Chapter Text
You wake up before Zayne.
The first thing you register is the ache behind your eyes— the kind that comes from staring at a screen too long, at handwriting too small, at facts that refuse to arrange themselves into anything solid.
The second thing you register is that you fell asleep at the dining table.
Your cheek is pressed against a printout of hospital transfer logs, and there's a faint indent along your jaw where the edge of the paper dug in overnight.
Your neck protests when you sit up, the same slow, cracking complaint it's given you every morning this week.
You don't remember deciding to stay up.
You remember eating dinner, if barely, and settling onto the couch with files on your lap, and waking up in the dead of night, and reading the files from Akso’s records department.
You don’t remember moving or pulling the files out of their folder or making a burnt pot of coffee.
But apparently, at some point in your hyper-focus, you’d decided to drag yourself back to the dining table— that the unidentified patients and the unknown man and the redacted status couldn’t possibly wait until morning.
The house— Zayne's house, though you've stopped mentally correcting yourself every time you think the word home— feels like it’s holding its breath around you.
Early light through the windows. The dying plant on the sill, looking marginally more dead than it did yesterday, which you choose to take as a sign.
You reach for your coffee mug out of habit before you remember it's been empty since sometime around two in the morning.
You make more.
You don't make breakfast.
You tell yourself you'll eat something later, once you've gotten through the next stack, once you've cross-referenced the transfer logs against the ambulance dispatch records one more time to make sure you're not imagining the gap you think you found last night.
Zayne finds you like that— hunched over the table, mug in hand, eyes already moving down a new page before he's even said good morning.
He doesn't say anything about your state at first.
You catch him doing his sweep anyway, the automatic doctor's assessment, taking note of the shadows under your eyes and the way your hoodie is the same one you were wearing yesterday.
"Morning," he mouths, setting a plate down beside your elbow. Toast. Eggs.
He doesn't ask if you want it.
He just puts it there, the same quiet insistence he's had since he first reappeared, and moves toward the counter.
"Morning," you say, avoiding eye contact.
He comes back a moment later and sets something else beside your mug.
Your morning pills, lined up in their little slot, untouched from yesterday's refill.
You blink at them.
"You didn't take these yesterday," he says, and it isn't an accusation. Just an observation, delivered plainly, without any weight attached, leaving you room to decide what to do with it.
"I forgot," you say, and it's true, and it unsettles you a little that it's true, because you don't usually forget.
You've gotten better at the routine of taking care of yourself in the small ways, the ways that don't require you to feel anything about it.
You take them now, dry, wincing slightly, and he doesn't comment on that either.
He sits down across from you with his own coffee and watches you for a moment before his eyes drop to the pages scattered across the table.
"Find anything new?" he asks.
You hesitate and shift your elbow slightly to cover the title at the top of one of the hospital records.
"Maybe," you say. "I don't know yet."
His lips press together.
But then he nods, and lets you keep working, and if there's a flicker of something behind his eyes— worry, maybe, or the watchfulness that comes with having found someone half-breathing in their bed once and never quite letting go of the memory— he doesn't let it become a conversation.
Not yet.
You spend the morning chasing a single thread, the same way you used to chase a scent trail on a hunt— patient, methodical, refusing to let yourself get ahead of the evidence even when every instinct wants to sprint toward a conclusion.
The unidentified patient.
Unknown Male. Approximate age 22–26. Transferred prior to identification. Redacted status.
You flick through data— cross-referencing admission times against every ambulance dispatched to the district that night, against every hospital transfer logged within a six-hour window, against the short, incomplete list of missing persons that somehow never got updated after the explosion.
Most of it goes nowhere.
You expect that by now. You've learned that most threads go nowhere, that the ones that matter usually hide behind three or four that don't, and you've stopped letting the dead ends discourage you the way they used to.
Then you find something that isn't nothing.
An ambulance dispatched to the scene, logged, timestamped, a unit number and a crew name attached to the call.
No patient listed on arrival at Akso.
You check it twice, then three times, cross-referencing the unit number against every hospital in the district in case the transfer simply went somewhere else.
Nothing.
The ambulance exists. The dispatch exists. The crew exists, named and accounted for in payroll records you probably shouldn't have access to but do, courtesy of whatever Xavier's already sent you.
