The ice cream shop on Yong Street had no business being as cheerful as it was.
It sat wedged between a shuttered augmentation clinic and a noodle stall with a leaking pipe, its hand-painted sign reading COLD SWEET in letters that were slightly too enthusiastic for the neighborhood. The interior was exactly four tables wide, each one sticky in a different corner, with a single ceiling fan that did nothing except redistribute the same warm air in a circle. A hand-written menu hung on the wall behind the counter listing seventeen flavors, three of which were crossed out with marker.
Mint chocolate chip was not crossed out.
This was the problem.
"It tastes like toothpaste," Kamina said, holding his cone at arm's length as it had personally insulted him. "This is what you serve at the dentist before they drill something out of your head. Why would anyone eat this recreationally."
"Because it's good." Imogen licked her mint chocolate chip cone with the focused satisfaction of someone determined to enjoy every single lick while an idiot watched. "It's refreshing. It cools you down. That's the point of ice cream."
"All ice cream cools you down! That's the one job ice cream has! This one is doing extra work nobody asked for!"
"You are so wrong." Imogen pointed her cone at him, not at his face, at him, at some essential wrongness she seemed to be locating in his chest cavity. "Mint chocolate chip is the superior flavor. It's elegant."
"It has one layer. The layer where it tastes like you brushed your teeth and then someone gave you a cookie."
"That sounds delicious."
"No, it's not."
Imogen made a sound somewhere between a scoff and a shriek. "You eat everything like it insulted your ancestors! Last week you called the mango sorbet 'aggressively fruity.'"
"It was aggressive! It had opinions! I don't want my dessert to have opinions!"
"Your dessert having no personality is a you problem."
"My dessert is strawberry and it is peaceful and it does not lecture me."
Shmuel was not listening.
He was sitting across the table from both of them, his mint chocolate chip untouched in its cup, he'd ordered it without thinking, the same flavor he'd always ordered, the same one Bruno used to steal half of every time they sat somewhere like this, back when sitting somewhere like this was a normal thing that happened and he was somewhere else entirely.
Not far. Not deep. Just the particular middle distance that exists between where you are and where you keep accidentally going back to.
The shop's ceiling fan clicked on every third rotation. A small, useless noise. He counted the clicks without meaning to.
A week since the laboratory.
A week since the Titanic, since the flooding dining hall and the broken glass heart and Bruno standing at the bow with her hand on the railing watching the sea like she'd always been there, like she hadn't been assembled from grief and red-lit conduits eighteen hours before.
A week since she'd said I will love you until my heart gets ripped out of my body and he'd walked away and hadn't looked back.
He'd been very disciplined about not looking back.
He was being less disciplined about it right now, in a four-table ice cream shop with a broken fan, while Kamina and Imogen argued about mint.
The thing was and this was the specific problem he kept running into, he didn't know where the old Bruno ended and the new one began. He didn't know if the distinction meant anything. It was sitting in his chest like a splinter he couldn't find and couldn't leave alone.
She had Bruno's laugh somewhere in her muscle memory. He was almost certain of it. He hadn't heard it yet but he was almost certain, and that almost-certainty was its own specific kind of cruelty.
The ceiling fan clicked.
He counted.
"BRO."
Shmuel blinked.
Kamina was pointing at him with the strawberry cone. A small piece of strawberry ice cream was describing a slow arc toward the table. Neither Kamina nor the ice cream appeared concerned about this.
"Bro. Hey. We're asking you something."
"I heard you."
"Then answer. Because this has been going on for ten minutes and I need a verdict."
Imogen leaned forward with the expression of someone who considered this a legally binding arbitration. "Tell him mint chocolate chip is good. Tell him he's wrong. Use your words."
"Tell her it tastes like someone flavored ice cream with a headache," Kamina said, "because that is the truth."
Shmuel looked at Imogen's cone.
He looked at Kamina's cone.
He picked up his own untouched cup of mint chocolate chip and ate a spoonful.
