Quiet Reparations

Andy did not trust himself to be indoors. He left the Sky Archive as soon as he could, navigating the labyrinth of glass and paper with the care of a man afraid to touch anything. The words Claire had put in his head were still there, echoing in the minor keys behind everything he saw: If you become a god, Andy, we do too. All of us. There is nothing in the bond that allows a reversal.

It was the all of us that kept ringing. Not the impossible word “god,” not even the fear that he could never go back, because he would take the leap in a second if it could save Laura. No, it was the certainty that every step he took would drag the rest of them along behind, like a line of tin cans on the bumper of a car that had no intention of stopping.

He took the long route through the forest, the air thick with the scent of last night’s rain. The path climbed and twisted, sometimes breaking into sun-drenched clearings, sometimes tunneling under low green canopies where nothing lived but the shadows and the ancient, musty quiet. He let his hands brush the leaves, the trunks, the stones that bulged from the soil like old bones. He liked the friction, the reminder that he was still made of something that could push back.

He sensed Laura through the bond—always a constant, like the hum of a high-tension wire, but this morning the feeling was soft, distant, more echo than presence. She was in the Hollow Garden. He knew she'd sense his distress, but he left her there. He didn’t want her to see him like this. He wanted her to finish what she was doing, to come back whole, and maybe then he’d be able to look her in the face.

He did not have a destination, not really. But the paths here were only so many, and the loops they made always funneled him back to the same places: the pool, the main entrance, the Banquet Hall. He skirted all of them, walking the perimeter until the path changed underfoot—from moss to gravel, from gravel to the heavy, echoing step of stone.

He found himself in the Verdant Arches, the ancient ring of upright slabs set in the hollow of a small valley. Erin had found it, weeks ago, then remade it with a hundred kinds of wisteria and jasmine and creeping things that took the edges off the cold old rocks. The light in the Arches was always different from everywhere else, more gold, more green, sometimes so thick it seemed like you could drink it. Andy stood at the edge of the ring and breathed it in.

He walked the circle, one slow round, running his hand over the petals and the moss and the stone. It should have calmed him. It should have given him a center, or at least a place to set the weight down for a minute.

But the wanting was back—the old, raw impulse that always surfaced when he was alone, now compounded and braided through with the new knowledge of what he was becoming. Being here, where he had only been with Erin before, he found that he wanted her, the way you want the sun to come up when you’re lost in the woods and can’t be sure if it ever will.

It wasn’t a conscious decision, but it didn’t matter. The transformation, Always On Time, specifically said Erin would come if he needed her. And a heartbeat later, she was there.

She stepped into the circle mid-stride, a half-eaten apricot in one hand and nothing else on. Her mint green skin caught the light, and the impossible geometry of her body was—if anything—more extreme than he remembered: the wide shelf of her breasts, the lean athlete’s muscle, the sweep of her hair tied up in a careless, perfect knot.

Her eyes went wide when she saw him, and the hand holding the apricot froze mid-bite.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Erin said. She sounded more exasperated than surprised, but he saw the dark green blush start at the base of her neck and work its way up. “You yanked me out of breakfast! I’m going to assume it’s an emergency. Or are we just at the phase where I come running every time you want to see me naked?”

He opened his mouth to reply, but the words didn’t come. She kept going, voice climbing with each sentence.

“You want to try again?” she said, using the apricot as a pointer. “Because I’ve been sitting on something since Laura talked to me two days ago, so you’re going to shut up and let me finish.” She took a deliberate bite, chewed, and swallowed. “Ereshkigal. The debt. The part where you and Laura and Claire apparently decided that was a you-three situation and the rest of us could just—what, find out eventually? Or not at all?”

She turned the apricot over in her hand, not looking at him. “I could have done something, Andy. Maybe not fixed it, but something. You made us waste days. That’s all I’m saying.”

He was supposed to fire back, or at least give her a reason to escalate. Instead, he just stood there in the ring of arches, his expression glassy, the hand not on the stone balled into a fist so tight it looked bloodless.