The patient does not.
You sit back from the table, your pulse picking up in the way it always has when you find a thread that refuses to make sense the easy way.
You keep going.
You find a second discrepancy an hour later, buried in the security footage timestamps from Akso's own intake log— a full nine minutes unaccounted for between when a patient is logged as admitted and when the corresponding security camera actually shows them being wheeled through the doors.
Nine minutes.
Long enough for someone to be somewhere else first.
You write it all down, methodical, refusing to let your hands shake even though something cold is climbing steadily up your spine with every new gap you uncover. By early afternoon you've found four separate inconsistencies, each small enough to dismiss on its own, damning together in a way that makes your stomach twist.
And then you find the missing page.
You almost don't notice it at first— the transfer log jumps from page fourteen straight to page sixteen, no page fifteen anywhere in the digital file, no note indicating it was ever scanned in the first place.
You go back through everything Xavier sent, searching for it specifically.
It isn't there.
Not misfiled. Not corrupted. Simply absent, the same way the eleven minutes of hallway footage outside your own apartment had been absent, clean and total and utterly deliberate.
Someone removed it.
You stare at the empty space where page fifteen should have been.
Not a scanning error.
Not a corrupted file.
Someone had taken the time to remove exactly one page.
Not enough to draw attention.
Just enough that anyone reading quickly would never notice the numbering skipped ahead.
You notice anyway.
Your thumb taps once against the edge of the desk.
Then again.
Someone wanted this buried.
Not the explosion.
Not the investigation.
This.
The thought settles somewhere deep in your chest, heavy enough that you can't immediately decide whether it feels like hope or dread.
Because buried things can still be dug up.
Your phone vibrates across the table and you flinch hard enough that your coffee sloshes over the rim of the mug.
Xavier.
You answer before it can ring a second time.
"Hey."
Xavier's face resolves on the screen, and you know before he says a word that whatever he's about to tell you isn't going to make any of this feel better.
He doesn't bother with a greeting.
"I checked into those files you asked about."
Something in his voice makes you sit up straighter.
"And?"
"I hit a wall."
You frown.
"You?"
He gives a short nod.
"I thought the records were just archived somewhere else. They weren't. I tried pulling the originals."
You can see his chest rise and fall with a sigh through the screen.
"They're sealed."
"Sealed how?"
"Higher clearance than I have," he says, and there's something tight in his expression you haven't seen from him before, not even in the bunker, not even standing over two dead men with a gun in his hand. "I tried three different access routes this morning. All of them dead-ended the same way. Whatever's in that page, it's locked down above my level. Above Jenna's level, probably."
"That shouldn't be possible," you say. "You're an active Hunter. She's a captain."
"I know," Xavier says. "That's what worries me."
You sit with that for a long moment, the phone warm in your hand, the pages spread across the table suddenly feeling less like evidence and more like something with teeth.
"Someone with real authority buried this," you say slowly, thinking it through as you speak. "Not Umbra. Umbra doesn't have clearance inside the Association's own systems."
"No," Xavier agrees. "They don't."
Neither of you says the next part out loud. You don't have to. It sits there in the silence between you, the shape of a much larger and much more frightening question than the one you started with.
"Be careful," Xavier says finally. "I mean it. Whatever this is, it's bigger than a rogue trafficking ring. I don't want you touching anything else until I understand who's actually locking these doors."
"Okay," you say, though you both know it isn't really a promise.
He ends the call, and you sit there for a while with your coffee gone cold and your hands not quite steady, and something inside you that's been quiet for months— quiet since before the explosion, if you're honest, quiet since long before that— finally, finally sits up and takes notice.
Someone buried the truth.
Which means the truth is worth burying.
Which means it exists.
You feel it the way you used to feel the start of a real hunt, the moment a trail stopped being cold and started being warm, the old sharp clarity you thought you'd lost somewhere in the rubble along with everything else.
For the first time since Caleb died, you're not moving because grief is chasing you. You're moving because you're chasing something.
It feels different in your chest. Less like drowning. More like teeth.
