Nyx woke up before she understood what room she was in, which was fine, because the room was not the relevant variable.

She found Proxy on the floor near the terminal before she had fully waking up, and the part of her that had the compass had already confirmed the direction before her eyes had adjusted to the light.

She moved to him and had her hands on his face.

He was breathing. Pulse present. Nothing visibly wrong with him that the hands-to-face check could find.

She tilted his head left, then right. Checked the collar. Ran her thumb across his lips.

The room looked the same as it had before. The surgical lighting was fine. The terminal was dark. Jinx was on the floor near the instrument rack.

Nyx ignored Jinx and redirected her attention to the task of getting Proxy conscious, which she accomplished by pinching his cheeks and pulling until he made a response.

He made a sound.

"There you are," she said.

He came up slowly. The specific heaviness of the neural overdrive shutdown was something he had not experienced before and identified in real time as different from every other kind of unconsciousness he had been subjected to on this island.

Less the interrupted sleep of sedation and more the residual drag of a system that had been forced to stop mid-process and was not entirely happy about being asked to resume.

He sat up and said nothing for a moment because the moment required it.

Nyx was watching him with both hands still available, ready to move to any new injury that appeared while he stood up.

Jinx was waking up on the far side of the room. She did it, ungracefully, in stages, with a brief interruption at when the optical implants returned before the proprioception did and she had full visual input and no reliable sense of where her body was in relation to the floor.

"Okay," Jinx said, to the ceiling.

She blinked once, then swallowed.

Then, after a pause, "That was horrible."

Proxy looked at the room. He looked at the terminal, dark, the session closed. He looked at Nyx, who was looking at him with patient warmth.

"That’s on me."

He started to explain. "The facility security system detected the network intrusion and deployed the isolation field as an automated countermeasure."

Jinx sat up and absorbed this with the pragmatism of someone who has been on a battle royale island for several days and has stopped demanding that things make sense before accepting them.

"Can’t be helped," she shrugged.

She looked at Nyx. She looked at Proxy. She looked at the door.

"We leaving, or."

Nyx was looking at Proxy.

She had been looking at him since he finished the explanation. Not with suspicion. She didn’t do that with him.

She was looking at him with attention, when she told him he had a specific face for when he had found something out and wasn’t saying it.

She locked his gaze for one moment.

Then she nodded.

"It’s fine. Everyone commits mistakes."

He noted that she had not believed it.

He did not point it out, because the exchange was complete and the room had a door they should be using.

They left the hub.

The zone at night was quieter now. The fires from the fight had settled to embers, the emergency lighting working nearby in the sections it still reached and absent in the sections it didn’t.

Proxy moved through it with the network active, scanning for positions and heat signatures, finding nothing close.

He found a building three minutes into the search.

It was a processing tower at the northeast section, taller than the structures around it but not the tallest thing in the zone, which made it visible enough to find and unremarkable enough to ignore.

The exterior was corrugated metal on the upper levels, prefabricated panels below, with a maintenance ladder bolted to the exterior reaching the upper floors.

He accessed the management system, confirmed the upper maintenance floor, confirmed the hatch.

They went up the ladder, which had the specific unpleasantness of exterior ladders at height in the dark when one member of the party had a hip graze that did not appreciate climbing. He did not say this.

The upper floor was a single room, four meters square, equipment racks along the walls with nothing left on them and no reason to exist except that they had been installed when the building had a purpose and nobody had taken them out since.

Metal grating for a floor. One narrow window on the western wall, the zone spread below it and the dark horizon past that. One overhead strip light in the far corner, still working.

Nyx looked around.

She turned once, slowly, taking in the strip light and the empty racks and the grating and the narrow window.

"Ours," she said with complete sincerity.

"It’s a maintenance floor," he said. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

She set her pack against the nearest rack.

"Our maintenance floor," she said.

They distributed the rations from the cache supply, six blocks between the three of them, which Jinx received her portion of with the wordless gratitude of someone who had been operating independently for days and had reached the phase of the island where receiving a ration block from someone who had recently threatened her life felt like a reasonable trade.

Nyx applied the nano-fiber bandaging to Proxy’s forearm where the sealant needed covering, and moved on.

He watched her left forearm, which was flinching since the fight, and applied the remaining sealant to it while she was occupied examining the western view, because doing it while she was looking at something else was more efficient than convincing her about it.

She let him, which was its own kind of acknowledgment.

Clippy materialized near Nyx’s shoulder at the moment she sat down against the equipment rack.

I have completed an assessment of the new location. I have four recommendations for overnight safety in elevated industrial positions. Shall I begin with-

"Tomorrow," Nyx said.

Clippy paused.

Of course! Rest is important. I will be ready. This service is complimentary.

Clippy retreated.

Jinx looked at the strip light for a moment.

Then she looked at the two of them against the rack.

Then she looked at the window.

"I’m going to ask a stupid question. Yes, I know it’s stupid."

Nyx looked at her with a snort.

Jinx shifted her pack in her hands.

"The knife thing earlier," she said. "Was that. Were you aiming for the panel. Or was I."

Nyx tilted her head. Her expression was the placid one.

"Reflex," she said.

Jinx exhaled through her nose.

"Right," she said. "Cool. That’s what I thought."

She picked up her pack. She looked at the hatch they had come in through. She looked at Proxy.

"I’m going to sleep somewhere that isn’t in front of her, if that’s fine."

"The lower floors are accessible," Proxy said.

"Great," Jinx said.

She reached the hatch and pulled it open.

She paused with one hand on it.

"Hey, for what it’s worth."

She said, to the room in general, "You two are very weird. And also I’m not totally sure I’m going to be alive tomorrow. So."

She considered this.

"Congrats on your relationship I guess."

She went down the hatch without waiting for a response.

Proxy looked at the hatch.

Then at Nyx.

Nyx was smiling at him. The wide version, the one she kept for when something had confirmed something she already knew.

"Happy?" he said.

"So happy that I might even make a bold wish right now." she said.

Proxy flinched, goosebumps through his back. He was truly concerned she would really do it.

Then, outside, the zone’s speakers connected.

The host’s voice came through them at the sarcastic tone it never once adjusted regardless of content.

"Good night, contestants," Athena said.