Chapter 17| A Seasoned Acquaintance

Chapter 17: Chapter 17| A Seasoned Acquaintance

Day three started with rain.

Not the thin persistent kind that had followed them since the escape. Proper rain, the kind that had opinions about where it was going and arrived with enough conviction to make the farmhouse roof register its presence. Damian stood at the window with his coffee and watched it come down across the cleared land and thought about the supply situation.

They were running low on the practical things. Food, primarily. The dry goods the cousin had left in the farmhouse kitchen had carried them through the first week but the inventory was thinning in the specific way that inventories thinned when two people were eating properly for the first time in a while. Cash was holding but not indefinitely. And there were things Sable needed for her research setup that the farmhouse didn’t have and the nearest place that did was the city.

He told her he was going alone.

She looked up from her tablet with the expression that meant she was running the risk calculation.

"The rain helps," he said, before she finished running it. "Disperses the thermal trace faster. And I’ll vary the approach route."

She looked at him for another moment. Then she wrote a list on the back of a receipt and slid it across the table without argument, which was as close to approval as Sable got when she didn’t fully agree with a decision but recognized she wasn’t going to change it.

He was on the first bus into the city by 0800.

The city received him the way it always did. Completely, without interest, the way cities received individuals who didn’t announce themselves. He’d taken three buses instead of two, gotten off two stops early on the last one, and walked the remaining distance through streets that the rain had emptied of the usual foot traffic. By the time he reached the supply district his approach route bore no resemblance to any path he’d taken before.

[Flux: 91%]

He worked through Sable’s list methodically. The pharmacy first, then the hardware store two blocks east, then the grocery at the end of the covered market where the owner didn’t look at faces. He paid cash at each stop and kept moving and the rain came down around him steady and indifferent and he was three blocks from the bus stop that would take him back toward the farmhouse when the route took him past the apartment building.

He didn’t plan to stop.

The Thai place on the corner was open. Warm light through the window, the smell of something with lemongrass drifting out every time the door moved, and he hadn’t eaten since before the first bus and the supply run had taken longer than he’d planned. He stopped at the window and looked at the menu board inside and was still looking at it when the apartment building door opened behind him.

"I thought that was you," Zara said.

She was in her convenience store uniform, bag over one shoulder, hair doing its usual thing where the bun had started the day with ambitions it couldn’t sustain. She was looking at him with the expression she always looked at him with. Like she’d already processed something he hadn’t said yet and was being patient about it.

"You’re heading to work?," he asked.

"In an hour," she said. "I was going to eat first." She looked at the Thai place window and then back at him. "You look like you haven’t eaten today."

"I was going to."

"Were you," she said, with the specific tone of someone who had assessed a situation and reached a different conclusion. She pushed the restaurant door open and held it and looked at him with the patient expression of someone who had already decided how this was going and was giving him the courtesy of appearing to offer a choice.

He went inside.

They took the table by the window because Damian needed the sightline to the street and Zara took the seat across from him without questioning the specific chair he’d chosen, which told him something about her that he filed without examining further. She ordered without looking at the menu. She’d been here enough times to have that relationship with it and he ordered the same thing she did because making decisions about food felt like a waste of processing capacity right now.

[Grade Scan: Zara — Grade S. Flux restoration available: 100%]

The notification sat at the edge of his vision the way it always sat when she was within range. Patient. Glowing. Completely indifferent to the fact that he had a deadline and two days of prep still ahead of him and approximately no capacity for the complication that S-grade represented.

He ignored it the way he’d been ignoring it since the apartment doorway. Or tried to. His eyes moved to her chest once without permission. Just once, brief and involuntary, the Grade Scan running its passive assessment in the background whether he wanted it to or not. He pulled his gaze back to the window before it became something she noticed.

’S-grade,’ the system reminded him, as if he’d forgotten.

He hadn’t forgotten.

That was precisely the problem.

"You’ve been gone for a while," she said. Not an accusation. Just an observation, the way she made most observations. Stated cleanly and then left alone, no pressure attached.

"The farmhouse has been good," he said. "Quiet like you said."

She nodded like that confirmed something she’d already assumed. "My cousin keeps it well. Even empty." She looked at him with the particular attention she reserved for things she’d already decided not to push on. "You eating properly out there?"

"Better than before," he said.

"That’s not a high bar," she said, and flagged the waiter.

"Just some things to sort out," he said.

"Mm." She looked out the window at the rain. "The farmhouse okay?"

"It’s good," he said. "Quiet."

"My cousin likes quiet," she said. "He’ll be glad someone’s using it." She looked back at him. "Your friend. The woman with the tablet. Is she okay?"

"She’s fine."

Zara nodded and looked at the window again and the restaurant moved around them. Other tables, other people making conversations, the specific comfortable noise of a place that had been feeding the same neighborhood for long enough to know what it was doing. The food arrived faster than he expected and was better than anything he’d eaten since before the facility and he didn’t say that out loud but something about the way he ate it apparently communicated it anyway because Zara watched him for a moment with an expression he couldn’t fully read and then looked back out the window without commenting.

He noticed her eyes drop to his forearm at some point during the meal. The three parallel burn scars, old and settled, visible below his jacket sleeve where it had ridden up slightly. She looked for maybe two seconds and then looked back at her food with the deliberate neutrality of someone deciding not to ask a question they’d already formed.