Cold. Sweet. The mint hit first, clean and sharp, and then the chocolate underneath it, soft and dark, and the combination was exactly what it had always been, not toothpaste, not a blizzard, just the particular flavor of a summer afternoon in a district that didn't really have summers, shared across a table with someone who always took more than half.
He put the spoon down.
"Mint chocolate chip is good," he said.
Imogen made a triumphant noise so piercing that the woman at the counter looked up.
Kamina recoiled like he'd been physically struck. "BRO!"
"I'm not done." Shmuel looked at him. "But you're also not wrong that it tastes like toothpaste. You're just wrong that toothpaste is bad in this context."
"HOW IS TOOTHPASTE…"
"It tastes like something familiar," Shmuel said. Not to Kamina. Not really to Imogen either. Just out loud, which was the only place it was going to go. "That's the whole point. It tastes like something you recognize. Even when everything else is… " He stopped. Looked at the cup. "Even when everything's different. It's the same."
A small silence settled over the table.
The fan clicked. Once, twice, three times, the broken rotation.
Imogen had stopped being triumphant. She was watching him with those pale eyes that took in too much, the same way she'd watched him in the laboratory hallway before everything went wrong, not with pity, which he wouldn't have been able to stand, but with the particular attention of someone filing something away carefully.
Kamina took a slow bite of his strawberry cone and chewed it with the focused thoughtfulness of a man reconsidering a position.
"...Still tastes like toothpaste," he said finally.
"I know, Bro."
"But." He tilted his head slightly. Examined the mint cone in Imogen's hand with something approaching neutrality. "I can see how. If you're used to it." He paused. "I'm not going to eat it."
"Nobody asked you to."
"Just for the record."
"It's on the record."
Imogen looked between them, mouth slightly open, apparently unsatisfied with the way her victory had dissolved into something quieter than she'd planned for. She pointed her cone at Shmuel. "You're still agreeing with me."
"I'm agreeing with the ice cream," Shmuel said.
"That's the same thing."
"It really isn't."
She huffed. Took a lick of her cone with the slightly diminished energy of someone who has won a point they no longer entirely want. Then, because she was constitutionally incapable of staying quiet for more than ninety consecutive seconds: "You went somewhere just now."
"I was here the whole time."
"You were here," Imogen said, with the precise emphasis of someone who understood the distinction perfectly and was choosing not to pretend otherwise, "but you went somewhere."
Shmuel looked at her.
He looked at the ceiling fan, completing its broken rotation.
He looked at the cup of mint chocolate chip in his hands, half-eaten, the same flavor it always was.
"Yeah," he said.
He didn't explain it.
She didn't ask him to.
Kamina finished his strawberry cone in two enormous bites, looked at the empty wrapper with satisfaction, and then looked at the menu on the wall with the expression of a man who had won nothing today and was ready to try again.
"I'm getting a second one," he announced. "And I'm getting the chocolate. Because it's the best."
"Chocolate has plenty of…"
"An honest flavor, Imogen."
"You are so…"
The ceiling fan clicked.
Shmuel ate another spoonful.
It tasted the same as it always had.
Kamina's second chocolate cone arrived. He turned it once, inspected it, and took a bite with the vindicated expression of someone whose point had been made in flavour.
Then his eyes moved to the window.
The shop's front glass was grimy at the edges but clear enough in the middle, and through it the street went about its usual business, a woman pulling a cart with a broken wheel, two men arguing over a container of something neither of them appeared to want, a drone flickering weakly at the level of the second-floor walkways before giving up and drifting sideways into an alley.
And there, about twenty metres down, a man.
He was standing at the edge of the foot traffic rather than moving through it, the stillness of someone who had chosen their spot. In front of him, propped at an angle against the wall, was a wide board mounted with an assortment of objects attached in rows, small tools, cable ties, a handheld light, a folding knife, a strip of medical tape, several things that were difficult to categorize from this distance. Everything was arranged with the careful neatness of someone who took their inventory seriously.
