Russet...

The world blinked and receded like a pulled curtain: one second Andy was in the Hotel’s elevator, the next he stood on a cold, wind-hammered sidewalk in Yonkers. If not for the thump of his heart, he might have doubted the transition had happened at all. He smelled exhaust, heard the doppler whine of a delivery truck a block away, and the slow, steady sweep of tires over salt-rubbed asphalt. Winter in the city was less a season and more an ongoing dare.

Sam stood next to him, hands deep in her jacket, shoulders hunched against the wind. She’d traded the island’s loose, bright clothes for her real uniform: flannel, black jeans, battered Docs, and a red beanie that might once have belonged to a twelve-year-old. It looked like it had been through a garbage disposal. She breathed hard into her fists (for show, since neither of them actually felt the cold), exhaled a visible plume, and jerked her chin at Andy. “You ready?”

“Ready for what?” he asked. The street was anonymous, a row of old brownstones that got denser as you neared the intersection. “Is this a surprise?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a ‘date’,” she said, with a smirk that meant I planned this with malice aforethought. She started walking, not waiting to see if he’d keep up.

Andy followed, matching her stride. The sidewalks here were buckled and scabbed with ice, never once properly shoveled. He wondered if this was intentional, a test to see which residents were new and which ones had grown up in terrain that meant to break you.

They turned up a narrower street and paused outside Sam’s building, a three-story brownstone that had been painted a color you’d have to call “urban resignation.” The place looked exactly like every apartment building Andy had ever visited on a college break: cracked concrete stoop, cheap buzzer array, tiny yard with a fence that wouldn’t stop a determined squirrel. Sam jogged up the steps and punched in her code. The door didn’t buzz, just made a small, asthmatic click.

Andy trailed her into the hall and up a flight of stairs that groaned with every step. On the landing, Sam reached for her pocket, then froze, patting herself down with a theatrical groan. “You gotta be kidding me,” she muttered.

“Did you forget your keys?” Andy asked. He already knew the answer.

“Did I forget my keys, he asks. Like I’m some rookie,” she grumbled. But she was already digging under the mat by the door. The spare was taped to the back in a plastic shell that once housed a novelty eraser. She peeled it off, unlocked the door, and shouldered inside.

Sam’s apartment was the architectural version of her personality: functional, unimpressed by the idea of home décor, but surprisingly orderly. Every piece of furniture had survived a previous life elsewhere, and every surface was scrubbed, not dusted. The place smelled of clean laundry and coffee. There were a few art prints on the wall, and the biggest bookshelf was devoted to the exact blend of indie comics, role-playing handbooks and engineering manuals Andy would have predicted in college.

He stepped in, took off his shoes, and set them beside the radiator. Sam’s place always ran cold. The living room was set up for one person—couch, battered coffee table, TV from a previous century—and nothing about it suggested she’d ever expected to live any other way.

Sam didn’t pause. She crossed straight to the little table by the kitchen pass-through and scooped up a set of keys from a tray. She turned back to him, let the keys dangle from her finger.

“Seriously?” Andy said, already feeling the onset of dread. “You’re not.”

She grinned. “Why else would I bring you all the way out here? Some things you can’t do by Zoom.”

“You’re going to drive us there?” he said, voice edged with real fear.

Sam popped her eyebrows. “Unless you got other plans?”

He looked at the keys, at her, and then out the frosted window at the curb. The Rust Bucket sat there, haloed by a patch of oil and a meter that only sometimes registered the correct time of day. Andy desperately told himself the Gifts made harm unlikely, even if the car exploded, but he found this didn't do much to assuage his dread.

“You know that car is a federal safety hazard, right?” Andy said. “There are lead-painted toys with higher NHTSA ratings.”

Sam scoffed, heading for the door. “I re-bled the brakes last month, thank you very much. Plus, you’re immortal now, or close enough. Haven’t followed the whole story. Worst that happens, you get some cool scars. Chicks dig scars.”

She was already down the hall by the time Andy put his shoes back on. He hurried to catch her, even though he knew she’d never actually leave him behind.

When they were both out the door, Sam paused and turned. “You got your wallet?” she asked. “If we get pulled over, you’re the one talking to the cops.”

Andy blinked, felt for the wallet in his pocket, then zipped up his coat against the wind. He fell in step behind her, as he always did, knowing full well where this was headed, and powerless to do anything but go along.

Sam led the way with the confidence of someone who’d been practicing for this exact day since they were nineteen. Andy considered, briefly, that he could fix the car with a thought, by simply changing its description in Sam’s bio with Coauthor (and that was if the strangely reticent power within him didn’t trigger by itself like it had just done with his wallet), but left it alone. He liked the ritual, the comfort of watching her do things the hard way, and trusted her, more than anyone, to get him through it alive.

