Page 65 of Guardian of Exile

Where are you two?

Evra’s reply of Why are you texting him and not me? beat Morgen’s reply of At the movies by half a second.

She responded to Evra first: Because since you got a phone, you have done nothing but bitch about how much you hate phones.

To Morgen she wrote: You shouldn’t be texting during films.

Evra: The screens are too small and I must frequently correct the system’s attempts to change my wording.

Morgen: It just ended. What’s up?

Nyx to Evra: Predictive text⁠—

—or whatever it was in coding that made your phone change the words you’d actually typed into the words it was convinced you’d meant to type⁠—

—sucks.

Nyx to Morgen and Evra in group text: Can you come back? Tristen’s finally ready to leave.

Morgen: On it.

Nyx: Could you get Kaden to come back too?

Evra: Where is he?

Nyx: His word was, and I quote, “Out”.

Evra: Eyeroll emoji. She actually typed this out as two words, as neither Nyx nor Morgen had managed to get it through her head that emojis should be sent as actual pictures instead of texting a description of the expression in question. It wasn’t that Evra didn’t understand emojis existed, it was more that she took issue with the ambiguity involved in the visual interpretation of them.

Morgen sent back the actual eyeroll emoji, then: We’ll find him.

They did not find Kaden for four hours, and only then because he returned on his own. After Morgen had called him, to no answer, Kaden had ditched his phone because he was smart enough to know that Morgen was smart enough to figure out how to track it. After that, there was really nothing to do but wait. When he finally walked in, it was carrying two nondescript shopping bags.

“We sat around for four hours so you could go shopping?” Tristen asked.

Nyx wondered where Kaden had even gotten money. All of his assets had been seized by the Council after the Harvester had gone missing. She was sure—well, she hoped—Jevryn paid him for working for him, but it wasn’t like he could have a bank account given his current status as a wanted fugitive. If he had physical money lying around somewhere, he hadn’t asked the Station to convert any of it to US bills, and when Nyx had tried to give him money when they’d left the Station—because she’d given everyone money so they would have resources in the unlikely event someone became separated from the rest of the group—he’d refused to take it.

Kaden gave Tristen the kind of direct stare that made most people uncomfortable. “We sat around for four days so you could drag your feet, didn’t we?”

Nyx suddenly wondered if the number of hours Kaden had been gone had symbolic significance. It would be just like him to casually say fuck you in a manner no one was likely to pick up on.

Tristen’s lips twisted. “And you couldn’t have gone shopping sometime in those four days?”

“No.”

Nyx cut in before it could go any further. “Everyone grab their stuff and let’s go.” She set off toward the bedrooms they’d been staying in. A suspicion had coalesced in her mind into a near certainty, and she didn’t know why she needed to confirm it, but she did.

When Kaden had lived in Dead Earth with her, he hadn’t been able to get legal work. She’d known he wasn’t in the country legally, and that had made work hard to find. He’d done any job he could get, and most of the time that had ended up being construction work. The kind that paid daily under the table for a fraction of what the work was worth. Most days he’d left early and come home late.

The past four days, she hadn’t seen him leave, and she hadn’t seen him come in. She’d hardly seen him at all. She slipped into his room, knowing she couldn’t be more than fifteen steps ahead of him and not caring. She spotted the laundry hamper in the same place the one in her own guest room was—next to the closet entrance—and made a beeline for it, flipping the lid open. She pulled out the top two items—a long-sleeve cotton shirt and a pair of jeans.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Kaden stood just inside the room, the shopping bags on the dresser next to him.

She had. The clothes in her hands were stiff with dried sweat and covered in concrete dust. The feel of it was so familiar that for a moment, she saw a very different apartment than the one she stood in. A much smaller, drabber one, where she’d spent a lot of time doing shit like cleaning and cooking and Kaden’s laundry, because while she’d also worked any job she could get, her mother’s Hiding had ensured she had difficulty getting them and more difficulty keeping them. She’d been a homemaker during that time more often than she hadn’t.

“If you needed something, I could have bought it. You didn’t have to do this.”

“I never minded this,” he said. “And I don’t want your money.”

“Yeah, you made that perfectly clear.” She felt something she couldn’t pin down with words, something angry and helpless. Maybe it was just that she’d been so dependent on him when they’d lived together, in more ways than one. She’d had to swallow her pride and let him pay for almost everything. Now their situations were reversed, and he wouldn’t take anything from her.

He crossed the room and took the clothes out of her hands, tossing them back in the hamper. It didn’t erase the feel of the grit on her skin or the memories it had dredged up.

“It wasn’t real,” he said softly. “It never could have been.”

She jerked back. His eyes weren’t harsh or mocking. If he’d been anyone else, she’d have called the look in them regret.

She walked out without another word.