The cut on Ryan's side was deeper than he'd let on.
Charlotte found out the way she always did, not from him, but from the way he was sitting. Too straight. Too careful about where he put his weight. Ryan Howl did not do careful unless something hurt badly enough to force it.
"Take your jacket off," she said.
"It's fine."
"Ryan."
He took his jacket off.
The gash ran four inches along his ribs, clean-edged and angry. Not a scrape. Something with a blade had done that, or something moving fast enough to act like one. Charlotte kept her expression neutral and reached for the kit on the floor beside her.
They were in Kasper's basement. They were always in Kasper's basement after jobs, it was the largest space any of them had access to that wasn't someone's living room, and Kasper's mother had stopped asking questions two years ago. A bare bulb hung overhead. Somewhere upstairs a television murmured.
Keelan sat against the far wall with his knees up and his eyes closed. Coming down. His hands had stopped shaking ten minutes ago which meant the worst of it had passed. Charlotte had learned to read those signs the way you learn to read weather.
Rachel stood by the stairs with her arms crossed and her phone in her hand, not looking at it. She was still in her gear, dark fitted jacket, the thin copper bracelet on her left wrist that wasn't a bracelet. Her jaw was set in the way it got when she was running numbers on something that wasn't adding up.
Kasper was making tea nobody had asked for. That was how he handled things.
"Hold still," Charlotte said.
"I am holding still."
"You're breathing too much."
"That's generally required, Charlie."
She cleaned the wound with practiced efficiency and felt him flinch once and control it. Ryan was many things — loud, impulsive, constitutionally incapable of admitting a plan had gone wrong but he didn't complain about pain. That was the one thing she'd always respected about him without telling him because he didn't need the encouragement.
"What happened?" she asked. Quietly, so it didn't sound like an accusation.
"Contact came with backup," Rachel said from the stairs. She said it the way she said most things, flat, precise, like she was filing a report. "Four of them instead of two. Keelan went wide trying to cover the exit and Ryan closed the gap."
"Someone had to," Ryan said.
"Someone had to," Rachel agreed, in a tone that meant they would be discussing this later.
Charlotte threaded the needle. Ryan looked at the ceiling.
"The job's done though," Kasper said from across the room, appearing with two mugs. He set one beside Charlotte without asking and kept one for himself. His voice had that particular warmth it always carried — easy and unhurried, like none of this was anything to worry about. "Shipment didn't move. That's what matters."
"The job's done," Rachel said. "We were sloppy getting there."
Silence settled. The television murmured upstairs. Keelan breathed steadily against the wall.
Charlotte worked. This was the part she was good at, the after. The cleanup and the quiet and the making-sure. She had never been able to explain to any of them why she didn't go on the jobs properly, not in a way that landed right. It wasn't fear exactly. It was something more like a refusal. This city and its problems were a current she could feel pulling and she had spent years learning to stand sideways to it, to let it move past her.
She had places to be. Plans that had nothing to do with Kasper's basement or blade wounds or whatever 18Labs-adjacent nonsense had decided to set up shop in their borough this week.
She tied off the last stitch and sat back.
"Done," she said. "Don't stretch it. Don't do anything that involves your torso for at least... "
"Three days, yeah, you've said."
"I've said it three times and you've ignored it three times."
Ryan grinned at the ceiling. "I'm consistent."
Charlotte began packing the kit away. The bare bulb hummed overhead. Her eyes adjusted to it automatically, the way they always did, the light shifting and sorting itself into something more useful, shadows giving up their detail. She didn't think about it. She never thought about it. It was just how she saw.
Across the room Keelan had opened his eyes. He looked tired in the specific way he always looked after, hollowed out and quiet, like something had burned through him and left the edges clean. He caught Charlotte's gaze and nodded once. She nodded back.
Rachel uncrossed her arms and finally looked up from her phone.
"Charlie," she said.
"Mm."
"When you came through the side entrance earlier." She paused, choosing the next words with that careful Rachel precision that meant she'd been sitting on this since it happened. "How far back were you when you saw me signal?"
Charlotte thought about it. "I don't know. Thirty metres maybe."
Rachel looked at her for a moment without expression.
"It was dark," she said. "I was behind a column."
Charlotte opened her mouth. Closed it.
"Kasper's tea is going cold," Kasper said cheerfully, from nowhere in particular.
Charlotte looked down at the mug beside her. She picked it up. The moment passed the way moments do, absorbed back into the noise of the room, into Ryan complaining about the stitching pulling, into Keelan quietly asking if there was a second mug.
She drank her tea and didn't think about it.
She was good at not thinking about things.