Time in the crypt was measured by the bandage.
The first week, Ethan mostly slept. Joel unwrapped the dressing twice a day, his big hands careful in a way that never made it into his voice, and each time the gauze came away rust-colored where the fire escape had torn the wound back open. Fever came and went in low waves. Ethan dreamed in fragments — the QZ outbreak's screaming dark, Grandpa's last roar cut short, the Watchman's hum vibrating through his molars — and woke with his jaw aching, the taste of copper in his mouth. Between sleeps his mind wouldn't stop humming: circuit diagrams, half-remembered schematics, the ghost of a life that wasn't this one, running underneath everything like a second heartbeat.
Joel kept his post by the barricaded stairwell, shotgun across his lap, listening. Once or twice a day he slipped out alone and came back with dented cans — peaches, beans, once a miraculous sleeve of crackers — and lengths of wire or a usable tool, laid out without comment beside Ethan's pack.
Ellie rarely left his side. She read to him from her battered comic, her voice a low murmur against the stone, doing all the voices badly on purpose until the corner of his mouth twitched. When the fever was at its worst she just sat with her shoulder against his, saying nothing, which was better than the comic.
By the second week the angry red around the wound had faded to purple, then to a deep bruised yellow. Ethan could stand — shaky, one hand braced on the wall — and take a few limping steps across the crypt before the leg gave out. He spent the long afternoons cleaning his crossbow, tightening the braided string, working the hunting knife's edge on a salvaged whetstone until it caught the vent light. He ran his small data reader over the church's parish ledgers too, siphoning what the brittle pages held — names, burial dates, a town ledger from before — and filed it all away without knowing why he needed it. Ellie watched him work sometimes, and twice she handed him the tool he was reaching for before his fingers got there.
One afternoon a shaft of sunlight found a crack in the crypt ceiling and laid a bar of gold across the floor, dust turning slow somersaults inside it. Ellie closed the comic gently and looked at him for a long moment.
"It's weird," she said quietly. "Hearing about your parents. About Nightingale. You actually know things about before — not rumors, not book stuff. Real things." She picked up the tarnished locket from where he'd left it beside his pack, turning it over in her fingers. "This was from before, right? Did you have it when you were a baby?"
"Found it in the QZ," Ethan said. "Near the church. It felt — right. Like it was mine."
The truth sat on his tongue, plain as the dust in the light: you found it on the altar, you polished it on your sleeve, you pressed it into my hand. But saying that would make it sound small — a trinket off a dusty altar in a dead town — and he couldn't do that to what she'd given him. So he let the lie stand, and hated himself a little for the ease of it.
Ellie's eyes flicked to his face. She knew. She'd been there; her fingers had folded his over the locket. A small pause hung between them — and then she let it go, turning the locket over once more and setting it down, her thumb smoothing its edge. She didn't press. Something in his expression had asked her not to, and she'd decided to honor it.
"You don't remember anything from before?" he asked. "Even vague stuff?"
She shook her head, a shadow crossing her face. "Bits. Marlene said my mom died when I was born. Left me with her. Never knew my dad." Her voice went thinner. "Sometimes I wonder what it was like. Just — living. Without all this."
Ethan looked at her, at the vulnerability under the armor of her, and felt the old familiar ache of his own unanswered questions rise up to meet hers. "My grandpa used to say the quietest things are the most important," he said.
It was the truest thing he owned. He reached out — his uninjured hand, slow, giving her time — and took the locket from her fingers. Their hands brushed, and something warm sparked low in his chest that had nothing to do with the fever. He set the locket down on the stone between them and left it there.
Ellie's gaze held his. Color rose faint in her cheeks, barely visible in the dim light, and she didn't look away.
After that, the days took on a shape. Ethan's questions to her changed — less about the before, more about the now: the Fireflies' real intentions, the road west, what Joel never talked about. And she told him things in return, in the long quiet afternoons: about Riley, about being afraid of being the only one left of anything, about the fierce small hope she carried for a cure that she was almost embarrassed to say out loud. Their conversations wove tighter without either of them deciding it.
Then came the storm.
It rolled in one evening without warning — wind slamming the church above, rain hammering stone, thunder cracking so close the crypt seemed to flinch. The dark went absolute. Ellie jerked upright from where she'd been dozing, knees pulled to her chest, eyes wide.
"I hate thunder," she whispered, small and raw. "Reminds me of the QZ. The screaming. The shooting."
Ethan didn't think. His hand found hers in the dark, fingers intertwining, and he held on — firm, steady, a fixed point in the noise. "It's just the sky," he murmured. "We're safe here. Joel's at the stairwell. Nothing's getting in."
Her fingers tightened around his. In the flicker of the dying candle she looked at him, and he looked back, and neither of them let go.
The thunder moved off east eventually, thinning to rain finding the vent and dripping, steady as a metronome, into the dark. Ellie's breathing slowed. Her head tipped, heavy and warm, against his shoulder — and his hand stayed in hers, and the storm went on without them.