I dug into the pack, pulled the cloak hood low so my hands were under it, and reached for the inventory as I had practiced, a small mental click, like remembering a familiar password, and palmed a packet of bread and a wedge of cheese under the cloak before bringing them out as if they had been in my bag the whole time.

Zero watched me do it with the expression of a woman who had just clocked the whole maneuver and was choosing not to comment, which was, frankly, the way she watched me do most things.

I held the food out to Ruby.

"Eat it slowly and in small bites. It’s good food, real food, but your stomach is going to be small. Don’t push."

She didn’t take it.

She stared at the bread. She stared at the cheese. Then she looked up at me, and her face changed for the first time, and what changed it wasn’t gratitude, it was terror. "...What do I have to do?"

"Eat," I replied.

She shook her head and asked, "For the food. What do I have to do for the food?"

I insisted, "Nothing, Ruby. It’s just food. Eat."

"...Are you going to abandon me here?" Her voice took on a fearful tone.

That’s what got me. The matter-of-fact, of course this is what’s happening, you’re feeding me one last meal and leaving voice. Like she was confirming the schedule.

I crouched, put the food in her lap, put my hand over hers, and held it there until she looked at me.

"Listen to me. I am not going to abandon you. I am not feeding you a last meal. We are going to a safe place, you are going to eat, you are going to sleep, and tomorrow we are going to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. I’m not the enemy, Ruby. I know the world has trained you to assume I am. But I’m not."

She didn’t answer. Instead, she just looked at the food. After a long moment, she picked up a piece of bread with hands that shook slightly, and bit a small corner off, and chewed it like she was trying not to be noticed doing it.

I wanted, briefly and with a violence that surprised me, to go back into Halfmark and find every man in a Black Snake jacket and feed each of them their own teeth. The feeling came up from somewhere deep and ugly, and I had to take a slow breath and put it away.

I sat down on the floor across from her and tried to look small. ’Lukas. You’re a functional adult. Calm down. The win is she’s eating.’

After a minute, when she had worked through about a third of the bread, I tried again to talk to her. "Ruby. Why did Black Snake want you?"

She actually answered without hesitation, like this was a question she had answers prepared for.

"Computer skills. I was raised in a lab settlement before they took me, and I was ahead of my class in digital. They use me for hacking. Their AI handlers, mostly. Pre-Fall systems they capture and try to crack. I’m... very good at it." She paused. "They didn’t sell me. They kept me because of it."

"How good is very good?"

"I have not been given a system I could not enter, eventually. The Black Snake gang’s own internal AI, I have access to. It’s how I knew the convoy schedule." Her voice was flat, the same voice she had used to tell me her age. "I could leave their tracker active in the network, if you want, when we’re far enough out. I can route their search away from us."

I stared at her, then I looked over at Zero. Zero was looking at Ruby like a woman who had just opened a box and discovered the box contained considerably more than expected.

"...Ruby. Would you want to do that?"

She blinked at me again. "...You’re asking what I want?"

I smiled. "I am literally just asking what you want."

"...I would like that. I would like to make sure they don’t find us." She replied softly, as if every word was wrong.

"Then yes. Please."

She nodded once. The bread was, by then, almost gone. She picked up the cheese, hesitantly, and bit a corner of it, and the small, very small, expression that flickered across her face when she tasted it was the first thing she had done since we’d met that I could call genuinely human.

Zero stepped a little closer to my shoulder and said, quietly, in my ear, "Sugar boy. We just adopted a hacker."

"I noticed."

"She’s worth her weight in biofield generators."

"I noticed that too."

"You picked well, sweetheart."

"I picked desperate. The skills are gravy."

"Mm. The best harem decisions usually start with desperation."

I almost choked. ’It is too soon for that joke and I love that joke and I need this woman to stop talking.’

...

We made it back to the safehouse just past sundown, after a long, careful walk that took us the long way around to throw any pursuers off the line.

Ruby walked between us without complaint, did not slow once, did not ask a question. By the time we reached the door, I could see her trembling slightly, and the moment we were inside, I steered her toward the cot in the back room and sat her down.

I made her a hot meal. Quick. Eggs scrambled fast in butter, the last of the bread toasted in the same pan, a small handful of dried fruit. I watched her eat the whole thing, this time without asking what she had to do for it, which felt like progress so small it could fit in a thimble but was progress all the same.

When she was done, I tucked a clean blanket around her shoulders and told her to sleep. She didn’t protest. She closed her eyes and was out, like a switch had been thrown.

"Lukas," Zero said quietly from the doorway.

"Yeah."

"Come on."

She had two cans of cola sitting on the kitchen counter when I came back out. Earth cola, the ones I had brought through on the last trip. She’d cracked them both already, and the sound of the second one popping open as she handed it to me was the most normal sound I’d heard all day.

I took it and sat down on the kitchen counter, because the chairs had all been pushed against the far wall earlier and neither of us could be bothered. Zero hopped up beside me, her leg pressed against mine, can in one hand, the other one absently sliding up under the back of my shirt to rest on my lower spine.

"Today," she said, "was a good day."

"It was a deeply weird day."

"Both can be true."