Once it was just the four of us: Marlon, Molly, Maribel, and me, I laid it all out.

I started from the beginning, from the moment Penny had come at us, teeth and fight and everything that followed. Maribel had already filled them in on the broad strokes of that part, I figured, but she couldn’t have told them what came after, because she hadn’t been there for it. So I walked them through it, the meeting with Callighan, how it had gone, what had been said, and what had been agreed to. The hostage exchange, the terms, all of it.

When I finished, the park settled around us. Birds somewhere overhead. Wind through the leaves. Nobody said anything for a moment, and then Marlon spoke.

"You met Callighan." It wasn’t quite a question.

"I did," I said. "He’s not what I expected, going off your descriptions of him."

Marlon gave a short, humorless sound. "Clumsy marine junior."

"Yeah. That’s not the man I sat across from."

"Ten years is a long time," he said.

"I suppose it is." I nodded. "People change."

"They do." He was quiet again for a beat, staring at nothing in particular, jaw clenched. "Though I find myself wondering now whether any of it was ever real to begin with. Whether he wasn’t running some version of this game from the very start." He exhaled through his nose. "The way he conducted himself, around me, around the men. The attentiveness. The loyalty he performed. The effort. Was all of that just a ladder he was climbing? Just a role he kept up long enough to get where he needed to be?"

He didn’t say it loudly. He said it the way people say things they’ve been chewing on alone for a while and haven’t quite resolved yet.

I looked at him and didn’t answer right away, because there wasn’t really an answer to give. What I could see clearly was that it had hurt him. Whatever Callighan had done strategically, the fallout of it had landed on Marlon in a personal way, and underneath the anger that he wore easily and openly, there was something older and quieter sitting there too. The kind of wound that comes from realizing someone you believed in was never quite the person you thought they were.

He’d done the right thing. I was certain of that. The consequences of it were just the part that had to be lived through now.

"So what do you need, boy?" Marlon asked, eyes settling back on me.

"I’m heading to the State Marina with some of my group," I said. "For the exchange. But I’d rather not go in relying only on ourselves if it goes wrong. I was thinking it would be worth having more people watching our backs, hanging at a distance. Just in case."

Marlon didn’t need me to spell it out further. He understood the shape of it immediately and what I was requesting him.

"Alright," he said. "Come find me when you’re ready to move."

I hadn’t been certain what to expect. A condition, maybe, or at least a few more questions before he committed. Getting a clean yes landed better than I anticipated.

"Thanks," I said.

"I can’t have teenagers walking into something like this without proper backup," he replied with a soft chuckle as his eyes warmed. "I wouldn’t be able to face my daughter otherwise."

There it was again.

His daughter. Always his daughter. The man really did orbit around that girl like she was the fixed point everything else organized itself around. I kept the thought to myself and just nodded.

"I’ll come too," Maribel said, crossing her arms and with a serious gaze.

"I’m not sure that’s the right call, Maribel," Molly said looking at her.

"Why? I’m fine, I can handle myself, and I can shoot," Maribel replied, chin lifting slightly.

"That’s not the part I’m worried about." Molly’s tone stayed even. "I’m more concerned you’ll see Callighan and make a different kind of decision."

"I’m not that stupid," Maribel said, and she shrugged like the idea barely deserved a response. Though the slight tightness around her eyes suggested it deserved slightly more of a response than she was giving it.

"Let her go," Marlon said, glancing briefly at Molly. "She’s responsible for the boy while he’s here. If she wants to keep eyes on what he’s walking into, that’s her right." He said it plainly, without any particular edge to it, like it was simply the logical conclusion. "She’s just worried."

I looked at Maribel.

"You don’t need to push yourself over this," I said. "There’s no obligation."

"It has nothing to do with that!" She shot back, quick enough that it answered a slightly different question than the one I’d asked. A faint flush had crept into her cheeks that she clearly had no intention of acknowledging. "The State Marina, that’s near the hotel, right?" She continued, pivoting smoothly. "We’re going to be moving on it soon anyway. I’d rather get eyes on the area while I have the chance. It’s just useful information."

"That’s actually a fair point," Marlon said, giving a slow nod, and then his gaze drifted back to me. "You might be getting your girl back out of this. But you’re still committed to the larger plan?"

I knew what he was asking. Mei was a reason, one of the reasons I wanted Callighan gone and the Hotel taken apart piece by piece. But she wasn’t the only one, and she wasn’t the whole shape of it.

"Callighan needs to be removed from Atlantic City," I said. "Same as Gaspar. That hasn’t changed." I held his gaze. "I’m still in."