Erin waited a beat. Two. She looked at him, defiant, but saw something in his face and her expression changed. She exhaled, let her shoulders drop, and set the fruit aside on a mossy ledge. “What happened?” She said, this time without an edge.

He looked at her, and in that look there was the whole of it: the horror, the confusion, the certainty that nothing in the world could fix what was broken. He tried to find a joke, and came up empty.

“Nothing,” he managed. “Just needed a minute. Didn’t mean to—” He trailed off, the rest unsayable.

She stared at him, the switch from attack to defense complete. “Are you hurt?”

He shook his head.

“Is it Laura?”

He shook his head again, slower this time.

“Is it—” She caught herself, the rest of the question vanishing. Erin was not a woman who asked for details unless she could actually do something about them. She closed the gap between them, reached for his hand, and folded it into hers. Her palm was cool and dry. “You could have just sent Mildred,” she said, voice dry but not unkind.

He managed a thin smile. “Would have, if I’d thought of it.”

She huffed, not quite a laugh, and drew him down to sit with her on the moss at the center of the ring. She leaned her back against one of the upright stones, the texture rough and ancient against her skin, and he sat beside her, close but not touching, shoulders almost lined up.

They sat in silence for a long stretch, neither in any hurry to fill it. The sun moved behind a cloud, and the whole ring turned green and dim and a little cold. Andy didn’t move. He didn’t even seem to notice the temperature change.

Erin watched him out of the corner of her eye, then brought the apricot to her mouth and took another bite. The juice ran down her chin and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. After a while, she said, “You want to tell me what’s going on, or you want to just sit here until your brain puts itself back together?”

He finally spoke, and his voice sounded like gravel. “Second one, please.”

She nodded. “Cool. I’ve got nowhere else to be.” She tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and let the world shrink down to just this: the rough press of the stone, the slow throb of sunlight, the presence beside her that had once been the only thing keeping her upright.

They sat that way for a while. When the sun came back, it lit up the ring so that the green of the moss was so vivid it seemed to shine. Erin dug her heels into the ground, stretching her legs out. Andy sat with his head down, elbows on his knees, staring at the ground as if it would offer up the words he couldn’t find.

She didn’t touch him. She didn’t offer comfort, because she knew that was not what he needed. He needed company, not consolation, so she just sat, and after a while, the worst of the shaking seemed to leave him. At that point, Erin was the first to break the silence, which made sense, because she was never good at holding it for long if she thought it could be put to work.

“You know,” she said, glancing at the spot of apricot juice drying on her thumb, “if this is how you start every morning now, I’m going to have to file a complaint. I don’t mind being naked in the woods, but next time you could at least let me finish breakfast.”

He almost replied, but she cut him off with a hand. “Don’t say ‘sorry.’ You wouldn’t mean it.”

He shrugged, the smallest motion.

She grinned, teeth showing. “That’s more like it.”

She wiped her hand on the moss, picked at a bit of lichen, then gestured at the ring. “So, are you going to tell me what’s going on, or is this just going to be an extended mute panic attack?”

He looked up, finally, and said, “It’s not—panic. I just couldn’t do the Archive anymore. Not after what Claire said.”

She nodded, filing that away. “You want me to go get her? Or Laura? Or whoever you’re supposed to talk to about feelings?”

He shook his head. “It’s not them I wanted.”

She absorbed that without blinking, then said, “Copy. I’ll put that in your permanent record.”

He managed half a smile. “Thank you.”

She nudged him with her knee, careful and not at all flirty, just a tap to remind him that she was real and there and not going anywhere. “If you ever want to tell me about it,” she said, “you can. If not, you don’t have to. But don’t make me have to guess if you’re going to combust, because I’d rather avoid the cleanup.”

He gave a short laugh, the sound rusty and unfamiliar. “I’ll try not to combust.”

She studied him. “You want to hear something funny?”

He looked over, skeptical.

