The uniform was not designed for someone who moved like Nana.
This was a purely objective observation made by her mother, who stood at the bottom of the stairs watching her daughter descend — or more accurately, slide — down the staircase railing with one hand, hunter jacket half-zipped, boots not yet fully laced, hair pinned up in a way that had started the day as something intentional and was now simply a situation.
"Angelina."
"Morning!" Nana hit the bottom landing with a small hop, nearly collided with the hallway cabinet, caught it with one hand, and spun toward the kitchen with the energy of someone who had been awake for a full four minutes and had already decided today was going to be magnificent. "Is there rice?"
Her father looked up from the table. He took in the uniform — olive and dark grey, fitted for function, with the Class A patch still slightly crooked on the sleeve — and then looked at his wife with the expression of a man who had made peace with many things over the years.
"You look," he said carefully, "very ready."
"She looks like Tarzan," her mother said, with the particular tone of someone who loves a person very much and is simply choosing honesty as an expression of that love. She was already at the stove, already moving a bowl toward the table, already sighing in the way that meant *I have accepted this child entirely and I will worry about her every single day regardless.*
Nana dropped into her chair and began eating with a focus that could only be described as industrious. The rice disappeared. The egg disappeared. A full portion of pickled vegetables vanished in a timeframe that would have alarmed a stranger.
Her mother sat across from her and rested her chin in one hand and watched.
"Chew," she said.
Nana chewed. Twice. Swallowed. Continued.
"She's going to be fine," her father said, in the tone of someone reassuring himself as much as anyone else.
"I'm going to be *great,*" Nana corrected, already standing, already reaching for her bag, already performing the small chaotic ballet of a person who is seventy percent ready to leave and running a mental checklist while physically moving toward the door. Badge. Earpiece. Blade kit. The lucky hair clip — the starfish one — pressed into her hair above her left ear.
She kissed her mother's cheek. Her mother caught her by the collar briefly, straightened the crooked patch, and let her go.
"Call us," her father said.
"I'll call Gege first and then you," she said cheerfully, and was out the door before either of them could respond to that particular hierarchy.
Her mother looked at her father.
Her father looked at his tea.
"She'll be fine," he said again.
From outside came the very confident sound of a motorcycle engine starting.
She sent the text at a red light, which was almost certainly not road-legal.
Nana 🐹 → Caleb Gege 🪖
> gege!!!! first day!!!! riding to association now!!! 🏍️💨
She pocketed the phone before the light changed and then rode the rest of the way with the particular abandon of someone who had decided that momentum was a form of preparation.
She arrived with four minutes to spare, which felt like a victory.
The Hunter Association's Luna City branch occupied a compound near the city's mid-district — utilitarian from the outside, all reinforced concrete and security clearance gates, but inside it carried the lived-in energy of a place where people spent long hours doing difficult things and had gradually made it bearable through accumulated clutter and familiarity. Bulletin boards papered with mission postings. The smell of equipment oil and coffee in equal measure. Senior hunters moving with the easy economy of people who had stopped proving anything to anyone.
Nana stood in the orientation bay with fourteen other new Class A registrants and felt like her entire body was vibrating at a frequency slightly above the recommended level.
Mina appeared at her elbow — Park Mina, who Nana had trained alongside for the past eight months, who was methodical and precise and had once spent twenty minutes trying to convince Nana that preparation was more important than enthusiasm before giving up and accepting they were simply different kinds of people.
"You have a crease on your left sleeve," Mina said.
"It's character," Nana said.
"It's a crease."
"Mina."
"I'm just saying."
"The first mission is a forest check," Nana said, consulting the brief she had already memorized on the ride over, because she had absolutely been reading mission documents on her phone at red lights, plural. "Standard elimination. Entry-level wanderer density, no predicted anomalies, full backup access if conditions escalate. We're going to be fine."
Mina smoothed her own sleeve, which had no crease. "I know we're going to be fine. I'm noting the sleeve."
Nana looked at the crease. Then at Mina. Then back at the crease.
She left it.
The Haeun Forest sector was forty minutes outside the city center — a stretch of managed woodland designated as a hunter zone for years, low-density wanderer presence, the kind of assignment built specifically to give new certifications their first real contact in a controlled environment.
Controlled, relatively speaking.
The briefing had said *entry-level wanderer density.*
The briefing had not mentioned the one that came through the tree line like a small and terrible freight train approximately six minutes into their sweep.
It was big. Not the biggest Nana had seen in training simulations, but training simulations did not smell like that, and they did not move with that lurching aggression, and they did not fix their attention on a target with that hollow, lightless focus that sent something very ancient in Nana's hindbrain sprinting in the opposite direction of all her training.
Her training won. Barely.
"Mina —" she started.
Mina was gone.
Nana turned. The spot where Mina had been standing one second ago contained only air and the faint suggestion of disturbed leaves. A distant sound of running feet disappearing into the underbrush in a direction that was definitively away.
Nana looked at the wanderer.
The wanderer looked at Nana.
"Okay," Nana said, to no one. "Okay. Fine. Fine."
She moved.