And the man was smiling.
The smile was wide and patient and turned toward every person who passed him, offered to each one in turn, steady as a sign.
Kamina watched him for a moment, chewing slowly.
"Bro."
Shmuel looked up.
"That guy." Kamina tilted his cone toward the window. "On the street. With the board."
Shmuel glanced through the glass. He looked at the board, at the man, at the smile. He looked for about two seconds before he looked away again and picked up his spoon.
"Don't make eye contact."
Imogen turned to look, already curious. "Why? He's just selling things."
"Maybe." Shmuel ate a spoonful of mint chocolate chip. "But in this city, when someone comes at you with a smile that big, it usually means one of two things."
Imogen waited.
"Either they want to sell you something," Shmuel said, "or they want your organs."
Imogen turned back from the window somewhat faster than she'd turned toward it.
Kamina considered the man on the street. The man's smile had not changed. He was offering it now to a pair of workers in grey overalls who were moving past him without slowing.
"Both of those things can be true at the same time."
"Often are."
Imogen pulled her rifle slightly closer to her side of the table by reflex, then caught herself doing it and stopped, straightening in her seat with the dignity of someone who had definitely not just done that.
"Our office has cleared this part of the district," she said, with the measured confidence of someone reminding the room of an established fact. "The organ-running operations in this sector have been shut down. That part is handled. We made sure of it."
"The Rats are gone," Shmuel agreed. "For now."
"So he's just selling things."
"Probably."
"Then why are you saying it like that."
"Because probably is not definitely," Shmuel said, "and this is District 12, and two things can look identical from the outside." He set his spoon down. "A man with a board and a smile trying to sell you a folding knife and a man with a board and a smile trying to get you to stop walking long enough that someone behind you can make a decision about your kidneys look exactly the same until they don't."
Imogen was quiet for a moment.
"That's a very exhausting way to experience a street," she said.
"Yes," Shmuel said. "It is."
Kamina had turned the rest of his chocolate cone slowly in his hand through all of this, watching the man on the street with the particular quality of attention he gave to things he was still deciding about. The man's board caught a thin strip of afternoon light, the tools arranged in their rows glinting briefly.
"How come he didn't try to sell to us," Kamina said, "when we walked past?"
He said it simply, without suspicion, as a genuine question. They had come down this street not twenty minutes ago, three people taking up the full width of the pavement, and the man with the board had been there then. Kamina remembered clocking him without registering why he'd clocked him.
Shmuel followed his eyes back to the window.
"Look at us," he said.
Kamina looked at himself. Then at Imogen. Then at Shmuel's mechanical arm resting on the table.
"The way we walk," Shmuel continued. "The weapons. The way we take up space. We look like Fixers. We might look like Syndicate." He tilted his head slightly. "Those people, the sellers, the small scammers, the ones running the low-level cons, they're fast readers. They have to be. Their whole operation depends on identifying the right targets in half a second. Too slow, too careful, visibly not armed, visibly anxious, those are the ones they approach. Someone like Kamina who walks down a street, someone with mechanical augmentation and a long coat, someone with a rifle…"
He paused.
"They leave us alone because we could kill them on a whim," he said. "And they know we know that. And they know we know they know it."
Imogen absorbed this. "So they don't approach us because approaching us is dangerous."
"Right."
"But they also can't protect themselves. So they're just… " She stopped. "They're just very exposed. All the time."
"To almost everyone," Shmuel said. "If a Fixer wanted to stop them, there's not much stopping it. If a Syndicate runner decided they were a nuisance, same. They have no protection and no backing and nothing to offer anyone with real power, which means they exist in this particular gap where they're invisible to people like us but visible to everyone else."
He looked at the board again through the grimy glass.
"The irony," he added quietly, more to himself than to them, "is that if someone from a Syndicate did decide they were useful, they'd probably be safer. But then they'd also be something else."
