Callan, who had made every single day at this job a quiet, grinding, exhausting battle from the moment I started.
Years of tension and irritation and careful distance.
He didn’t look at me like that.
He didn’t see me likethat.
I took another sip of coffee, focusing on the bitterness, letting it fill my mouth and give me something to distract myself.
“You look like hell,” he blurted.
There it was.
The Callan I knew.
I let out a tired laugh. “Wow. Thanks.”
He didn’t smile. Didn’t take it back.
He just leaned his hip against the counter and crossed his arms, watching me with that same steady, unreadable expression.
“You didn’t sleep,” he said.
It wasn’t a question.
“Neither did you.”
He shrugged. One shoulder. Barely a movement. “Didn’t plan on it.”
Which meant he’d stayed awake on purpose. Stayed awake watching that door with me curled against his chest, and he hadn’t moved. Hadn’t shoved me away. Hadn’t woken me up.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
Silence settled again between us, only it seemed different now. Not as hostile. Not comfortable exactly, but not adversarial either.
Just quiet.
Just two people sitting in an empty cafeteria at the end ofsomething neither of them understood yet.
I picked at the plastic wrapper on the muffin, peeling it back. I wasn’t hungry. My stomach was too knotted for that. But my hands needed something to do, and it was the muffin or my own fingernails.
I was aware of him. His presence, his weight in the room, the sound of his breathing. Aware of it in a way I’d never let myself be before. Or maybe I had been all along, and I’d just called it something else—irritation, tension, dislike.
I didn’t know anymore.
Outside, the world was gone. Or going. Or already past the point of saving.
Inside, it was just us, and I didn’t know what that meant yet.
* * *
After eating and using the restroom—an experience that seemed absurdly normal, as if my body hadn’t gotten the message that the world was dying—Callan found me near the service corridor.
“I’ve got a way up,” he said.
He didn’t sound uncertain.
He sounded like himself again: focused, methodical, like this was just another maintenance issue that needed solving, and he’d already solved it.