You get up and clear an entire section of the living room wall, and by the time the light outside starts turning gold you have names written across it in your own increasingly frantic handwriting, connected with string you dug out of a kitchen drawer, question marks scattered like static between the threads that don't yet connect to anything.
Songbird.
Swallow.
Umbra.
Gaia Research Center.
The missing page.
Caleb's phone records.
You don't notice the hours passing.
You don't notice your stomach, which has stopped complaining somewhere around noon and settled into the flat, distant hum of hunger you've learned to ignore.
You don't notice, until the front door opens and closes with more force than it usually does, that it's evening, and that Zayne is standing in the doorway of the living room looking at the wall like it's a wound.
"Hey," you say, not quite looking away from the string in your hands.
He doesn't answer right away.
You feel it before you see it— the shift in the air, a kind of stillness that means he's examining something and doesn't like what he's finding. You turn, finally, and follow his gaze around the room.
The files, spread everywhere, spilling off the dining table onto the floor. The lunch plate you don't remember him leaving this morning, untouched, the eggs gone cold and rubbery hours ago. The pill dish, empty this time, at least, but sitting exactly where he left it, meaning you took this morning's dose and forgot the evening one entirely.
His eyes come back to you last.
"When was the last time you ate?" he asks, and his expression is careful in a way that means he already suspects the answer and is bracing for it anyway.
You open your mouth to answer.
Nothing comes.
You genuinely don't know. You remember the toast this morning, half of it, maybe. You don't remember anything after that.
"I don't know," you admit, and something in his face does a small, controlled thing at the honesty of it, like he'd rather you lied and he could have argued with the lie instead of sitting with the truth.
"Okay," he says, and moves toward the kitchen, already reaching for something, already trying to fix the immediate problem how he fixes every immediate problem— methodically, without fuss.
You should let him.
You don't.
"I don't need you to make me a plate right now, Zayne," you say, and it comes out feeling sharper than you mean it to, the frustration of the last hour still sitting close to the surface. "I need to finish this section before I lose the thread."
He stops in the kitchen doorway.
"The thread will still be the same in twenty minutes," he says. "Your blood sugar won't."
"That's not the point."
"It's exactly the point." He turns to face you fully now, and you can see him choosing his next words carefully, the way he does when he's trying not to say the wrong thing and already sensing it might come out wrong anyway.
"You've barely slept. You forgot your medication. You've eaten half a piece of toast in the last twenty-four hours. I'm not trying to control what you're doing. I'm asking you to take care of yourself while you do it."
"I am taking care of myself."
"You're not," he says, and it isn't unkind, but it isn't soft either. "You're doing exactly what you did before. The investigation instead of sleep. The investigation instead of food. You did this the last time too, right before—"
He stops himself.
You already know how the sentence ends.
Right before the bunker.
"Don't," you say, and your voice cracks slightly around the word, more warning than request. "Don't compare this to that."
"I'm not comparing the outcome," he says, careful, measured, though you can hear something straining underneath the careful part now, something he's working hard to keep contained. "I'm comparing the pattern. You disappear into something when it hurts too much to feel anything else. I recognize the pattern because I watched it happen once already, and I don't—" His jaw works. "I don't want to watch it happen again."
"This isn't the same," you say. "I'm not spiraling. I found something real, Zayne. Someone sealed a page of hospital records with clearance higher than Jenna has. That's not grief talking. That's an actual lead."
"I believe you found something," he says. "I'm not disputing that. I'm telling you that you can pursue a lead and also eat dinner. Those aren't mutually exclusive."
"Then let me finish this section and I'll eat."
"You said that hours ago about the last section."
You didn't.
You're fairly certain you didn't, though the honest truth is you can't actually remember what you said several hours ago, which is itself not a great sign, and some small, exhausted part of you knows that even as the rest of you keeps pushing forward anyway.
"I have a lead that might actually tell us who killed Caleb," you say, and your voice is rising now, the frustration from the whole day finally finding somewhere to go. "Forgive me for not stopping every two hours for a meal plan."
Something flickers across his face, quick and sharp, gone before you can fully read it.
"That's not fair," he says slowly.
"None of this is fair."
"No," he agrees. "It isn't. But I'm not asking you to stop looking. I would never ask you to stop looking. I'm asking you to stop destroying yourself while you do it."