The ceiling fan clicked overhead.
Kamina finished the last of his chocolate cone. He pressed the wrapper flat on the table without seeming to notice he was doing it.
"What do you think," Shmuel said, after a moment. He looked between them both. "About people like that."
It was not a rhetorical question. He asked it the way he asked things he actually wanted to hear the answer to — evenly, without loading it, leaving space on both sides.
Kamina and Imogen looked at each other briefly. The look was not a conversation exactly. More like the acknowledgment that the other person was about to say part of the same thing.
Kamina went first.
"I don't have a big opinion," he said. "I mean, I do, but it's not the kind that goes anywhere useful. People do what they have to do. That guy out there with his board, he picked something. Could be he got pushed into it, could be he looked around at what was available and this was it, could be he's been doing it since he was twelve and it's just the shape his life took." He shrugged, one shoulder. "Obligated or not, he's out there every day. Showing up. Smiling at people who won't stop walking."
Imogen picked up from there, and it came naturally, the two of them moving through the same thought in the same direction without having planned to.
"And that's… I mean, there's something to that," she said, a little more carefully than she usually said things. "It's not a clean life. It's probably not a life anyone would choose with a full set of options in front of them. But he's choosing it every morning. Getting up and going to the same corner." A pause. "That's not nothing."
"It's not nothing," Kamina agreed. He leaned back, arms crossing. "I just… " He stopped. Looked out the window again. The man was still there. Still smiling. A child had stopped to look at the board with the open curiosity and the man was explaining something, pointing at one of the tools, and the smile had changed shape slightly, become something less rehearsed.
"I just wish," Kamina said, "that they were doing it toward something. Not just as a way of not dying today. I want them to be alive for tomorrow, not just through it."
The words didn't come out loud. They came out the way things came out of Kamina when he wasn't performing them, straightforward, a little unguarded, carrying more weight than they announced.
Imogen was quiet for a moment.
"We don't know enough about how this city works to know if that's even possible for people like him," she said, honestly. "I grew up behind walls. I know the names of things but not the weight of them."
"I don't know much better," Kamina said. "I'm still figuring out what a Wing is. I still asked Shmuel last week if the Hana Association was a type of flower."
"It sounds like a type of flower."
"It does! It really does!"
Shmuel made a sound that might have been a laugh, contained to the back of his throat before it fully formed.
Both of them looked at him.
"That's what I'm here for," he said. It was not self-deprecating and it was not particularly modest. It was just a statement of the arrangement as it actually stood. "I know the weight of it. Both of you know things I don't know how to know. Between the three of us it adds up to something."
Kamina pointed at him with the flattened cone wrapper. "That was almost a compliment."
"It was a structural observation."
"From you that's basically a compliment."
"Don't push it, Bro."
Outside, the child had finished looking at the board and moved on, pulled back into the foot traffic by the hand of someone older. The man with the board watched them go, then turned his smile back to the street, back to the passing crowd, patient and undiminished.
Imogen watched him for a moment.
"I hope he sells something today," she said.
It was a small thing to say. It did not solve anything. It did not address the gap or the city or the particular architecture of a life built at the edge of other people's indifference.
But Shmuel nodded once, quietly.
"Yeah," said Kamina.
The chairs scraped back from the table in rough sequence.
Kamina stood first, stretching both arms overhead. His back made a sound. He looked satisfied.
Imogen slid out from her side of the table, tucking the rifle strap back over her shoulder with the practiced ease of someone who had stopped noticing she was doing it. She adjusted the strap once, then looked at the empty cup in front of Shmuel's place.
"You finished it," she said.
"I did."
"So mint chocolate chip is good."
"I finished it," Shmuel said. "I didn't take a position."
"Finishing it is also a position."
Shmuel picked up the three empty cups and stacked them, then carried them to the small counter near the door where a hand-painted sign requested customers leave their waste. He set them there neatly. The woman behind the actual counter glanced up from her phone with the brief, weary gratitude of someone whose customers usually did not do that.
