Eli didn't go far.
Just out into the hallway, past the common room doors where the noise softened into something easier to think through. The lights out here were set for evening, dimmer than the rooms they lit, the kind of light that didn't demand anything from you. The corridor stretched quiet in both directions, nobody moving through it at the moment, just the low hum of the building doing what buildings did when the day had mostly finished with them.
He leaned back against the wall and looked down at his phone.
Marcus.
It still sat slightly wrong, seeing his name on the screen like that. Not because they hadn't talked since Eli left Port Virel, but because the talking had changed in quality without either of them naming it. Shorter exchanges. Longer gaps between them. The specific distance that accumulated when two people's daily lives stopped overlapping and neither of them had found the new frequency yet.
He tapped the call button.
It rang longer than it should have. Once, twice, three times, long enough that he was already recalculating, already thinking about what he would say in a message instead.
Then: "Yeah."
Marcus's voice came through a little rough, the specific texture of someone who hadn't spoken in a while or had just cleared their throat before answering. Eli adjusted the phone against his ear.
"You good?" he asked.
A pause. Not dramatic, just present, the kind of pause that said something was being organized before it was said.
"Yeah," Marcus said. "Yeah, I'm good. Just—" He exhaled, a quiet sound. "Just a day."
Eli nodded to himself against the wall. "You said something weird happened."
Another pause, longer than the first.
Then Marcus gave a short laugh that was more breath than sound. "I mean, not like that. I worded it wrong."
"What'd you mean then?"
"Nothing big. Just stuff. It's been a weird stretch here."
Eli waited.
Marcus didn't fill the space right away, which was its own kind of information. Marcus usually filled spaces. It was one of the consistent things about him, the way he could take any silence and put something in it, not awkwardly, just naturally, the way some people were built to keep conversation moving. The fact that he wasn't doing it now was noticeable in the specific way that familiar things were noticeable when they were absent.
There was background sound on his end. Not loud. A television in another room, voices muffled through a wall, something that might have been traffic from outside. It sounded like Port Virel. It sounded exactly like the specific version of Port Virel that Eli had grown up in, the ambient sound of a building in the Low Coast in the evening, and something in him registered it in a way that was different from just recognizing it.
"Rent's going up again," Marcus said.
Eli shifted his weight slightly against the wall. "Again?"
"Yeah." There was a flatness in it, the specific flatness of someone who had already gone through the emotional range of a piece of information and had come out the other side into something more settled and less energetic. "Landlord called it adjusting with the area. Same thing he said last time."
"How much?"
"Doesn't matter. Too much."
Eli rubbed his thumb along the edge of his phone. "You guys going to stay?"
"I don't know." He heard Marcus shift, the sound of someone leaning back against something. "My mom keeps saying we'll figure something out. Keeps saying it like if she says it enough times the math changes."
"And you don't think it does."
"I don't see how." The words came a little faster that time, which meant he had been sitting with this for a while and it had built up enough to move quickly when it had somewhere to go. "She doesn't want to move again. I get that. She's been in that apartment for eleven years. But if the rent keeps going up, what are we actually doing? Just keeping it together every month and calling that making it work?"
Eli didn't answer right away.
He had heard Marcus complain about things before. Bills, work, customers, the radiator that had been broken since October of two years ago. There was always something, and Marcus had a specific way of talking about those things, a quality of venting that was more performance than distress, the telling of it doing most of the work of resolving it. This didn't sound like that. This sounded like he had been through the venting already, privately, enough times that what was left was something more worn down.
"Have you talked to her about it?" Eli asked.
"Yeah." A short breath. "Same conversation every time. She says it'll work out. I say I don't see how. She tells me not to stress about it." He paused. "I'm not stressed about it. I'm trying to figure it out. Those are different things."
"She probably knows that," Eli said.
"Maybe." Marcus didn't sound convinced. "Doesn't change what she says."
Silence settled between them for a moment. Not uncomfortable, just the particular quiet of a conversation that has reached a point where there isn't anything useful to add and both people know it.
Eli heard something shift on Marcus's end, a chair maybe, or him moving from one room to another, the background sound changing quality slightly.
"You're still at KMI?" Marcus asked.
"Yeah."
"How is it."
Not quite a question the way he said it. More like the verbal equivalent of checking a box, the obligatory pass through a topic before moving on.
