From the hedge across the street, Rose saw the door with the chipped blue paint open before his knuckles reached it. Lena filled the frame, eyes already cutting to the space beside him for a second shape that wasn't there.
Rose couldn't hear every word, just pieces that carried in the still air.
"…Class A aberration… early trial zones…"
His voice held the clean edges of a report for one sentence and then frayed. Lena's hand went to her mouth. "No… no." The rest blurred, but the shape of it was obvious. The way his shoulders dipped and held. The way she swayed, reaching for him as if to catch a balance he couldn't give.
Don't say it, Rose thought, as if the force of it could hold sound inside someone else's throat. Don't make it real.
Lena's fingers slid down his arm by habit. Rose saw the flinch when they met alloy at his right thigh. Saw Lena's gaze travel down and fix on the careful, unnatural stillness from mid-thigh to floor.
"Your leg," floated across, shaped more by breath than voice.
He said something short. It didn't reach her, but the angle of his head did. The set of his mouth did. I'm what's left, Rose supplied, and hated how certain she was.
He steadied Lena when her knees went, brought her in with that quiet, implacable care he'd used all afternoon, and the door shut on both of them. The fake flowers in the window kept their bright lie.
Wait, Rose told herself. Breathe. Don't go in there and make this worse.
She didn't move. Minutes stretched. The block returned to its ordinary noises—pipes ticking, a neighbor's radio a room too far away. Through the thin shade of a curtain, she saw them in the front room: Lena on the couch, folded small; Caellum in the chair opposite, elbows on his thighs, head bowed. He fetched water and set the glass within reach. Lena didn't take it. He didn't push. The silence had weight.
Tell me what happened.What it looked like.Where you were.Where he fell.
The house's lights shifted, a lamp in the front room went dark, a hall bulb blinked on, then off. He rose. He pressed his mouth to his mother's hairline, a dry benediction. She caught his sleeve and let it go. He moved down the hall with a soldier's quiet. Toward the back. Toward his room.
Now, Rose thought. Before he puts the mask back on.
She crossed the street on the lull between passing cars, slipped along the hedge, and tried the front door. Unlocked. Of course it was. The air inside hit her—warm, stale, edged with detergent and tea. The sound of Lena's crying came from a closed room, low and steady, the kind of sound a body makes when it's run out of tricks. Rose kept to the hall's shadow and the creakless part of the floor she remembered. His door stood almost shut.
Don't knock.
The latch clicked. His breath was the only sound.
She eased it open with two fingers.
The shirt lay black on the boards. He stood in the center of the room like someone listening for distant thunder. For a breath she thought his back was inked. Then her eyes adjusted to the raised relief of scar.
Not written. Carved.
Forty-eight surnames, set in three narrow columns from shoulder to waist: thick, pale letters still angry at the edges.
Miller. Rodriguez. Chen.
Names she had shouted across yards, whispered under blankets, counted to herself when she could not sleep.
He had made himself their graveyard, Rose thought. The rest of him was a map she didn't want to read. Silver seams from claws that had missed their mark. A puckered, melted patch on his shoulder where something had burned down to the muscle. His left leg carried old white lines. His right, from mid-thigh down, was cold metal.
That's what it took, the thought echoed in her skull. This is what it cost to be the one who lived.
He hadn't heard her. His shoulders, which had been squared against the world all day, were now slumped, trembling. A low, guttural sound ripped from his throat, the noise a body makes when the holding gives.
His right hand, clenched around a single, worn dog tag, rose and slammed into the wall. Once. Twice. A third time, the impact splitting his knuckles, smearing blood on the plaster.
Then whatever held him up let go. His knees gave way and he collapsed to the floor, his body folding in on itself. The sobs were silent and shuddering, as if they had to fight their way through bone.
Rose stood frozen in the doorway, her own tears cutting hot paths through the grime on her cheeks.
"You carved their names into your skin," she whispered. "But you wear everyone else's death like a shroud. You idiot. You didn't have to carry it alone."