Mira and Ken had gone to his room to check on him.

They had knocked, waited, knocked again. Atlas had answered in the particular state of someone dragged back from sleep by external demand—half present, blinking, processing the question of where Jelo was with the slow machinery of someone whose brain hadn’t fully reengaged yet. He had taken a stroll, Atlas said. He does that. They had stood in the corridor for a moment—Mira and Ken and the half-awake Atlas—and then by some unspoken agreement they had decided to go looking.

They found him on the bench.

Sitting in the gap between the lights with his legs extended and the can in his hand and his eyes on the sky, completely still in the way he was still when his body was present and his mind was somewhere else entirely. He didn’t hear them coming. He didn’t look up until Mira spoke.

"Hope all is well," she said.

It reached him the way sounds reached people surfacing from deep thought—arriving at the edge of awareness before the meaning assembled itself, the words landing before the sentence did. He blinked. Looked over at her.

"I got caught up in my thoughts for a little while," he said. "All is good."

They settled around him—Mira on the far end of the bench, Ken standing for a moment before finding a low ledge nearby, Atlas dropping onto the ground beside the bench with the easy comfort of someone who had long since stopped requiring furniture to be comfortable. The street around them was quiet. The light didn’t reach them properly. It felt separate from the rest of the evening in a way that made conversation easier than it would have been anywhere more visible.

"So how do you feel today was?" Mira asked.

Jelo considered it.

"Exciting," he said. Not the automatic answer—the actual one, arrived at after a genuine moment of consideration. "I was worried about the fight. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t. But after it was done, what stayed with me was something else." He paused. "I feel like it’s too early for people to know this much about me. I feel like I should start being more low-key."

Mira looked at him—the particular look she gave things she was considering rather than things she had already decided about. She didn’t respond immediately.

"The bracket put you in front of that crowd before Class 1 even started," she said eventually. "That’s not something you controlled."

"I know," Jelo said. "Doesn’t change how it feels."

He looked at Ken.

Ken had been quiet since they sat down—not absent, present in the way he was always present, the specific quality of attention he brought to conversations that meant something to him. Jelo watched him for a moment.

"What about you," Jelo said. "Your fight won’t be tomorrow or the day after probably, but it’s coming. I can see how eager you are." He paused. "It’s like you’re a book and I’ve read every page."

Ken looked at him.

"I really can’t wait," he said. Simple. Direct. No performance around it—just the honest statement of someone who had been watching fights all day and had found the watching harder than the waiting. "I’m more than ready."

"I know you are," Jelo said.

The street was quiet around them. Somewhere further down a door opened and closed and footsteps moved away and then it was quiet again. The can in Jelo’s hand was nearly empty now—he had been sipping it slowly enough that the night had gotten further along than he realized.

Atlas shifted on the ground beside the bench.

"You know," he said, in the tone he used when he had been sitting on something for a while and had finally decided to say it, "we all expected you to use Ember Step in there. And some of your other abilities. But you didn’t." He paused. "I’m guessing you didn’t want to show too much yet."

Jelo looked at him.

Atlas looked back—not pushing, just having said the thing and leaving it where he put it.

"You’re right," Jelo said. "I don’t want to show too much yet. I’ll reveal it when it’s time." He paused. "There’s no point in showing everything to a crowd that’s going to be watching every fight I have from here until the final. Let them wonder."

Mira nodded once—slow, the nod of someone adding a piece of information to a structure they had already been building. Ken said nothing but something in how he was sitting changed slightly—a small adjustment, the physical expression of a thought landing and being filed.

They sat there for a while after that.

Not talking much—just present with each other in the particular way that the people you spent difficult days with became present at the end of those days, the conversation not needing to carry the weight because the shared experience had already carried most of it. The street stayed quiet. The sky stayed dark. The can in Jelo’s hand went empty and he set it beside the bench and leaned back and looked up.

After a while Mira left first—standing without ceremony, saying something brief, walking back in the direction of the accommodation with the precise economical movement she brought to everything.

Ken left shortly after—a nod to Jelo, a nod to Atlas, the same quality of departure he had, quiet and deliberate and complete.

And then it was just Jelo and Atlas.

Atlas looked at the sky for a moment. Then at Jelo. Then back at the sky.

"You good?" he said.

"Yeah," Jelo said.

"Okay." Atlas stood, brushing dust from his clothing with the ease of someone completely unbothered by having sat on the ground. "Then let’s go."

They walked back together—not talking, the silence between them the comfortable kind that didn’t require filling, the kind that came from knowing someone well enough that quiet wasn’t something that needed to be managed.

Jelo walked and let his head stay where it was.

Tomorrow was coming.

He was ready for it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​