They got in, and Andy braced himself.

The Rust Bucket wheezed to life with the slow, phlegmy resistance of a creature that resented all human progress. Sam adjusted the seat, gave the dash a pat, and rolled her shoulders like she was about to arm-wrestle God. Andy buckled in, and as always, the seatbelt caught three inches out and locked, refusing to budge. He wiggled it loose, braced, and gripped it with his left hand—he’d learned, long ago, that the inertia reel would give up at the worst moment, and you had to be ready to play defense.

They pulled into traffic and merged with a herd of late-model SUVs that all looked like they were on their way to eat the same small animal. Sam drove with a reckless confidence born of either a **** wish or a deep and abiding faith in the rules of turn-taking. At the first stoplight, the car shuddered and made a noise like it had swallowed a bolt.

Andy said, “I’m surprised you haven’t been arrested for vehicular endangerment.”

Sam shrugged, flipping on the left blinker. “Nobody wants to get close enough to ticket me. I’m running an immunity strat.”

“Bioterrorism is not an immunity strat.”

“If the feds can do it, so can I.” The light turned green and the car hesitated, then lurched forward like a dog that’d seen a mailman.

They wound through side streets, past a field of salt-stained crosswalks and sidewalks scored with years of freeze-thaw. Yonkers was the kind of town that never finished any of its own repairs, but insisted on ticketing you for every bent license plate. As they passed the old Catholic church, Andy said, “You ever think about moving back to Chicago?”

Sam snorted. “You homesick, or just complaining?”

“Little of both. At least back home the cold had the decency to be honest about it.”

Sam kept her eyes on the road. “New York cold is rude,” she allowed. “Chicago cold is just trying to kill you outright. I respect the transparency.”

“Exactly. None of this wet, sneaky, thirty-four-degree nonsense.”

“You'd never survive. You’re going soft, Coop.”

“I grew up in snow, Sam. I have a certificate.”

She snorted. “A certificate.”

“Metaphorically. The point stands.”

“The point is you’ve been in New York five years and you’ve forgotten how to suffer correctly.” She took one hand off the wheel to gesture at the grey street ahead, and at a woman on the corner wrapped in what appeared to be every coat she owned. “See? Proper cold suffering.”

Andy snorted. “This is nothing. This is a warm hug.”

She smiled, let it hang. The heat from the vents was all on the driver’s side, and Andy remembered how often his toes would go numb, riding into the Rust Bucket in the winter, as far back as when they were students, in Chicago. He flexed them, watching the world outside blur past, the cold sun picking out the flaws in every surface.

After a while, the road curved up, and the river appeared. The Hudson was the color of old coins, flat and iron-grey under a sky that had never heard of blue. Sam downshifted and took a right onto a gravelly little access road, then parked at the edge of a turnout that overlooked the whole sweep of water.

They sat a minute, neither moving to open the doors. Andy stared out at the chop and the sunlit silver. “You ever get tired of this view?” he asked.

“Never. This is the only place in New York where the world stops trying to sell you something.” Sam let the engine tick down to silence, then shut it off with a little ceremony. The car shuddered in protest, and Andy was fairly certain he heard something bounce off the ground.

They got out. The air up here at the overlook cut through Andy’s jeans and up his throat, but it didn’t matter—neither of them felt the cold anymore, not in any way that registered. They walked side by side to the chain-link fence guarding the edge, hands jammed in their coats, boots scrabbling for traction on the salt-glazed gravel. Sam’s gait was a little shorter than Andy’s, but he slowed enough to keep them just out of step, so their shoulders wouldn’t touch unless on purpose.

Andy studied the river below, a wide and slow-moving stretch of the Hudson that today looked like an immense flat coin, oxidized and dulled by the heavy sky. The only break in the surface was a tanker gliding downstream, and Andy watched the ship until it disappeared behind a bend. It felt like the river was full of secrets—messages sent downstream from one city to the next, coded and indecipherable, but still urgent.

“Hey, do you remember the week we met, back at UIC?” Andy asked, thinking back.

Sam kept her eyes on the river, but her mouth twisted up like she was fighting a smile. “Is that the one where you dropped coffee on my phone, then tried to fix it with a hairdryer, and the whole thing ended up melted to the countertop?”

“That was the week. But that wasn’t my fault. You left your phone right next to my cup.”

She rolled her eyes, then shrugged. “It had Tetris on it. The real kind, with the Russian music. I was defending my high score.”