Shmuel turned back.
"I'll get the check."
Kamina was already walking toward the door, Imogen two steps behind him, and neither of them broke stride.
He turned to the counter.
The woman at the register had the tired efficiency of everyone who ran a small shop in this part of District 12, uninterested in conversation, already processing him as a transaction rather than a person. He reached into his coat and found the office card, the small laminated rectangle that said THE GREAT KAMINA OFFICE across the top in the bold font Kamina had insisted on, which Shmuel had argued against and lost.
He held it out.
The woman looked at the card. She looked at the name on it. Her expression did not change, which took some effort, he suspected.
She ran it through.
The machine beeped.
"Thank you," he said.
"Mm," she said.
He pocketed the card and went outside.
The afternoon had shifted slightly in the time they'd been inside, the light coming from a lower angle now, throwing longer shadows across the pavement and turning the usual grey of the district into something almost amber at the edges. Not warm exactly. More like the city was trying on warmth and hadn't fully committed to it.
Kamina and Imogen were standing on the pavement, not quite arguing and not quite not arguing, occupying the particular conversational territory they defaulted to when left unsupervised for more than ninety seconds.
Shmuel stepped out. The door chimed behind him.
Kamina glanced over. "All good?"
"All good."
They started walking.
The street was in its late-afternoon mode, the morning rush long gone, the evening rush not yet arrived, the in-between period where District 12 settled into a lower hum. Vendors were beginning to think about packing up or pulling stock back under awnings. The drone that had been drifting near the second-floor walkways when they arrived was now gone, replaced by a different one with a working light that blinked steadily as it moved eastward.
Imogen fell into step beside Shmuel, Kamina a half-stride ahead as he always was, covering ground like he was mildly annoyed at it.
"When's the next job?" Imogen asked.
Shmuel checked the inside of his coat pocket by habit, though he already knew the answer. "We're still in the week break. No active commissioners. I closed the intake window before we left this morning."
"So nothing for the rest of the week."
"Nothing until Monday."
Imogen considered this with the expression of someone who found unstructured time both appealing in theory and slightly suspicious in practice.
Kamina turned his head without fully turning around, raising his voice to carry back to her. "You know what that means."
"What."
He pointed at her. "Your bucket list. Ice cream at an ice cream store. Tick it off."
Imogen blinked. Then she reached into the front pocket of her coat and pulled out her phone, opening it with the thumb-swipe. The case was the same one, gold edged, spiderwebbed with thin cracks from heat stress, still completely functional. She opened the notes application, scrolled briefly, and found the list.
Eat ice cream at an actual ice cream store.
She tapped the small checkbox beside it.
A tick appeared.
She stared at it for a moment with the expression of someone who had expected the accomplishment to feel larger and was quietly recalibrating.
"Done," she said.
"Good," Kamina said.
A few paces passed in comfortable silence. They turned left at the end of the block, onto a narrower street that cut between two residential buildings, their walls close enough on either side that the sound of the city softened. Laundry overhead. A cat on a windowsill that tracked their progress with professional neutrality.
"I could come back here on my own," Imogen said, more to herself than to either of them, looking back over her shoulder in the direction of the shop.
"You could," Shmuel said.
"It's not far."
"It isn't."
Kamina glanced back at her. The glance held a half-second longer than necessary.
"Who would leave a lady by herself," Imogen said pleasantly.
Kamina stared at her.
"Damn brat," he said, with absolute and complete clarity. "Wanting the attention."
Imogen's expression did not change except around the eyes, where something in the vicinity of satisfaction was occurring.
Shmuel said nothing. He had learned that saying nothing at specific moments was a skill.
They came out the other end of the narrow street and back onto a wider lane, the familiar route that led back through the mid-section of the district toward home. Shmuel knew this walk the way he knew few things in his life completely, by repetition rather than decision, by the particular way it had accumulated into something close to comfort. The cracked intersection at the corner of Yong and the unnamed tributary the locals called the Long Way even though it was shorter. The overpass where the lights worked on every third pillar. The building with the blue door on the fourth floor that had been the same shade of blue for as long as he could remember.
