Sarah knocked on his door at seven in the evening.
This was one knock. Deliberate. The kind that communicated: when you're ready, not now if you're busy.
He opened it. She had a small box in her hand and the expression of someone who had been preparing for a conversation and was ready to have it.
"Come in," he said.
"Other way," she said. "My apartment."
Zeph wasn't shocked.
He had told her about the fragments at rest over text and she had told him she will get back to him.
He followed her few doors down. CV on his shoulder, wings folded, the settled weight of something that had been in this corridor enough times to have stopped cataloguing the journey.
Her apartment was warm in the way it was always warm. The alien-script item on the shelf. The pre-System documents on the table from the evening's research. Tea already made, which meant she had been expecting this to take time.
