She told him her name on the fourteenth day.
They had found shelter in the remains of a bookstore, its shelves toppled like dominoes, its floor carpeted with pages that had escaped their bindings. The smell of old paper and mold hung in the air, a musty perfume that reminded Gray of libraries he'd visited in another life. The dry lightning had finally stopped two days ago, but the sky remained the color of old iron, and the wind carried sounds that might have been voices or might have been the world remembering how to breathe.
"Mina," she said, and the word hung between them like an offering. "My name is Mina. Mina Park."
He repeated it quietly to himself, testing its weight on his tongue. Mina. It suited her - short, simple, with a softness that belied the strength he'd seen in her over the past three days. She'd climbed through ruins without complaint, shared food without being asked, kept watch when exhaustion should have claimed her. She was tougher than she looked, and she looked like someone who had already survived more than anyone should have to bear.
"Mina," he said aloud, and she nodded, something in her expression easing.
"Now you," she said. "Fair's fair."
"Gray." He didn't elaborate. His name felt strange in his mouth, a label that belonged to someone who had existed before the world ended. But it was all he had to offer, so he gave it.
She accepted it without pushing for more. That was one of the things he'd learned about her over the past days - she knew when to ask questions and when to let silence do the work. It was a skill he appreciated, especially now, when every word felt like it carried more weight than it should.
They sat among the fallen books, the remains of other people's stories surrounding them. Gray could see the silver threads in the paper, faint and fading, the echoes of the trees the books had once been. Everything in this new world seemed to have threads, patterns, a hidden architecture that only he and Mina could see. He was beginning to catalog them unconsciously - the bright, pulsing threads of living things, the dim, steady threads of stone and metal, the flickering, unstable threads of the strange phenomena that haunted the sky.
He didn't have words for any of it. He only knew that his mind was building a map of something he couldn't name.
"I was a nursing student," Mina said, and her voice pulled him back from his observations. "Before. I was supposed to graduate in three months."
He turned to look at her. She was staring at a book in her lap, its cover torn, its title illegible. Her fingers traced the spine absently, the gesture of someone who wasn't really seeing what was in front of them.
"I had a rotation at St. Catherine's," she continued. "Emergency room. I'd seen people die before - car accidents, overdoses, the usual city chaos. But nothing prepared me for this." She gestured vaguely at the world outside, at the ruins that surrounded them. "When the sky fell, I was at the hospital. I watched people die who shouldn't have died. People with minor injuries, people who should have survived. And then I watched people live who shouldn't have lived either."
She looked up at him, and her hazel eyes were steady, though something in them flickered with old pain.
"That's when I started seeing the threads. At first I thought I was cracking under the stress. But then I realized - the threads were connected to who lived and who died. The people with strong threads, bright ones, they survived things that should have killed them. The people with dim threads, they..." She trailed off, and he understood what she wasn't saying.
"You learned to work with them," he said. It wasn't a question.
She nodded. "I don't know how I do it. I just... I can see where the threads are broken, and I can push them back together. Sometimes. It costs something - I don't know what. But I can do it."
He thought of the woman in the collapsed tower, the way Mina had held her hands over the broken body, the silver threads flickering and fading despite her efforts. She'd tried to save someone who couldn't be saved, and she'd stayed with her until the end anyway.
"Do you know where your family is?" he asked, and immediately regretted it. The question was too personal, too raw.
But she answered anyway, her voice flat. "No. My parents were visiting relatives in another city when it happened. My brother was at college. I don't know if any of them are still alive." She paused, and something in her expression shifted - not grief, exactly, but something adjacent to it. "I've been moving toward the coast. My aunt lives there. Or lived. I don't know anymore."
He didn't offer false hope. He'd learned that hope was a currency that could bankrupt you if you spent it too freely. Instead, he simply nodded, acknowledging what she'd shared without trying to fix it.
"What about you?" she asked, and her voice was gentle. "You never talk about yourself."
He considered lying. It would have been easy - a fabricated past, a made-up family, a story that would satisfy her curiosity without requiring him to reveal anything real. But she'd given him truth, and something in him resisted the idea of giving her less in return.
"There's not much to tell," he said, which was true enough. "I was alone before this too. Different kind of alone, but still alone. When the sky fell, I was in my apartment. I watched the city burn through my window. And then I started walking, and I haven't stopped since."
She studied him, her gaze measuring. "You have headaches," she said. "I've noticed. You wince sometimes, like something's hurting you. And you stare at nothing - not daydreaming, but like you're seeing something I can't see."
The observation landed like a blow. He'd thought he'd been hiding it better.
"It's just stress," he lied, and the words tasted like ash in his mouth.
She didn't push. But she also didn't believe him - he could see it in her eyes, the quiet knowledge that he was holding something back. She let it go, though, and he was grateful for that.
Instead, she turned back to the book in her lap, her fingers still tracing the torn spine. "I used to love reading," she said softly. "Before all this. I'd spend hours in bookstores, just wandering. It felt like visiting other worlds without leaving your own."
He watched her hands as she spoke - the gentle, deliberate way they moved, as if even her gestures were designed to heal. She was cataloging him too, he realized. Watching the way he moved, the way he looked at things, the way his expression shifted when he thought she wasn't paying attention. They were both building maps of each other, trying to understand the terrain of this strange new partnership.
"We should sleep," he said, though he didn't know if he could. The migraine behind his eyes had been building all day, the cold-water sensation pressing against his skull like something trying to get out.
She nodded and settled back against a fallen shelf, her eyes closing. Within minutes, her breathing had slowed into the rhythm of sleep. He watched her for a moment, cataloging the peace on her face, the way her hands had finally stopped trembling.
Then he turned his attention to the darkness beyond the windows, and he kept watch.
Some things were too heavy to carry alone. But some things, he wasn't ready to share.