She said, “The jasmine came in overnight along the east arch. I didn’t plant that much, but now it’s everywhere.” She pointed. “That patch by your shoe? I had to fight to get the roots down, but now they’re choking out the wisteria. It’s a disaster. I had to have a very stern talk with it yesterday.” She said it with the seriousness of a NASA engineer describing a problem with a heat shield.

He followed her gaze, took in the overgrown white blooms, the way the vines tangled and snaked up the stone like they owned it.

She said, “What would you do about it? Pull the jasmine, or just let it go and see who wins?”

He hesitated, then said, “Let it go. The system will reach equilibrium eventually.”

She grinned, wide and sharp. “Answered like a true engineer. That’s what I thought, with the addition of some direct finance to both misbehavers. Claire wanted me to chart the growth and decide if it was ‘self-sustaining’ or if the wisteria would need intervention. I told her the wisteria can fend for itself, it’s been here for a million years and it's very confident in its resilience. But she said the jasmine is an invasive species.”

He shrugged. “Depends on what you want the ring to be. If you want it wild, let it go. If you want a certain look, you have to fight it every day.”

She eyed him sideways. “Now apply that to whatever’s eating you, genius.”

He snorted, but there was a little light behind it now.

They sat for a minute, the argument hanging in the air like smoke.

Erin said, “Actually, there's something with which you could help. There’s a bird nesting where I really, really don’t want it. It shits all over the gate. You got a solution for that?”

He blinked. “You could block the nest for a day or two, see if it moves.”

She shook her head, “Tried that. It just waits me out.” She eyed him. “You could climb up there and get the nest, but you’d probably feel bad after.”

He thought for a second, then said, “Leave it until the eggs hatch. Once the chicks are out, they’ll move on.”

She scowled, but it was an exaggerated thing, more theater than reality. “So basically you’re saying do nothing and hope for the best.”

He shrugged again, but this time it was with a little more weight behind it. “Most problems fix themselves if you give them time.”

She raised an eyebrow, let the retort dangle, then grinned. “You know, for someone who can’t get his own head straight, you give pretty good advice.”

He nodded, and this time the air around them felt lighter, less crowded.

She glanced down at the hand she still held in his, then let it go, dusting her palms on her knees. “See? Now you’re not vibrating like you’re about to explode. I knew I could fix you.” She leaned her head back against the stone, closed her eyes. “You want me to kiss you, or is that going to make it worse?”

He laughed, the real thing. “Go ahead,” he said. “It can’t get worse.”

She climbed into his lap in one practiced motion, straddling him, the mint green of her skin vivid against the black of his shirt and the moss below. Her breasts—perfect, weighty, two impossible hemispheres—rested against his chest, and her hair fell in a lazy fan over her shoulder.

She kissed him, slow at first, then with more pressure, her tongue slipping into his mouth with a certainty that said she had done this a thousand times and would do it a thousand more. She kept one hand on his face, fingers at his jaw, the other on his chest, holding him in place.

He responded, at first out of muscle memory, then because the taste of her was sharp and bright and so unlike anything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. He put his hands on her waist, the muscle there hard and alive under his fingers. She moved against him, slow and deliberate, grinding in tiny circles until he was hard under her, one hand grabbing his butt, the bulge of his cock pushing up against the warm, slick skin between her thighs.

Groped the Master’s Ass! +1 VP
Ground against the Master! +1 VP

She reached between them, took him out, and lined up, pressing the head of his cock to her opening. She moved slow, taking him inch by inch, eyes locked on his the whole time. When she was fully seated, she exhaled, the sound low and almost a growl.

He moved his hands to her hips, but she caught his wrists and pinned them against the stone behind him. “Nope,” she said, voice soft but unyielding. “I’m running this one.”

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

She rocked on him, keeping the pace slow and relentless, squeezing with her muscles every time she lifted off, then sinking down again. Each time his focus slipped, each time his eyes glazed or flicked to the horizon, she stopped, held his face, and pulled his gaze back to hers.

“Right here,” she said, more than once. “Stay with me, Andy.”