They passed the construction site where the crew Kamina had redirected few weeks ago had apparently continued doing things, scaffolding climbing the side of a building that had been a hollow shell when they first arrived in this part of the district. Someone had taped a handwritten progress report to the hoarding at street level. Shmuel had never stopped to read it but he had noticed it in passing enough times to know it was updated regularly.
The man with the board was gone from his spot. Whether he'd sold something or given up or simply moved to a different corner was unknowable.
Kamina looked at the empty space where he'd been standing without saying anything.
They turned onto the final stretch, the street that ran directly past the entrance of the building their building, Shmuel's building, the one with the apartment on the upper floor and the makeshift office sign still hanging outside that Kamina had painted in red construction paint one afternoon and that Shmuel had stopped being embarrassed by sometime around the first month.
The sign caught the amber light.
"★ THE GREAT KAMINA OFFICE ★"
Still crooked. Still missing a screw on the left bracket. The paint had faded at the star on the right side, which gave it the look of something that had been here for years rather than months, which was either a problem or wasn't, depending on the day.
Shmuel stopped at the door and found his key.
Kamina looked up at the sign and put his hands in his pockets.
Imogen stood beside him, looking up at it too.
Shmuel got the door open.
"Home," he said.
The lobby of the building smelled faintly chemical from the pipes, the lingering ghost of whatever the woman on the second floor had been cooking that morning. A smell that was nobody's idea of welcoming and that Shmuel had long since stopped registering as anything except home.
The elevator was waiting, which was unusual. Normally it was on the wrong floor and took long enough to arrive that Kamina had twice simply taken the stairs on principle before being reminded that their floor was the tenth.
Kamina pressed the button for ten.
The doors closed.
The elevator made its considered, unhurried journey upward with the mechanical personality of something that had developed opinions about urgency over many years and had resolved them all in favour of patience. It shuddered slightly between the fifth and sixth floors. The light overhead flickered once.
Imogen watched the floor numbers tick upward on the small display above the door with the focused attention she gave to new information, still cataloguing the building's rhythms after months of living in it, still filing away which details were concerning and which were simply the building's character.
"Does it always do that?" she said, at the shudder.
"Yes," Shmuel said.
"And that's fine?"
"It's been doing it for longer than I've lived here."
She appeared to process this as adequate reassurance, or at least as the kind of information that didn't require immediate action.
The elevator reached the tenth floor with a soft, definitive thunk and the doors parted.
The corridor of the tenth floor was narrow and lit by two wall fixtures, one of which was functioning at full capacity and one of which was operating at the ambiguous level it had occupied for as long as Shmuel could remember. The carpet runner down the centre of the hallway had a pattern that might once have had a colour and had since reached a consensus with time about becoming beige.
They turned left out of the elevator.
Fourteen steps to the door, which Shmuel also knew without counting.
They covered twelve of them before Kamina stopped.
He stopped without announcing it, which meant Imogen walked into his back slightly and made a sound of indignation that he did not respond to because he was already looking at the wall.
On the wall beside the door at roughly chest height, was an envelope.
Not left propped against the door frame. Not slid under the door. Affixed to the wall. The envelope was cream coloured that whatever was inside it was not a bill or a flyer or a request from the building management about waste disposal procedures.
Kamina looked at it for a moment.
Then he reached out and pulled it off the wall.
The resistance was notable. It did not require effort exactly. He peeled it clean in a single pull, and where it had been, the wall was unmarked. No residue, no shadow, no evidence that anything had ever been there at all.
He turned it over in his hands.
Looked at the front. Nothing but their names, written in a clean institutional hand. All three of them. Kamina. Shmuel. Imogen. Not The Great Kamina Office, not a flat number, just their names, which meant whoever had put it here had known exactly which door to find.
