You assess the apartment in ninety seconds.

Two exits. The front door — standard lock, deadbolt, chain. The window in the living room — fourth floor, fire escape, metal stairs to the alley below. Not ideal. You'd prefer three. But two is more than the basement had, and you're not in a position to negotiate.

The kitchen has a knife block. You count them without touching — six knives, three sizes, the largest a chef's knife with a blade longer than your forearm. The bathroom has a window — small, frosted glass, but openable. Third exit if you break the frame. The bedroom door has a lock on the inside. The hallway has a smoke detector that could be repurposed as an alarm trigger.

You do this in front of MC. You don't try to hide it. She stands in the doorway with her keys in her hand and watches you scan her apartment the way a locksmith scans a building — every point of entry, every vulnerability, every object that could be a tool or a weapon or both.

"The couch pulls out," she says. "If you want to sleep in the living room."

You don't sleep in the living room. You don't sleep in the bedroom. You take two cushions from the couch and put them in the hallway closet — the one between the front door and the kitchen, small, dark, barely big enough for a person to lie down in. The closet has no window. It has one door. And it's positioned so that anyone coming through the front entrance has to pass it, which means you'll hear them before they reach you.

MC watches you arrange the cushions. She doesn't say anything. Her face does something complicated — not pity, not confusion, something closer to recognition. Like she's seeing a pattern she understands even though the specifics are foreign.

You close the closet door from the inside.

You don't sleep. You lie in the dark with your back against the wall and your bare feet on the cushions and you listen to MC's apartment settle around you — the hum of the refrigerator, the tick of a heating system, the distant sound of traffic through the walls. The noises of a home. They sound wrong. Not threatening — wrong. The particular wrongness of comfort when your body has forgotten what comfort is for.

---

Morning. MC has left food on the counter.

Not a plate — a container. Sealed. The same kind of self-sealing container you used to scavenge from the restaurant skip, except this one is new and the food inside it is fresh and there's a note on top that says: Eat whenever. No rush.

You eat everything. Standing up. Back to the wall. Eyes on the front door.

The food is good. Real food — rice, vegetables, protein in a sauce that tastes like someone made it with attention instead of obligation. Your stomach cramps from the richness of it after weeks of greenhouse supplements and stolen leftovers, and you stand in MC's kitchen with your hand pressed against your abdomen and wait for the cramp to pass.

You wash the container. You dry it. You put it back exactly where you found it.

Then you check the exits again. Front door — locked, chain on. Window — closed, fire escape clear. Closet — cushions in place, your pack inside, everything you own within arm's reach.

Everything you own: a cracked scrambler. A dead scanner. Six steno notebooks. Three changes of coveralls. A hairpin. A piece of wire. The clothes on your back.

No boots.

Your feet are bare on MC's tile floor. Clean tile, warm from the heating system, and your soles are still scraped from the concrete and the pavement and the day and a half of walking without shoes. MC left a pair of slippers by the closet door. You saw them when you woke up. Soft, grey, the kind of slippers someone buys for a guest.

You're not wearing them. Slippers are for people who live here. You don't live here. You're using this apartment the way you used the metro tunnel and the scrapheap and the greenhouse — temporarily, strategically, with one eye on the exit and your pack within reach.

---

MC comes home at six.

She's wearing the Hunter Association uniform — not the full tactical gear, but the day-to-day version. Navy jacket, insignia on the collar, the particular posture of someone who carries authority in their body the way other people carry bags.

You tense. You can't help it — your body reads the uniform before your brain reads the person wearing it, and the response is automatic: exit calculation, distance measurement, the particular assessment of how fast can I get to the window if this goes wrong.

MC sees it. She takes the jacket off. Hangs it on the hook by the door, insignia facing the wall. Stands in the hallway in a T-shirt and looks at you with an expression that says I know what I just did to you and I'm sorry.

"How was your day?" she asks.

"Fine."

"Did you eat?"