He tried. The sensation was overwhelming—her heat, her grip, the way her body was tuned to his like they had been made as a single system. The slow drag of her pussy, the way her breasts brushed his chest, the faint salt of sweat on her collarbone—every detail anchored him to the world, forced him to be present.

When he was close, she let him speed up, let him thrust into her, but she never let go of his face. When he came, it was with a force that made him shudder, and the pulse of it inside her triggered her own climax. She gasped, bit his shoulder, and squeezed down on him so hard he thought for a second he might pass out.

They stayed like that for a few minutes. Erin’s chest still heaved in the afterglow, and Andy stared up at the wisteria canopy, his vision pulsing with every heartbeat. The world felt thinner here, like anything extra would tip it over. Their sweat was cooling in the breeze, and Andy noticed for the first time how silent the ring had become. Even the birds seemed to have taken a break, as if the gravity of what had just passed between them—physical and otherwise—had pressed the air flat. He almost spoke, almost reached for her hand, but Erin slid off his lap and flopped down beside him, her legs still tangled with his.

She propped herself up on her elbows and for a while just let the dew dry on her skin. He wondered if he looked as undone as she did.

He waited for her to make a joke, or to launch into the next topic, or to tell him to get dressed before someone walked by. But she didn’t. She just let the silence stand. It was uncharacteristic, and that was how he knew she was thinking.

Eventually, she lowered herself so that her head lay in his lap, looked up at him, and asked, “You want to talk about it?”

Lap pillow! +1 VP

He didn’t answer right away. She didn’t push. After a while, he said, “Claire figured it out.”

Erin didn’t move. “What?”

He kept his eyes up on the sky. The vines above them wove together in a way that should have blocked out the light, but they didn’t. Sunlight knifed through the gaps, leaving little white explosions of glare on the ground. “What’s happening,” Andy said. “The flare-ups, the bond, all of it. How you can talk to plants now, why they obey you. Why Dawn glows sometimes. How I brought back Marissa's parents lay night. It’s not random. It’s accelerating. It’s—” He trailed off, searching for the word, more aware now than ever that the right word meant everything. “It’s building toward something.”

She made a sound that was half-sigh, half-laugh. “Like what, a panic attack with a kill screen?”

He almost smiled, and then wondered if that was the point of her joke. “Like godhood,” he said.

She snorted, sharp. “You, a god? I’ve seen you try to open a bag of chips.”

He didn’t take the bait. “I’m serious. The last two flare-ups weren’t just me. Marissa’s parents, in Manhattan—that was real, Erin. They were dead, but I… I summoned them. I made it happen without even meaning to. And before that, the shot glass for Norah. I created something from nothing. It’s spreading. Claire thinks the bond is a channel. The more this grows in me, the more it ripples out to the rest of you.”

She opened her mouth, and he could see the joke forming—the eyebrow already arching, the corner of her lip already pulling. Then she looked at him. Really looked. The joke didn’t come. She set it down somewhere and left it there.

She sat up slowly, her elbows coming off the moss, and studied his face the way she might study a lock she wasn’t sure she could pick. The hunter’s focus came in behind her eyes, quiet and methodical, already sorting through implications before she’d even finished accepting the premise.

He nodded, slow. “That’s what she thinks. And there’s no way to undo it, or prevent it from happening to you.”

Erin was silent for a long time, her brow furrowed, lips pressed thin. She picked a blade of grass, split it down the center with her thumbnail, then set it aside. “You’re not making this up, are you,” she said, not a question.

He shook his head.

She pulled her knees up, chin resting on them. “Is it certain,” she said, “or just a theory?”

He said, “It’s an extrapolation. But it’s backed by every event in the log. And Arabella’s stories. She’s telling me about her life, her previous identities. Teaching me lessons, in the meantime.”

She pressed her lips together, thinking. “So in a few days, when the Ereshkigal thing goes down, if you go through with it—”

He finished for her. “We all do. Together.”

She sat with that, the words turning over in her mind, until she was sure she’d found the edge of the problem. “Is there any version where you can stop it?”