It was not elegant. Not the clean, economical motion of someone who had been doing this for years — it was the genuine improvisation of a small person with good instincts and an adrenaline system that had apparently decided to compensate for her height through sheer chemical volume. She ducked under the first swing and it clipped her shoulder anyway. She rolled — genuinely *rolled,* across actual forest floor, bark and dirt and something that was probably moss — and came up on the other side and immediately had to roll again because it turned faster than the briefing data suggested was typical for this class.
*Backup,* she thought. *I should call for backup.*
She reached for her earpiece, ducked another swing, lost her footing on a root, caught herself on one knee, looked up —
The wanderer wasn't there anymore.
It took her a full two seconds to process what she was seeing.
The wanderer was dissolving — the specific grey-ash dissolution of a clean elimination, particles already dispersing in the canopy air — and standing in the space it had occupied was a young man she had never seen before in her life.
Silver hair, pushed back from his face like it had given up trying to stay anywhere specific. He was wearing a hunter's jacket with the kind of wear that came from actual use rather than equipment rotation — darker at the cuffs, one strap of his kit replaced with something that didn't quite match the rest. And in his right hand, already being re-sheathed with the ease of someone doing something ten thousand times over, was a blade.
A blade.
Nana stared at it. Then at him. Then at the dispersing dust that had been a wanderer approximately three seconds ago.
*Who uses a blade,* she thought, with genuine bewilderment. *Guns exist. Someone looked at guns and said: I'll have the blade instead.*
He glanced down at her — she was still on one knee in the dirt, which was not her best angle — with an expression that was not quite neutral and not quite anything else. Blue eyes moving over her in a quick, assessing sweep. Class A patch, crooked. Scrape on her left palm. Still breathing too fast. Not a threat. Not his problem.
He extended one hand.
She took it. His grip was unhesitating, matter-of-fact, pulling her upright in a single motion like it cost him nothing. Which — fine, she did not weigh a lot, but there was no reason for it to be quite that easy.
Then he turned, and walked back into the trees, and was simply gone.
Not dramatically. He just went. Like someone who had somewhere to be and had made a brief detour and was now resuming. Like the forest had a door somewhere only he could see.
Nana stood in the clearing with dirt on her knees and stared at the space he had occupied.
The dust finished dispersing.
Somewhere to her left, returning footsteps. Mina emerged from the treeline with two backup members behind her, earpiece in, looking slightly out of breath and entirely guilt-ridden.
"Nana — I'm sorry, I know I ran, but if we'd both tried to engage that class without proper backup we could have actually died, I made a tactical decision —"
"He used a blade," Nana said.
Mina blinked. "What?"
"The wanderer. Someone eliminated it." She turned. "Silver hair. He used a blade."
Mina and the two backup members exchanged a look Nana didn't have enough context to read.
"Was he tall?" one of the backup members said carefully. "Leather jacket, kit with a mismatched strap?"
"Yes," Nana said immediately.
The backup member's expression shifted into something that was equal parts recognition and something approaching awe. "That's probably Xavier Shen."
"Who?"
"S-Class." He said it like the two words carried a weight she should already understand. "He runs solo. Haeun sector overlaps with one of his active zones." A shrug. "He doesn't really stop to talk."
Nana looked back at the trees.
Xavier Shen.
The name settled into her head like a stone dropped into still water, and she watched the ripples without quite understanding why she was still looking at the place he'd gone like there was something left there.
"He didn't introduce himself," she said.
"No," the backup member agreed. "He doesn't usually."
Mina touched her elbow, the gentle apologetic touch of someone re-entering a friendship after a tactical retreat. "Are you hurt?"
Nana looked down at her palm. The scrape was minor. Her knee had forest floor on it. Her shoulder ached where the wanderer clipped her and would probably bruise by morning.
"No," she said. Then: "You ran, Mina."
"I said I was sorry."
"You ran so fast."
"Nana."
"I watched you disappear."
"I brought backup!"
The two backup members developed a sudden intense interest in the middle distance and said nothing at all.
.
.
.
.
.
The debrief took an hour. The report took another thirty minutes. By the time Nana got home, ate dinner, showered the forest out of her hair, and sat cross-legged on her bed in her oldest and most aggressively comfortable sweatshirt, it was past ten and her brain was still stuck on a single frame of a moment it refused to let go of.
*Silver hair. One hand. Gone.*
She opened the video call.
Caleb answered on the second ring. His quarters were lit the way they always were at this hour — desk lamp, the faint blue-white glow of SKYHAVEN's city visible through the high window behind him. He had his firearm on the desk and was running a cleaning rod through the barrel with the quiet patience of someone who found the repetition meditative.
He looked at the screen. Then at her expression. His hands kept moving.
"Tell me about the mission," he said.
"It went fine," she said. "Mostly. The target was slightly higher class than projected and Mina abandoned me —"
"Mina what —"
"I'm fine, Gege, I handled it, there was backup —"
"She left you —"
"Caleb —"
"In the field —"
"I'm fine," she said, firmly enough that he paused. She held up her palm toward the camera. "See? Tiny scrape. Doesn't even need a bandage. The interesting part is there was another hunter in the sector and he eliminated the target and then just walked away."