"I'm not destroying myself."
"You are," he says, and for the first time all evening his composure actually cracks, just slightly, just enough to let something raw show underneath it. "You're exhausting yourself into the ground the same way you did before, and I watched what that led to last time, and I can't— " He stops and takes a deep breath, adjusting his glasses like an anxious habit.
"I can't just stand here and say nothing."
You hear it as an order.
You know, somewhere underneath the anger, that it isn't meant as one. But it lands like one anyway, the way things do when you're this tired and this raw and this close to a truth you've been chasing for months.
Stop looking.
Let it go.
Forget Caleb.
"Everyone else gets to move on," you say, and your voice is shaking now, not with sadness but with something harder, something that's been building since the first missing page.
"Xavier moved on. Rafayel moved on. You've got your surgeries and your patients and your whole life just keeps going, and Caleb doesn't get any of that. He doesn't get to move on. He's just gone, and someone did that to him on purpose, and I finally have a real thread to pull, and you're standing there telling me to eat dinner like that's supposed to matter more."
"That's not what I—"
"I'm not giving this up," you say, cutting him off, the words coming faster now, less controlled. "I don't care if it takes another six months. I don't care if I have to sleep four hours a night for the rest of the year.”
You take a shaky breath. “I owe him this. I owe him an answer. And I'm not going to sit here and let you talk me into forgetting that just because it's inconvenient for you to watch."
The room goes very quiet.
You watch something happen behind his eyes— not anger, though you half expect anger, half brace for it. Something closer to pain. Something old.
"I'm not asking you to forget him," he says, and his expression has gone very careful, the way it goes when he's holding something back with real effort. "I would never ask you to forget him. I loved him too."
"Then why does it feel like you're trying to stop me?"
"Because I already lost him," Zayne says, and something in the plainness of it, the total lack of performance in it, makes your chest go tight. "I lost him fifteen years before the explosion took him for good. I spent that entire time regretting it. And then I came back, and I found you instead, half-dead on a bathroom floor, and I—" He stops and presses his palm flat against his own sternum, like he's trying to hold something in that wants very badly to come out.
"I almost lost you too. Twice. And I don't know how to watch you walk back toward the edge of that again without saying something."
"I'm not walking toward an edge," you say. "I'm walking toward answers."
"You don't see the difference right now," he says. "I understand that. I've seen it before, in patients, in myself. When you're this deep into something, it stops feeling like danger and starts feeling like purpose. That doesn't mean it isn't dangerous."
Your lips press together in a thin line.
Zayne doesn't move.
Neither do you.
You realize your hands are shaking around the folder in your grip.
Whether from exhaustion or anger, you aren't sure anymore.
"You don't understand," you snap, and the words come out before you can stop them, sharp and final. "You don't understand what it's like to have the one person who's supposed to answer for this just disappear into sealed files and dead ends while everyone else tells you to slow down, to rest, to eat, like any of that matters more than knowing why he died."
You expect him to argue.
He doesn't.
The words hang between you longer than you expect them to and you want to pull them back almost immediately.
Not because you believe them.
But because of the way his face changes.
Something shutters behind his eyes instead— quick, total, the same careful closing-off you've seen exactly twice before.
Once, in his office, when you asked about the years he was gone and he crossed out three answers before giving you a fourth that still wasn't the whole truth.
And once, just days ago, when you asked him what he was the healthy plant for and his face fell like an avalanche and he said he had surgeries and left before you could ask again.
"You're right," he says, and his expression has gone flat in a way that scares you more than shouting would have. "I don't understand what it's like to lose someone that way and have no answers for years."
Something in how he says it— years, not months, not the weeks since the explosion, but years, plural, a number that doesn't belong to Caleb at all— catches wrong in your chest, and you almost ask.
You almost ask what he means.
But he's already turning away, already reaching for his sleeve and rolling it down over his wrist with quick, deliberate movements, the same gesture you've watched him make a dozen times now whenever the scars threaten to come up in conversation and he decides, every time, that they won't.
"I need air," you say instead, because the alternative is standing here and saying something even worse, something you won't be able to take back. "I'm going for a walk."