Eli hesitated. "Fine," he said.
Marcus made a small sound that could have meant several things, none of them specific enough to read. "Yeah. Looked like it."
Eli waited for him to ask something else. He usually did. What are you actually doing there, who are you around, is it actually worth it, the questions that had a particular Marcus quality to them, direct and a little blunt and genuinely curious underneath.
Nothing came.
That was the first thing that felt off. Not wrong exactly. Just different from the pattern he was used to.
"We finished something today," Eli said. "A session."
"What kind?"
"Hard to explain."
"But you did okay."
"Yeah."
Marcus made another noncommittal sound. "Course you did."
It didn't land like a compliment. It didn't land like anything. Just an acknowledgment filling a slot, the way you said of course when you weren't really thinking about what you were responding to.
Eli looked at the floor of the hallway, at the specific worn pattern of it, the same floors that ran through most of KMI, pale and clean and identical everywhere you looked. "It wasn't like that," he said. "It was different from other stuff."
"Different how?"
The question came, but the quality of it was off. The right words in the slightly wrong register, the version of asking that was doing its job without being particularly invested in the answer.
Eli didn't try to explain it. "Just different," he said.
Marcus didn't follow up.
That was the second thing.
Eli could feel the conversation narrowing, the exchanges getting shorter and the spaces between them getting longer, the specific sensation of something winding down without anyone deciding to wind it down. He had been in enough conversations with Marcus to know the difference between one that was ending and one that was just breathing, and this one felt like it was ending even though neither of them had said anything that should have ended it.
"You working today?" Eli asked.
"Morning shift."
"How was it?"
"Fine."
Eli waited. Marcus's job at the delivery place had been a reliable source of material for years, the specific chaos of it, the customers and the coworkers and the dispatch system that crashed every few weeks and the manager who handled it by pretending it hadn't happened. There was always something. He had told Eli about it in enough detail over enough time that Eli felt like he knew the place without ever having set foot in it.
"Anything happen?" Eli asked.
"Not really."
"Quiet day?"
"I guess."
Eli rubbed his thumb along the side of his phone again, a small habitual motion.
"You still at the same location?" he asked, keeping his voice easy.
"Yeah."
"Good."
"Yeah."
The hallway lights hummed faintly overhead. Eli looked up at them for a second, at the pale glow of the evening setting, and then back down at the floor.
"You sure you're good?" he asked.
A beat.
"Yeah," Marcus said. The word came out a little tighter than the earlier ones, the specific tightness of someone who has been asked the same question more than they wanted to be asked it and is still choosing to give the same answer. "I said I'm good."
"Alright."
Marcus exhaled, and there was something in it, a small release. "Sorry. It's just—lot of small stuff. All at once."
"I get it."
"Yeah."
The background sound on his end changed again, the television voices cutting off, the ambient noise dropping to something quieter, like he had moved further from it or it had been turned down.
"Corrine asked about you," Marcus said.
Eli straightened slightly off the wall. "She did?"
"Ran into her earlier. Outside the pharmacy on Aldren."
"What'd she say?"
"Asked if I'd heard from you. I told her you were still alive and apparently doing fine." He paused. "She said you should call her."
Eli processed that. "I will."
Marcus didn't respond to it. Not even the small acknowledgment sounds he usually made to fill the space where a response would go.
"Is she good?" Eli asked.
"Yeah." A pause that had something inside it. "She's normal."
Eli waited for more. Normal from Marcus usually had something attached to it, a qualifier or a clarification or the beginning of a story. This time it just sat there.
"That's good," Eli said.
"Yeah."
The conversation had moved into its final stretch, both of them in it and neither of them quite finishing it, the specific awkwardness of not knowing how to close something that hadn't had a clean shape to begin with.
Marcus spoke first.
"I gotta go in a minute."
"Yeah, okay."
"Yeah."
Eli adjusted the phone against his ear. "Alright. I'll talk to you later."
Marcus didn't respond right away. There was a pause, and in it Eli had the specific sense of something present on the other end that wasn't being said, something that had moved up close to the surface of the conversation and then hadn't come through.
Then: "I'll hit you later."
"Yeah."
The line clicked.
Eli stood in the hallway and looked at the call log for a moment. The duration. The time. Marcus's name sitting above it.
