Sera came into the penthouse a minute later.

Alexei didn’t move. He let his eyes slit, just enough to see the set of her mouth and the way her shoulders had loosened like a tight knot finally undone.

She slid past him, heading toward her own room, her muscles relaxed in a way that he hadn’t seen in her before.

When he heard the soft click of her door being shut, he finally closed his eyes. But he did not sleep.

He kept counting.

It was a habit built into him long before walls and generators and green things you keep in a room. He counted the breaths of everyone in the room because he could, because it was useful, because it told him if anything changed.

Zubair’s never changed. Elias twitched once and made the small sound of a man whose dream had snagged on something sharp and then let go. Lachlan turned and told the floor a joke in his sleep that made no sense even to him.

Sera sat against the wall and let her body settle around the heat it had taken. He could hear the shift in her breathing when she went from prowling to purring to quiet. He could smell the blood she had cleaned from her hands anyway, faint; the cold sharpened everything and the room had no other strong smells left that could cover it.

He liked it. He did not have to explain to himself why.

He turned the whole thing over in his head the way he turned a knife in his palm to know if something about it was wrong.

He imagined Zubair seeing what he had seen and saying nothing out loud. He imagined Elias seeing it and putting words on it he didn’t need. He imagined Lachlan seeing it and turning it into a joke because he would not know where else to lay it down.

He decided none of them would see it the way he did. And that was fine.

It was not a secret he intended to use. It was not a weapon.

It was a thing that told him he had chosen the right world when he had put his hand out and let Sera take it even when she hadn’t needed it. It said: this is what we are.

Not what we pretend. Not what we were trained to be. What we are when there is no north and no maps and no one to write a rule.

He saw again the way her shoulders had eased. He felt the version of himself that had belonged to old winters, to fields that squeaked under your boots because the cold was that deep, nodding like finally something had stopped lying.

He lay there until the first thin change in light showed at the edge of the massive floor to ceiling windows. He opened his eyes and stretched like a man who had slept very well and had nothing in his head but the day in front of him.

Sera was awake, sitting with her knees up, watching Zubair rather than him. That was fine. This was his secret, what he had seen, what she had done.

He looked past her to the window. A thin line of frost ran along the bottom of the pane where the scrape had drawn it the day before. It was a good line to remember. If something big rubbed past again, it would tell them before the glass did.

He filed it with all the other small useful things. He lived well on those. They were better than promises.

He sat up and planted his feet on the rug and let the warmth from the sun into his bones an inch at a time. His body felt heavy in a good way. He had slept and not slept; both were fine.

On the floor, Lachlan snorted himself awake and blinked around like he’d never seen any of them before. "Who made night so long?" he asked the ceiling.

"No one asked you to time it," Elias said, voice rough, eyes already on the kettle because it gave him something to do with his hands before thoughts crowded his mouth.

Zubair’s eyes opened all at once. He did not make a show of looking at the window or at the rope or at Sera. He took everything in without moving and then stood. "Eat," he said. "Then work."

Alexei smiled into his shoulder where no one could see it. He got to his feet. He moved past Sera close enough that his sleeve brushed her knee. She didn’t pull back. He didn’t look down.

He walked to the stove and set the kettle on and didn’t ask Elias if that was his job. The metal rang the way it always did. The generator hummed. The lemon tree put a clean smell into a room that had too much of other kinds of memory.

He thought about telling Sera—later, when it mattered—that he had been there and seen. He decided it did not matter now.

He would keep the knowledge like he kept a knife in his shirt: close, useful, not out where it could be taken from him or shown to the wrong eyes. If there came a day when she needed someone who had seen her without the thing that pretended to be civilization wrapped around her, he would already be standing where he needed to stand.

He poured water into mugs and slid one to Sera first because the law inside his chest, and the thing inside of his head, said that was right. He didn’t look at her when he did it. He didn’t have to.

"North?" Lachlan asked around a yawn, more habit than question.

"No north," Alexei said, cheerful. "We follow the boss." He didn’t say which one.

Zubair made a small sound that meant stop making noise and start putting your hands to a task. Elias smiled into his cup in spite of himself. Sera’s mouth tilted like a secret that had chosen to be a mouth instead of staying a secret.

Alexei took his mug and drank the brackish water like it was good. It tasted like metal and dirt and not dying.

He set it down. He sharpened his knife with slow, clean pulls, watching the edge change from dull to bright. He listened to the building shift in the wind. He listened to the space beyond the glass where big things moved and did not care if men knew their names. He listened to Sera breathe and knew he would notice the second that breath changed again.

He had followed her into the cold and seen the thing she kept under the part of herself that made other people comfortable. He had come back before she knew he had gone. He liked that sequence. He liked the way it sat in him.

A quiet witness. Not for confession. For readiness. For when the world asked them to stop pretending again.

He slid the knife away and looked at the door. Work, then. He felt good. He would make himself more useful than he had been yesterday. He would offer a hand when she didn’t need it and not be offended when she took it anyway. He would be where he needed to be when something big pressed its weight against their glass again.

The world no longer had a true north. That was fine. He now had his own.