Andy leaned into the fence, which flexed a little under his weight. “You were addicted. You’d sit in the study lounge, plugging away for hours, and refuse to talk to anyone.”

“It’s called focus,” she said. “And it worked. I graduated, didn’t I?” She grinned over at him, then her gaze slid off again, to the river.

He said, “You know what I really remember from that week?”

Sam looked at him sideways. “What.”

“The way you kept checking your phone. Even after it was ruined, you kept pressing the buttons like maybe it was just a bad dream and the screen would come back.”

She blew out a laugh. “It was. I’d never had a nice phone before. My parents bought it when I got into UIC. I thought it meant I’d finally made it.”

Andy nodded. “You seemed so mad at first. Or maybe just—like the universe had played another trick.”

“Both,” she said. “It’s always both.”

They stood a while longer, watching the river and the shifting clouds up above. The cold air made everything more vivid: the smell of ozone and car exhaust, the gunmetal light, the crunch of grit underfoot. Every now and then Andy’s coat would catch a gust and snap at his sides, and he’d have to stuff his hands deeper in his pockets. He never grew up from certain habits.

Sam said, “You want to know what I remember? The time you took the fall for the vending machine.”

He almost laughed, but didn’t. “You mean the Mountain Dew incident?”

She nodded, lit up by the memory. “Yeah. I was going to get written up for it. I’d finally figured out the code to get sodas for free, and some hall narc told the RA. You just confessed and said you did it, even though you hated Mountain Dew.”

“I said I did it because I didn’t want your parents getting a call from the school,” Andy said. “That, and you looked like you were about to cry.”

Sam bristled. “I don’t cry.”

He considered her a moment, then said, “You did that night, a little. But you blamed it on allergies.”

She snorted. “Spring semester in a hundred-year-old dorm with no air filter, what did you expect?”

Andy smiled at the memory, and for a minute neither of them said anything.

He thought about how, for almost a decade now, he’d been accumulating these moments—Sam’s little tells and twitches, the memories she’d never admit to out loud, the way her laughs were always loud and her silences long. Always sharp, always there, a steady presence in a life that had been far too empty, before The HH. He might not be drawn to her romantically, but he loved her deeply, like the sister he had never had. More.

He wondered if she knew that. She probably did.

They kept watching the river in silence. Andy realized that, even though he’d spent most of his life waiting for the next crisis, right now he felt nothing but momentary peace.

Sam was first to break it. “You ever think about how weird it is? That we’re still here?”

Andy tried to puzzle what she meant. “You mean—here at the overlook, or…”

“I mean, both of us. After everything. After all the times we could have blown each other up, or just quit being friends.” Her voice sounded gentler than usual, like she was trying not to spook something wild and shy.

He thought about it. “I figured you’d get tired of me eventually. Or that I’d do something so dumb you’d have to cut your losses.”

She laughed, soft and real. “You almost did. Remember sophomore year?”

Andy frowned. “Which part?”

Sam grinned. “The part where you decided, out of nowhere, to grow a mustache.”

He groaned. “God, don’t remind me.”

“You looked like you were trying to join a cult. You stuck with it for three months.”

He remembered all the ways it had gone wrong: the itching, the patchy failures, the way even his professors had commented on it. “I thought maybe I’d look older.”

Sam tilted her chin at him. “You looked like someone’s little brother playing dress up.”

She could have said anything, but she said it with warmth.

He said, “I kept it because you made fun of it less than everyone else.” He paused. “Please don’t tell Laura. I will never hear the end of it.”

She nodded as if this made perfect sense. “That’s how you know who your real friends are. They’ll roast you, but never try to make you actually stop. And they have your back.” She reached over and flicked the tip of his nose, a move so quick and unexpected he didn’t react until after.

They both looked back out at the water. The tanker had re-emerged from behind a stand of winter-stripped trees, and it was moving even slower now, carving a trail through the river’s thin skin of ice.

Andy said, “You ever miss it? College?”

Sam shrugged. “I miss the part where I didn’t know what was next, and that was enough. Now it’s just one thing after another.”

He nodded, feeling the truth of it.

“I miss being broke,” she added. “Made me creative. Now I just buy what I need. It’s boring.” She looked at him, serious now. “Statistically, we should’ve gone our separate ways after sophomore year. I didn’t have a real friend until you.” For a long second, Andy saw something in her face he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen. Vulnerability, maybe, or just honesty stripped clean.

He said, “You make it easy.”

She let that hang for a minute, then grinned. “That’s a dirty lie. I’m a pain in the ass, and you know it.”

He laughed, then tried to explain. “I mean—people are comfortable around you. You say the thing everyone else is thinking. Even when you’re savage about it.”