He lowered the phone slowly.
He turned it over in his hand, looking at the back of it, then turned it face-up again. The screen sat there showing him nothing new.
It wasn't anything he could point at. If he tried to describe the conversation to someone else he would have said it was fine, it was just Marcus catching him up on rent and work and Corrine asking about him, nothing unusual. Everything he would have said would have been accurate and none of it would have been the whole picture, because the whole picture wasn't in the content of what had been said but in the texture of how it had been said, the pauses and the short answers and the questions that didn't follow up and the way Marcus had said of course you did and meant nothing by it.
Marcus had always been interested. Even when things between them were complicated, even when there was stuff neither of them was saying, Marcus had been interested in the actual details of things. What's actually happening there. What's it actually like. Is it actually worth it. The questions that meant he was paying attention rather than maintaining contact.
Tonight had felt like maintenance.
Like someone going through the motions of keeping something alive without quite having the energy to actually put something into it.
Eli ran a hand through his hair and let it drop.
He stood in the hallway a moment longer, the light humming overhead at its steady evening level, the corridor empty in both directions. The common room noise filtered through the doors, muffled and familiar, the sound of the group on the other side going about whatever the group was going about.
He thought about calling back.
He didn't.
He slid the phone into his pocket and pushed through the common room doors.
The noise resolved back into its individual pieces as he stepped in. Caspian was mid-sentence, talking with his hands in the animated way that meant he had committed to a bit and was seeing it through regardless of audience response. Rowan was already in the process of correcting something he had said. Jonah sat between them with a drink in his hand and the patient expression of someone who had decided to let the exchange run its course before inserting anything.
Naomi looked up when Eli came back in. She held it for a moment, reading something in his face with the quiet accuracy she applied to most things, and then looked back down at the table without asking anything. It was the version of attention that didn't require a response and didn't pretend it wasn't happening, and Eli was more grateful for it than he would have been able to explain.
He crossed the room and dropped back onto the couch where he had been sitting.
Caspian pointed at him immediately, the finger coming up before Eli had even fully settled. "There he is. We took a vote and you're filing the complaint about the chamber."
"I'm not doing that," Eli said.
"You missed the vote. Abstentions count as yes."
"That's not how that works."
"It is here."
Rowan looked at Caspian. "That's not how that works anywhere."
"Thank you," Eli said.
"You're still filing it," Caspian said, undeterred.
Jonah glanced at Eli over the rim of his drink. Not asking anything directly, just the brief look of someone checking in, the particular version of it that acknowledged something without making it into something that needed to be addressed right now.
Eli gave a small shake of his head. Nothing. I'm fine. Or something close enough to fine that the distinction wasn't important yet.
Jonah looked back at the others.
Eli leaned back into the couch and let the room settle around him, Caspian still building his case, Rowan dismantling it methodically, the familiar rhythm of the two of them at full operational capacity. It was easy to sit inside. It didn't require anything from him.
He rested his hands together and looked out across the common room. Same people in their same arrangements, Perrin's table empty now, the second-year by the windows still doing something with the card in his hand. The wall display cycled through its schedule loop. The lights held their evening level.
Everything sat exactly where it was supposed to sit.
His phone pressed faintly against his leg from inside his pocket, the physical presence of it just noticeable enough to be there.
He thought about what Marcus's voice had sounded like on the last few words before he hung up. The way the pause had sat before I'll hit you later, the thing that had moved close to the surface and then hadn't come through.
He thought about the rent. About Marcus's mom saying it would work out. About eleven years in one apartment and what it felt like to watch the math stop working and not be able to say so to the person who needed to hear it.
He thought about Corrine on Aldren Street, outside the pharmacy, asking Marcus if he had heard from Eli.
He pulled out his phone.
Looked at it for a moment.
Then opened a new message to Corrine and typed: Hey. Marcus said you asked about me. You around this week?
He looked at it for a second, then sent it before he could rethink the wording.
He locked the screen and put it back in his pocket.
Caspian had moved on to a new point in his argument, something about precedent and institutional responsibility, and Rowan was pulling it apart with the particular efficiency of someone who had located the structural problem in the first sentence and was working outward from there. Jonah had given up the pretense of not being entertained.
Eli listened to them.
The evening continued around him at its ordinary pace.
He didn't take his phone back out.