He didn’t answer for a long time, then said, “If I back out, maybe. Or if I don’t find the First Gate. But Claire thinks if I go through with it, it could be the loophole we’re looking for. And if I don’t, this might mean that Laura dies. For good.”

Erin let that hang in the air, then lay back down flat, arms out at her sides as if she was making a snow angel in the moss. “That’s a hell of a thing,” she said. She didn’t sound afraid, only a little tired. “You think it’ll hurt?”

Andy shrugged, and the movement felt strange, his body both heavier and lighter than it had been minutes ago. “I don’t know.”

She considered that, eyes on a cluster of white flowers overhead. “You want to know what I think?” she asked.

He did, very much, but couldn’t say so out loud.

She took his silence as assent. “I think you’re looking at it backward. When have any of us not been remade by this place? Look at me: I came in here thinking I was a normal person, got turned into a nudist, then into a plant, and now I’m a walking nude scene with a body type that doesn’t exist on any planet. Emi was an illustrator, and now she’s the six-armed descendant of a goddess. Claire never even made eye contact before this, and now she’s a mute catgirl running the math for the gods. Even Arabella—she’s been through how many versions of herself? And she still pulls it off.”

Erin shifted her head so she could see his face. “You know what makes you different from the others?” she said.

He shook his head.

“You didn’t want any of this, but you’re still trying. Most people would give up, or try to break the game, or want to abuse their gifts, or burn the place down. You’re trying to win it. You've been trying to keep all of us together since the beginning. I think that’s why you get to decide what happens at the end.”

He said, “I’m not sure if I want to win.”

She reached for his hand, squeezed it once, then let go. “That’s the other reason.”

The sun drifted higher, the world going soft at the edges with that late-morning light that made the whole Hotel seem like a painting of itself. Andy felt the temperature shift before he saw it, the air warming enough to dry sweat where it pooled in the hollow at the base of his throat. Above them, the wisteria leaves shook in the breeze, their purple sprays dancing with every wind-ruffle, and the first real chorus of birdsong started up in the treetops beyond the arches. It occurred to him that he should probably get dressed—he could still see his cock, slack and half out of his jeans—but he hadn’t moved an inch, and neither had Erin. She was sprawled beside him, hair a tangle of red and gold, skin gleaming, and her breath was still uneven from what they’d just done.

He reached for his zipper with a kind of sheepish instinct, but she caught his hand before he could move it, pinning his wrist with two fingers and a look of mild amusement. She didn’t say anything, just shook her head, the message clear: leave it. It was the first time Andy realized how much he’d come to depend on her cues, the way she could calibrate a situation in half a glance and decide what mattered and what didn’t.

“Let’s just stay here for a second,” she said, and her voice was different—softer, or maybe just quieter than usual. “I like the moss.”

He let his body go slack against the earth, the coolness of the ground offsetting the heat everywhere else. He watched the clouds parting overhead, saw them catch on the stone arches, and tried not to count the seconds. He was so used to living at velocity—hopping from one confrontation to the next, never letting himself feel anything longer than it took to analyze and file away. This was different. Erin was different. He was grateful for her, and for the impossibility of what awaited them, and for the silence itself, which had become a kind of fragile truce between them and the rest of the world.

“You know what the funny thing is?” she said after a while. “I’ve been remade three times since I got here. Each time, I hated it at first. Each time, I found a way to survive it. You know why?”

He waited. She just rolled onto her side, propped herself on one elbow, and fixed him with those sharp, dark eyes that always made him feel like he’d just been called out in front of class.

“Because of you,” she said. “Because no matter what, you never looked at me like I was less. Or broken. Even when I turned into a fucking plant, you acted like it was normal, like it was another version of me you could still annoy or argue with or—” She broke off, laughing, the sound quick and almost ugly, but it didn’t sting. “Now you’re telling me there’s a chance I get remade again. Into something even further away from human. But you know what? I don’t care. As long as you’re there, I’ll take it.”