"Yes."

"Do you need anything?"

The question lands between you like a grenade with the pin still in. You need everything. You need a scanner, a scrambler that isn't held together with electrical tape, components to rebuild both, a secure network connection, boots, a way home. You need to not be standing barefoot in a Hunter's apartment calculating escape routes while she asks you how your day was.

"Books," you say.

MC blinks. "Books?"

"Anything about dimensional theory. Protocore physics. Aether Core mechanics. If you have access to Hunter Association technical libraries, anything classified above public clearance on interdimensional energy transfer."

She stares at you. You stare back. The silence lasts four seconds.

"I can get books," she says.

"And I need a workspace. A table. Something I can write on. I'll use my own materials — I don't need your equipment. Just a flat surface and light."

"The kitchen table—"

"Not where you eat. Somewhere you won't need. A corner."

MC nods slowly. She's watching you the way she watched you in the basement — not with suspicion, not with pity, with that particular expression of someone who is trying to understand a language she doesn't speak.

"I'll clear the desk in the bedroom," she says. "You can use that."

"I won't use your bedroom."

"I'll move the desk to the living room."

You hesitate. That's a concession — a piece of furniture relocated for you, a reshaping of her space to accommodate your presence. That's not how nests work. Nests don't reshape. You reshape around them.

But you need the desk. You need to work. Forty-nine days of research, calculation, and learning are sitting in six notebooks in your closet and the work doesn't stop because the nest changed.

"Okay," you say. "Thank you."

The words feel foreign. You haven't thanked anyone in seven weeks. Dao at the warehouse didn't get thanks — he got labour. The restaurant skip didn't get thanks. The greenhouse didn't get thanks. Gratitude is a social contract and you've been living outside society's contracts since day one.

MC smiles. Small. Careful. The smile of someone who knows that the thank-you cost something and isn't going to make a big deal about it.

---

Day three at the apartment. MC brings dinner.

Not delivery — homemade. She stands in the kitchen and cooks while you sit at the desk in the living room with your steno notebooks open and a pen in your hand and the scratching sound of your private language filling the silence between you.

She's made enough for two. She sets a plate at the desk, next to your notebooks, and sits at the kitchen counter with hers. Not across from you — beside you, but at a distance. Close enough to be present. Far enough to not crowd.

You eat. The food is good. Your body processes it with the desperate efficiency of cells that have been running on deficit for weeks — you can feel the calories being absorbed, the protein being distributed, the particular satisfaction of a metabolism that finally has something to work with.

"Can I ask you something?" MC says.

You don't look up from your steno. "You can ask."

"Where are you from?"

Your pen stops. Not dramatically — you don't freeze, don't tense, don't give her the satisfaction of a visible reaction. You just stop writing for half a second, then resume.

"Somewhere else."

"Somewhere else in the city? In the country? Or—"

"Somewhere else."

MC is quiet for a moment. You can feel her looking at you — not staring, just looking, the way she did in the basement, with that particular intensity that your Aether Core — her Aether Core — makes possible.

"The way you talk," she says. "The words you use. Some of them are wrong. Not wrong like a foreigner — wrong like someone who learned the language from data instead of people."

You look up. She's right, and the fact that she noticed makes something cold settle in your stomach.

"I tapped into the city's network on day five," you say. "I learned the language from news feeds and transit announcements and public data. If it sounds mechanical, that's why."

"It doesn't sound mechanical. It sounds like someone who's translating in real time from something else."

You hold her gaze. She holds yours. The silence stretches.

"I'm not from here," you say. That's all you're willing to give.

MC nods. She doesn't push. She picks up the plates and washes them and you go back to your steno and neither of you mentions it again.

But later, when the apartment is dark and you're in the closet with the door closed and your bare feet on the cushions, you think about how easily she read you. Not the polymorph — nobody reads the polymorph. But the human parts. The tells. The particular flavour of displacement that sits in the gap between your words and the words this city uses.