She said nothing for a while, just stared at the river. “Most people don’t want to hear the thing, though. They just want to keep it inside. You and me, we’re the only ones who actually say it.”

He thought about Chloe and Claire and Norah and all the others, about how none of them would ever have survived a single week without Sam.

He said, “I always want to hear the thing, Sam. It’s why you’re my best friend.”

They both grinned, and it was the kind of old, bruised laughter that could only exist between two people who’d been through the wringer together.

Sam leaned on the fence and said, “You want to know the only time you ever surprised me?”

He waited, expecting a joke.

“That tabletop game you played with my friends. The campaign I ran for nine months, and you kept saying you were too busy, and then you showed up and made a character so dumb I had to change my entire plot.” She was smiling. “You hooked up with half the party in the first hour.”

Andy protested, “That’s not how I remember it.”

“It is one hundred percent how it happened,” Sam said. “And then, when Rachel tried to seduce you in real life, you crashed my campaign, on purpose, so she’d lose interest.”

Andy stared out at the water, face red. “I was trying to be a good wingman.”

“You were a disaster,” Sam said, laughing. “But it was worth it.”

Andy let himself laugh, the sound carried off by the wind.

Sam let the silence settle, then said, “You ever wonder if things would have been different if you’d made different choices? Like, if you’d actually dated someone instead of playing den mother to every lost cause in the room?”

“I did date someone,” Andy said quietly. “But Erin and I were both not ready, back then.”

Sam smiled, one hand on the fence chain. “Yeah. But you are now, Casanova.”

Andy chuckled, then said, “I like to think so.”

Sam looked at him, soft around the edges for once. “Me too.”

They leaned there a while, watching the wind rip the top off the river. Andy’s hand was cold, so he jammed it deeper into his pocket.

Sam said, “I guess not everything changes.”

Andy tilted his head, curious.

“You’re still you,” she said. “Even now.”

He smiled, small and real. “So are you.”

She looked away, wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Alright. That’s enough sappy shit for one day.” She nudged him. “You ready to get creamed at skee-ball?”

“Only if you promise not to gloat when I lose.”

Sam grinned, mean and beautiful. “I’m making no such promise.” They walked back to the Rust Bucket, boots crunching on old salt.

Sam drove them west, through three lights and a pair of roundabouts that served no actual traffic function, and turned into a little strip mall that looked like the last place anyone would try to have fun. The arcade was wedged between a vape shop and a Subway. The sign above the door said “Pixel Palace,” the neon tubes flickering in and out on every third letter.

Andy stopped walking.

Sam stopped a half-step later, turned. “What?”

He pointed at the sign. She looked at it, and he watched her face do the same thing his had just done.

“Huh,” she said.

“Yeah.”

They stood there a second, the wind cutting between them and the door. Somewhere in the parking lot, a shopping cart rolled slowly into a curb. “Norah must’ve come here,” Sam said. “Like, actually come here.”

Andy looked at the smeared glass door, the flickering tubes. “Before all of it.”

“Same place,” Sam said, quieter. “This whole time.”

Neither of them said anything else. Sam pulled the door open, and they went in. She led him straight to the far corner, where the claw machine sat. The glass was smeared with kid prints, and the inside was a jumbled graveyard of stuffed animals, stress balls, and bootleg Pop! figures. The claw itself was bent at a weird angle, like it had been used as a nutcracker, but it still worked.

Sam cracked her knuckles and planted both palms on the glass, eyes squinting at the mess of plushes heaped under the flickering fluorescents. She made a low noise of assessment, the same one she used on broken espresso machines at the Blue Bean. “This is it,” she said. “The Kingmaker.”

Andy squinted at the interior. “You sure? Last time it ate your five and didn’t even reset the claw.”

Sam grinned, devil in the details. “That’s because I didn’t pay tribute. This thing remembers.” She reached into her pocket, pulled out a stack of quarters so thick it looked like a magician’s roll, and fed them through the slot with deliberate slowness. She checked the top of the machine for a sticker—there was one, curling at the edges, “SOLD AS IS”—then tapped the side three times, fast, like Morse code. “You gotta show it you respect the game.”

He made a face. “You know there’s no difference, right?”

“There’s always a difference,” she said. “Especially with these.” She worked the joystick once, then twice, then lifted her hand and let it hover. “It’s like old cars. You gotta coax the carburetor. Or it’ll cough up smoke and die.”

Andy watched her, fascinated by the commitment. He’d seen Sam do this dozens of times, across half a decade and three different arcades, and the ritual never changed. She’d once explained it as a combination of “physical memory and psychological warfare,” the details shifting each time she lost, but when she won she acted like the method was gospel.