He didn’t have an answer for that, not one that would land without sounding pathetic or self-absorbed. He reached for her hand, squeezed it. It was the second time he’d done it, and the words came easier this time. “I love you,” he said.

She grinned, squeezed back. “You're free to be mushy. I’m supposed to be the tough one.”

He kissed her, slow and deep. When they broke apart, she pressed her forehead to his.

He kissed her, slow and deep, and she let him, then pushed back just far enough to press her forehead to his.

“Here’s the deal,” she said. “If you have to choose, you choose her. You choose Laura. And you choose the rest of us, too. I don’t care what I turn into, as long as I get to be with you, and all the others, when this is over.”

He nodded, once, hard.

She hugged him, her breasts flattening against his chest, arms tight around his shoulders. “Good,” she said. “That’s settled.”

They lay there, barely moving, listening to the Hotel come alive around them. The distant sound of water through the pipes, the heavier steps of one of the Mildreds on the garden path, the clink of glass from the far-off kitchen. Andy thought of Laura, and Claire, and Marissa, and Sam, and all the others. If they all made it through, if they all survived what was coming, he wasn’t sure he’d have the words to thank them. Maybe that was why he was thinking so hard about the moment now—about Erin’s body warm next to his, about the way she didn’t try to fix him or change the subject or even make a joke, for once.

He said, “Sometimes I just need you.”

She looked at him, and for a second there was no mask, no armor, just the girl he’d met years ago, tough and breakable and beautiful.

“Me too,” she said.

They stayed like that, in a tangle of moss and sweat and sunlight, for a long time. At some point, he closed his eyes and let himself drift—not asleep, but close enough, his mind quiet for the first time all week. Erin’s breathing slowed to a steady rhythm, and she moved only to rest her head on his shoulder, her hair spreading out in a messy halo. He wondered if she would mind if he said it again, if he whispered it against her skin until she started to believe it. But maybe she already did.

---

The Banquet Hall was never empty, but today it had the rhythm of a waiting room: people in, people out, none of them moving with urgency, as if the day itself were a kind of patient in recovery. By midmorning, a half-dozen of the women had drifted into the same gravity well at a window table: Emi, sketchbook propped on her knees and two arms fiddling with colored pencils while the other four made lazy patterns in her oatmeal; Riley, still damp from the pool, a towel around her neck like a medal of achievement; Sam, shoes up on a chair and a half-eaten roll in her hand; Liesa, notebook open, one ankle crossed over the other, her dress painted on; Myra, trailing the faint scent of tea and orange peel, her gaze somewhere in the middle distance; and Marissa, at the far end, a mug of black coffee and nothing else, her face set like she was learning to use it all over again.

The Mildreds made their rounds, dropping fresh bread and fruit and, once, a random plate of pickled herring that only Riley dared sample. There were enough extra seats for the group to keep a kind of polite sprawl, each woman with her own space but none so far apart that they couldn’t reach across if needed.

Riley was the first to break the surface. She leaned in Emi’s direction, peered at the drawing upside down, and said, “Is that me with the flaming sword, or is it supposed to be Norah?”

Emi, without looking up, used one hand to turn the sketchbook so the table could see. It was, unmistakably, a mashup: Riley’s hair, Norah's figure, Sam’s stubborn chin, all fused into a kind of archangel in running shoes, holding a sword made out of what looked like lightning and pipe cleaners.

“Both of you,” Emi said, and smiled a little, her eyes flicking up through her lashes. “It’s for Chloe. She asked for ‘a picture of all of us as superheroes,’ but I didn’t want to make it too literal.”

Sam said, “What about the second set of boobs?” Her tone was a deadpan, but the glint in her eyes was pure mischief. “Is that for aerodynamic purposes?”

Emi blushed, all six arms fluttering for a second. “It’s just—sometimes the proportions get away from me. Sorry.”

Liesa, flipping through her own notebook, said, “I like it. In Antwerp, they would put that on a wall and pay for the art.” She gave Emi a conspiratorial wink, then turned the page.