Caleb had gone still in the way he went still when he was paying close attention and didn't want to show it. The cleaning rod resumed moving. His eyes stayed on the camera.
"Walked away," he said.
"Just into the trees. Gone. He had silver hair — apparently he's S-Class, the backup team recognized him." She paused because it was still bothering her on a fundamental level. "He uses a blade, Gege. A blade. There are firearms. He chose the blade."
A moment of quiet.
The cleaning rod moved steadily.
"Xavier Shen," Caleb said.
Nana blinked. "You know him?"
"I know the name. S-Class solo operators get flagged in inter-division reports." He was looking at the barrel. "Good record."
"He didn't introduce himself," she said, which she recognized as irrelevant to an inter-division assessment and said anyway.
Caleb's hands stilled. Just briefly.
"Is he," he said, with a very precise and very carefully constructed neutrality, "someone you know? From the Association?"
"No, I told you — I'd never seen him before today —"
"Do you want to know him."
Nana stared at the screen. "What?"
He resumed cleaning. Looking at the gun, not the camera. "Reasonable question."
"That's a weird question —"
"They're different things —"
"Caleb Gege, are you asking if I have a crush on him?"
The cleaning rod moved in a very calm and even way that gave absolutely nothing away.
"I'm asking," he said, with the demeanor of someone conducting an entirely normal conversation, "if he's someone you're interested in knowing. Those are different."
"That is the same thing —"
"It's not —"
"I told you about *one person,*" Nana said, pointing at the camera, "one time, and you're already —"
"You've never talked about someone like this before." Quiet. Even. The gun receiving a level of attention that no firearm genuinely required. "That's all I said."
She opened her mouth. Then closed it.
He wasn't wrong, technically. She had never talked about a person the way she'd apparently been talking about this one — with that particular unresolved quality, turning a moment over and trying to understand what made it stick. She just hadn't noticed she was doing it until he pointed it out, and she wasn't sure what to do with that.
"He's just interesting," she said. "He appeared and then he left. It's interesting. That's all it is."
"Mm."
"Don't you mm me —"
"I didn't say anything."
"Caleb."
"Mm is not words."
She made a noise of profound frustration and flopped sideways onto the bed, phone propped against the pillow, camera aimed mostly at the ceiling and the top of her head. She could hear him still — the small sounds of the kit, the quiet of him setting something down.
"If I see him again," she told the ceiling, "I'm going to introduce myself. Because he didn't and that's just rude."
A pause that lasted approximately one beat too long.
"Sure," Caleb said.
She turned her head toward the screen. He was reassembling the firearm with steady, unhurried hands, eyes on the components, expression giving her nothing.
She watched him for a moment.
"You're doing the face," she said.
"I don't have a face."
"You've had it since I was seven. It's the one where you're thinking something and you've decided not to say it and you think I can't tell."
"Go to sleep, Nana."
"I'm not tired."
She was deeply, completely tired. The mission, the crash, the shower, the dinner — all of it had settled into her bones in the way that meant the pillow was about to win regardless of her intentions. She shifted, pulled the blanket up, kept the phone propped.
"Gege."
"Mm."
"Tell me something boring so I fall asleep."
A quiet exhale. On the screen, he set the firearm aside. For a moment she caught him looking out the window — down at the vast dark distance below SKYHAVEN, at the clouds and the faint lights of the surface settlements visible through them. He looked at it for a moment longer than seemed accidental.
Then he turned back, and began talking about the administrative reassignment rotation in a tone of such measured, deliberate neutrality that within six minutes her responses had slowed to single syllables, and within nine minutes there was only the soft rhythm of her breathing.
He watched her sleep on the small screen.
The starfish clip had worked loose and lay on the pillow beside her face. The apartment looked too quiet even on camera — the particular quiet of a space missing someone who used to fill it, which he recognized because he felt it too, from the other direction, on the other end of the distance between them.
*Xavier Shen,* he thought, looking at the screen. *Good record. Blade instead of a gun. Disappeared into the trees.*
*She said interesting in a voice she's never used before.*
It was not a large thing. He knew that. He had watched her grow up, watched her collect enthusiasms and set them down and pick up new ones, watched her turn her full attention onto a hundred different things over the years. This was probably nothing. Probably just the adrenaline of a first mission and a stranger appearing at the right moment and the way the brain fixed on novelty when everything else was new.
Probably.
He looked out the window again. Luna City was down there somewhere, below the cloud layer, going about its ordinary evening in all its neon-lit density. He knew the address of the apartment. Had the Association compound on a general awareness list that he told himself was standard inter-division protocol.
*Can I keep this,* he thought. The familiar question. The one he never answered. *The calls, the texts, her voice in the morning, her falling asleep mid-sentence — can I keep it exactly like this.*
*Or is that already ending, and I'm the only one watching it happen.*
He didn't close the call for another hour.
He sat in the quiet of his quarters with the small screen lit beside him, and the city below in the dark, and the thought he had been not-saying for years pressing steadily against the inside of his ribs like something that was running out of room.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.