He flipped it over.
On the back, a seal. Pressed into the paper with the particular firmness of something official, a circular mark that Shmuel recognised immediately and Imogen had learned to recognise within her first two weeks of being affiliated with the office.
The Hana Association.
Kamina looked at it. Then he looked at Shmuel.
Shmuel looked at the seal.
"Open it," Imogen said.
Kamina opened it.
He was not delicate about it. He ran his thumb under the flap and tore it back in one motion, pulling out a single sheet of the same weighted cream paper, folded in thirds, the Association's header printed across the top in sober, official typeface.
He unfolded it.
Read it.
The corridor was quiet. The half-functioning light continued its ambiguous work.
Kamina read the letter through once. Then he read it again, more slowly, with the expression of a man checking his own understanding of a language he's mostly confident in.
Then he held it out to Shmuel without saying anything.
Shmuel took it and read it.
The language was formal, the kind that buried its content in structure. Pursuant to review of achievement records, effective of the current quarter, the following amendments to certification grade have been processed by Hana Association South Section 4 and are hereby confirmed. but the content, when it arrived, was not complicated.
Kamina -Grade 4 Fixer.
Shmuel - Grade 6 Fixer.
Imogen - Grade 5 Fixer.
The Great Kamina Office - Grade 7 Office.
At the bottom, a line in slightly smaller text.
Certification cards to be collected at South Section 4 Tower at the holder's earliest convenience. Attendance is required in person.
Shmuel lowered the letter.
Imogen had been watching his face. "What does it say."
He held it out to her.
She took it, read it, and was quiet for a moment.
Then she looked up.
"Grade 5," she said.
"Grade 5," Shmuel confirmed.
She looked at Kamina. "You're Grade 4."
"Nice." Kamina said.
He was leaning against the wall beside the door with his arms crossed and his head tilted back slightly, looking at the ceiling of the corridor with the expression he made when something had happened that he was still deciding how to feel about.
"Grade 4," Imogen said again, reading the line again as though confirming it hadn't changed. "That's great, isn't it?"
"Grade 7 Office," Shmuel said quietly.
Both of them looked at him.
He was looking at that line specifically. The Great Kamina Office - Grade 7.
He thought about the registrar at the Hana Association who had stared at him when he'd written the office name in the intake form. He thought about the sign outside with its fading star and its missing screw. He thought about the first contract, the White Circle, the two of them standing over a distortion in a factory back room with exactly one bullet between them and a plan that had depended entirely on Kamina being willing to jump into an unknown portal.
Grade 7.
He folded the letter along its original creases and held it for a moment.
Then he held it out to Kamina.
Kamina took it. Looked at it again. Folded it once more and tucked it into his coat with the same unhurried ease he brought to most things.
"Hana Association South Section 4," he said. "We go get the cards."
"Monday," Shmuel said. "After the break."
"Monday," Kamina agreed.
He pushed off the wall and turned to the door, and Shmuel found his key for the second time that afternoon and got it open, and the three of them went inside in the usual order, Kamina first, filling the doorway for a moment before moving through it, Imogen next, Shmuel last, pulling the door shut behind him.
The apartment smelled like it always smelled. The ceiling was the same ceiling. The couch with its three different stages of wear was exactly where it had always been.
Imogen sat down on her end of it, the letter still faintly visible in her expression , Grade 5, the new weight of it, the number that meant something different than it had this morning.
Kamina dropped into the chair across from her and put his feet on the table.
Shmuel set his keys on the counter and stood there for a moment, looking at nothing in particular, the quiet of the apartment settling around them.
Grade 6.
Grade 7 Office.
He thought about the boy who had walked into a dead-end alley on a Tuesday night with a grade so low it was functionally a warning, chasing a rumour the office had shuffled down to the bottom of the pile because nobody else wanted it.
He exhaled slowly.
"I'll put the kettle on," he said.