"It's getting dark."
"I know how to take care of myself, Zayne."
The words land harder than you mean them to. You see them land. You don't take them back.
You grab your jacket off the hook by the door and you leave, and he doesn't follow you, doesn't call after you down the hallway, and some small, ugly part of you is almost disappointed that he doesn't.
The city outside is cooling into evening, streetlights beginning to flicker on in that uneven, staggered way they always do, and you walk without any real destination, just the need to put distance between yourself and the wall of string and names and the look on Zayne's face when you told him he didn't understand.
You don't decide to walk toward the memorial.
Your feet just take you there anyway, without your permission, some old gravitational pull you've never quite figured out how to resist.
It's small. A modest stone plaque set into the sidewalk near the edge of what used to be Grandma Josephine's street, listing names of people the city decided were worth remembering after the explosion.
Caleb's name is near the bottom, the letters still sharp-edged, not yet worn soft by weather the way the older ones are.
You sit down on the curb across from it, arms wrapped around your knees, and you let yourself finally feel the exhaustion you've been outrunning all day.
You think about Zayne's face. About the word years. About the way he rolled his sleeve down like he was closing a door.
You think about what he said— I already lost him fifteen years before the explosion took him for good— and wonder, distantly, disloyally, whether some part of tonight wasn't actually about Caleb at all, but about something older, something Zayne carries that he's never once let you see the shape of.
You think, too, about whether he's right.
Whether you are heading toward an edge, the same one you stood on once already, whether the sharp clarity you felt at the dining table this afternoon was purpose or just another way of running from the same grief that's been chasing you since the rubble.
You don't know.
That's the worst part. You genuinely don't know, and the not knowing sits heavier in your chest than either version of the truth would.
You sigh and rest your chin atop your knees, staring at the plaque until Caleb’s name blends in with the rest.
“I miss you,” you say quietly, and something about saying it out loud makes your throat tighten.
But the tears never come. And you’re not sure whether to be grateful or upset about it.
Either way, the sun is almost fully gone now. So you get up from the curb across from Caleb's name, brush off your jeans, and start the long walk back.
You don't have an answer. Not about whether tonight's fight was fair, not about whether Zayne is right that you're heading somewhere dangerous, not about what he meant by years and why saying it seemed to cost him more than anything else he said all evening.
You just know you're tired in a way sleep won't fix, and that you don't want to be out here anymore, and that somewhere underneath the anger you're still carrying, there's a small, quiet hope that the house will still feel like somewhere you're allowed to come back to.
It's fully dark by the time you let yourself in.
The house is still. Dim, except for the low light over the stove. You stand in the entryway for a moment, listening with your eyes the way you've learned to, studying the room before you commit to walking further into it.
No Zayne on the couch. No light under his bedroom door that you can see from here.
He's asleep, or trying to be.
You almost feel the disappointment of it— some part of you had wanted him to be awake, waiting, so you could either apologize or fight again, anything but this quiet, unfinished silence hanging in the air between two people who said too much and not enough at the same time.
Then you see the stove.
A plate, covered with foil, sitting on the back burner with the small blue pilot light glowing faintly beneath it, keeping it just barely warm. You lift the foil carefully.
Dinner. The kind he makes without thinking twice about it now, plated the way he always plates things, careful and precise even when he's clearly furious with you.
He stayed up.
You can tell by the state of the kitchen— everything washed and put away except this one plate, left deliberately warm, waiting for you to come home whether or not either of you had resolved anything.
He must have finally given up and gone to bed, unable to wait any longer, but not before making sure you'd have something to eat when you walked back in.
You stand there for a long moment, the foil crinkling faintly in your hand, and something in your chest that's been clenched tight since the fight finally, quietly, gives way.
He never stopped caring. Not even furious. Not even hurt by something you said and clearly meant to sting.
You sit down at the counter, alone, and you eat, slow and careful, tasting it properly for what feels like the first time all day.
You think about the word years again.
You think about tomorrow, and whether either of you will know how to start the conversation you both left unfinished tonight.
Maybe there isn't a clean answer.
But sitting here in the quiet kitchen with a plate he kept warm for you, you're reminded of something else you've learned today.
Buried things can still be found.