Marlon smiled at that quite satisfied by my answer. "Good," he said.

"Then I’ll go round up my people and—"

"Hey."

The word came from just outside our little circle, cutting cleanly across whatever I was about to say next.

Summer. She’d come back, or maybe she’d never gone very far to begin with, standing a few feet off with her arms loose at her sides, looking at me specifically.

"One of yours is here asking for you," she said.

"Aren’t you quite the king," Molly said, amused, the grin pulling at the corner of her mouth. "Having them come to you."

"Not really," I muttered.

I was fairly certain I’d said I was going to go to them, but fine. Whatever. I excused myself and walked toward the barricade, and when I got there I found Cindy waiting on the other side, arms at her sides, her face carrying an expression I didn’t like at all.

It was harder than how it was when I saw her off yesterday.

"Something happened, Ryan," she said.

As expected...

I held still for a second, then nodded. "Alright."

I fell into step beside her as she turned and we moved out of the Boardwalk settlement. The morning was going on around us, people moving, voices somewhere, the ordinary background noise of a place trying to function, and none of it touched what was building quietly in my chest as I watched Cindy walk in silence beside me.

"What happened?" I asked, unable to wait anymore.

"Better if you see it yourself," she said. "Explaining won’t do it good."

That didn’t help. "Was it Penny?" The name came out before I’d fully decided to say it, the first thing my brain reached for, the most obvious fault line in everything we were holding together right now.

Cindy didn’t answer. She just kept walking, and her jaw set a little tighter, and that was answer enough.

I picked up my pace. She matched it without a word.

Our section of the settlement came into view and I moved straight toward the small building we’d been using, the one where Lucy and Penny had been kept. My hand found the door, pushed it open, and I stepped inside.

Rachel was standing. Rebecca was in her chair, quieter than usual, watching me come in. Lucy was there too, which caught me briefly, not bound, not watched closely, just leaning against the far wall with her arms folded across her chest, eyes on the floor.

And then my gaze dropped.

There was a shape on the ground that hadn’t been there before. Low and still, covered over with a white sheet, with the terrible stillness of something that would never move again.

Everything in me went cold.

My first thought, the one that punched through before I could stop it was Christopher or Sydney.

They were both not here for some reason and they had been the ones watching over.

"It’s Penny," Rachel said, and she said it immediately, like she’d read exactly where my mind had gone and moved to head it off. "Not Christopher."

The relief hit me fast and hard, the way it does when fear gets yanked out from under you, and then, almost in the same breath, the full weight of what she’d actually said arrived.

"W... what?" I let out shocked.

"She went after Lucy," Rachel said calmly. "Lost herself completely. There was no way to bring her back from it. Christopher tried to intervene, he got hurt in the process."

"Is he alright?" I asked, and I heard how quickly it came out.

"He’s okay. Needs rest, but he’s okay," she said.

I nodded. And then I stopped nodding and just stood there, feeling the pieces of it rearranging inside my skull, all of it landing in sequence, Penny, Lucy, Christopher, the sheet on the floor, the timeline of this morning that had been moving forward while I was standing in a park talking about hostage exchanges and garden plots.

I crossed the room slowly and went down on one knee beside her.

I pulled the sheet back.

Her face was pale the way faces go when there’s nothing left behind them. Her lips had gone a deep, bruised purple at the edges, the color of something shutting down. She looked smaller somehow, people always did, afterward. Like whatever had made them take up space in a room was the thing that left first.

I looked at her for a long moment. Her face. The lines of it. The particular stillness.

My chest pulled tight and I felt the guilt move in like weather immediately within me.

I closed my hand into a fist and rested it gently against the top of her head.

Remembering how she was yesterday I just...

"This is on me," I said quietly.

"It isn’t," Rachel said from behind me.

"I should have been more careful with her." I shook my head, still looking at Penny’s face. "I should have anticipated it. I knew she was unstable, I knew she was close to the edge, I should have—"

"Ryan." Rachel cut me off gently. "You couldn’t have known it would happen like this. It came out of nowhere. You can’t hold yourself responsible for every variable you had no control over."

I didn’t answer that. The logic of it was sound. It didn’t do much.

I stood up slowly, covered her face again, and let out a long breath through my nose.

Then I turned to Lucy.

"Why did she go after you?" I asked. "Of all the people in this building, why you?"

The question was genuine. I wasn’t accusing. I just needed to understand the shape of what had happened so I could carry it properly.

"About that..." Rachel started, and then trailed off. She glanced at Lucy with an expression that sat somewhere between awkward and carefully neutral, like she was trying to decide how to explain it.