She positioned the claw, never even looking at the joystick. “See, you gotta go off the drift. These things always have a left bias, probably from all the kids cranking the hell out of it for years.” She flexed her wrist. “You watch for the shadows. That’s where you get the real alignment.”

Andy couldn’t help it. “You know, if you ever applied this to something that mattered…”

She pressed the red button. The claw whirred, descended, and did the usual weak-fingered grasp at the pile. But then, in defiance of physics or at least the odds, it snagged a pink plush—a heart with arms and legs—and hoisted it straight up. The claw wobbled, but didn’t let go. Sam exhaled, slow and steady, never once betraying the tension in her jaw.

The claw dragged the heart across the void, swaying a little. It hovered over the chute and opened. The heart fell, bounced off the plastic lip, and tumbled to the bottom.

Sam didn’t celebrate. She reached into the slot, palmed the heart, and held it out to Andy. “Tribute to the king,” she said, tone even.

He blinked, then took the heart. It was soft and kind of sticky, like it had spent years picking up residue from every hand in Yonkers. “You’re not even going to keep it?”

She shrugged. “Already got one like it. You get to name this one, though.”

Andy looked at the plush. “It’s got a face,” he said. The face was embroidered in a way that suggested malice. The tongue was out, and the eyes were mismatched, one bigger than the other. “Why does it look like a serial killer?”

Sam leaned in, assessing the face. “That’s the sign of a true prize. If it doesn’t scare the shit out of you, it’s not a real winner.”

He put the heart under his arm, half-tempted to toss it, but didn’t. “Alright,” he said. “My turn?”

Sam already had another quarter in the slot. “I warmed it up for you. It’s all about momentum.” She stepped aside with a flourish, like a chess player giving up the board.

Andy took the joystick. He did what he always did: lined up a bright blue bear, double-checked the angle, and dropped the claw. It descended, wobbled, and caught nothing but air. It clanked against the glass with a sound like disappointment made physical.

Sam snorted. “You rushed it.”

He said, “That was literally the same timing as you.”

Sam shook her head. “No, no, I finessed the release. You gotta let it float, not **** it. Show some patience.”

He fed another quarter in. Same result. He tried again, now obsessively analyzing every millimeter of drift, every fake-out lurch of the cheap gears, and still came up with nothing but air. The claw machine, which had already given up its best prize to Sam, clearly had no interest in his effort.

By the fourth attempt, he’d started to take it personal.

Sam didn’t rub it in, but her eyebrows did a little “told you so” dance every time he failed. “You want a tip?” she said, already positioning herself for her next shot.

He handed her the joystick. “Go ahead. Show me how it’s done.”

Sam lined up a gaudy rainbow unicorn, double-tapped the side, and ran through her whole ritual again: the knock, the test cycle, the hover. She murmured something under her breath—he caught the words “sucker” and “last-chance”—and dropped the claw.

The unicorn was wedged between two other plushes. The claw went down, grabbed all three, and for a second looked like it would drop everything. But, just as the prizes hit the chute, the unicorn popped loose and landed, perfect, right in the claim slot.

Sam picked it up, turned it over in her hands, and grinned. “For the collection.” She didn’t offer it to him this time.

Andy shook his head, half in awe, half in defeat. “You ever think maybe you’re just a statistical anomaly?”

She put the unicorn on her shoulder, like a parrot. “I think maybe you just suck at claw machines.”

He grinned, but there was an ache to it. There were things he could do, now—abilities so far beyond human they barely registered as real—but none of them, apparently, could win him a single damn plush in a rigged box with a bent claw. It was almost comforting, the way this one tiny universe continued to defy his will.

He pushed the temptation to use Command back. He was having too much fun.

They played two more rounds, Sam narrating every step of her process, Andy determined to find the flaw in the system. He did not, and Sam’s unicorn had a twin by the time they stopped.

He finally said, “You want to get out of here?”

Sam nodded. “Let’s hit the next spot.” She tucked both unicorns under her arm, then grabbed the heart Andy had tried to leave behind and jammed it in his coat pocket.

They left the Pixel Palace, and for a moment, Andy stood in the vestibule, looking back through the glass at the flickering sign and the row of machines. He felt a weird nostalgia, a longing for the kind of future where the outcome wasn’t determined by raw power or fate, but by pure chance, or maybe just a practiced ritual.

Sam caught him staring. “You good?”

He blinked, then nodded. “Yeah. Just thinking.”

Sam rolled her eyes, but it was gentle. “If you’re having an existential crisis, save it for the bar. We got time.”

He followed her out into the cold, letting the wind bite his face. The heart plush was still in his pocket. He kept it there, just in case.