She's good at reading people. That makes her useful. It also makes her dangerous.

---

Day five. You find money on the desk.

Not a lot — a small stack of bills, the physical currency kind, the same denomination Dao used to pay you at the warehouse. No note. Just money, placed next to your notebooks while you were in the bathroom.

You leave it where it is. When MC comes home, you point at it.

"No," you say.

"It's not charity. It's—"

"No."

MC's mouth opens. Closes. She takes the money back. You see the flash of something in her face — frustration? Hurt? The particular helplessness of someone who wants to give and keeps being refused.

"You need shoes," she says.

You look at your bare feet. She's not wrong. The scrapes are healing — your body is efficient at repair when it has calories to spend — but you can't go outside like this. Barefoot means conspicuous. Conspicuous means cameras. Cameras mean the task force.

"I'll buy my own," you say. "When I have money."

"You need them now. You can't go outside without—"

"I know."

Silence. The mathematics of pride versus the mathematics of survival. You've done this calculation before. Survival always wins. That's what makes it so exhausting.

"Do you have a pair I can borrow," you say. Not a question. A concession. The hardest sentence you've spoken in this apartment.

MC disappears into the bedroom. Comes back with trainers — white, worn, a size too small. You put them on. They pinch at the toes and the heel slips and they're not boots and they're not yours and wearing someone else's shoes feels more intimate than wearing someone else's coveralls ever did.

"Temporary," you say.

MC nods. "Temporary."

---

Day seven. You start sleeping with the closet door open.

Not because you trust her. Not because the apartment feels safe. Because your body has made a decision without consulting your brain, the way it always does — the way it decided to run on day one, the way it decided to fight the Wanderer, the way it decided to go invisible in an intersection. Your body has assessed the threat level of this apartment and concluded that the closet door can be open. Not unlocked. Not removed. Open. Three inches. Enough to hear the hallway. Enough to see the light change if someone enters.

It's not trust. It's triage. Your body is prioritising sleep quality over maximum security because it needs the recovery more than it needs the paranoia, and the door being open lets air circulate and reduces the claustrophobia that makes your heart rate spike at three in the morning.

You don't tell MC. She notices anyway. You see her glance at the closet in the morning — at the door, open three inches, at the cushions visible through the gap, at the evidence that something microscopic has shifted.

She doesn't mention it. She makes breakfast. She leaves for work. She comes home with books.

The books are good. Technical manuals. Protocore physics. Dimensional theory — not the classified stuff, not yet, but the foundational material that the Association uses to train new Hunters. The science of rifts. The mathematics of Wanderer incursions. The theoretical framework for interdimensional energy transfer, written in the dry, precise language of researchers who have never personally been thrown across a dimensional barrier in their pyjamas.

You read them in a day. Your brain does the acceleration — slower now, gentler, the learning engine running on proper fuel instead of emergency reserves. The nosebleed comes at hour eight. Small. Manageable. You wipe it on your coverall sleeve and keep reading.

By nightfall, you've filled twelve pages of steno. The calculations are starting to converge. Not on a solution — on a shape. The shape of the problem you need to solve to get home.

You sit at the desk in MC's living room with twelve pages of mathematics in a language nobody in this world can read, and you think: the Aether Core. It's always the Aether Core.

You look at MC. She's on the couch, reading something on her wrist-screen, her feet tucked under her, her heart beating with the steady rhythm you gave it seven weeks ago. The heart you stabilised. The energy you touched.

The energy that could open a door.

You look away. You close the notebook. You go to the closet and you pull the door to three inches and you lie down with your bare feet on the cushions and your back against the wall.

You don't write in the steno that night. You don't write the thing you're thinking. The calculation that connects MC's Aether Core to a theoretical portal. The implication that sits in your mathematics like a splinter.

You don't write it because writing it makes it real. And if it's real, you'll have to choose between the woman who gave you a jacket and the man who gave you a ring.

Day fifty-six.