Myra, cupping her mug with both hands, didn’t try to look at the sketch. She just said, “If you’re drawing us as archangels, who’s the devil?”

The question was out, and the table went still for a heartbeat, the way it always did when someone tripped over the border between joke and prophecy.

Riley grinned. “I’d say it’s Andy, but I think he’d prefer to be the sexy henchman instead.” That got a half-laugh from Sam, who shoved a roll in her mouth to muffle the sound.

Marissa watched the whole exchange with a distant, clinical precision. She didn’t touch her coffee until the others had finished talking, and then she sipped, slow, her gaze never leaving the center of the table.

“Do you all realize,” she said, finally, “that in four days, we’re going to watch a goddess come for one of us? That it’s not even a question of if, just of who gets to say goodbye first?”

The table froze. Even the Mildred clearing plates seemed to pause, mid-sweep.

Sam put her roll down, a tiny crumb avalanche scattering onto her shirt. “I guess I hadn’t really put it like that,” she said.

Marissa set her mug down, traced a fingertip in a wet circle around its base. “I spent most of last night trying to come up with the thing to say to make this less awful. I ran through all the scripts: ‘We’ll find a way,’ or ‘It’s not over until it’s over,’ or ‘Maybe Ereshkigal has a heart buried somewhere.’ But I’m not going to say any of them.”

She looked around the table, making sure every eye (or, in Myra’s case, every ounce of attention) was on her. “I’m saying it because I don’t want to pretend we’re all okay with this. We’re not. Even if Laura acts like she is. The fact is, in a few days, unless we find the magical loophole, one of us could just be... gone. For good.”

The words dropped onto the table like a dead phone, and nobody seemed in a hurry to pick it up.

Sam was the first to try. “I’ve done the math. If anyone could rig a contest, it’s us.”

Marissa didn’t even blink. “That’s not what I’m talking about, Sam. I’m talking about what happens if we don’t win. Or if the rules change again, and none of us get a say. Have any of you even thought about what you would do, if it was you?”

Sam looked at her hands, picked at a cuticle. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’d probably panic. Or make a joke. Or both. It’s what I do.”

Riley, never one to stand on ceremony, said, “I used to think about it every day. Now? I just want the last thing I say to someone to be worth hearing. That’s enough for me.”

Liesa said, quietly, “I would want to say goodbye. But not to everyone. Some goodbyes just make it worse.”

Myra, her fingers laced tight around the cup, said, “I’d want to know it mattered. That someone would remember me. Even if it’s just a little bit.”

Emi, who had gone very still, looked at the sketchbook in her lap. Her voice was small, but clear: “I think about it all the time. But I don’t know what to do about it, except keep making things. If I disappeared, at least the drawings would stay.”

There was another long pause. Marissa took it in, then nodded, almost like she was marking down notes in her own ledger.

Myra, who read emotion by scent and pulse, said, “There’s a lot of grief at this table. It’s like a smell, or a temperature. I don’t think there’s a right answer. But I do know that none of us are carrying it alone.”

Sam, who couldn’t bear silence for long, topped off everyone’s coffee. “Okay,” she said, her voice forced-bright, “so the plan is: win the thing, break the rules, and if that doesn’t work, hold each other’s hands until the last minute.” She looked at Marissa, who raised her mug in a slow salute.

Riley pushed her towel off her shoulders, her skin prickled with goosebumps. “I’m in. But can we agree, if anyone has a genius idea for a hack or a loophole, they say it out loud? No more secrets?”

Myra said, “Deal.”

Liesa looked up, her face softer than usual. “Deal.”

Even Emi smiled. “Deal,” she echoed, the sound making her blush again.

The table didn’t go back to normal after that. The talk was quieter, more about the food and the weather, the little nothings that only mattered when you realized they might be the last things you got to say. But none of them got up to leave. Even when the next shift of Mildreds started setting the tables for lunch, the group just moved their coffee and notebooks down a seat, making room, refusing to let the day pull them apart.

Outside, the sky was still perfect, but you could smell rain coming, sharp and real.