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Ren got back to the clinic after dark.
The building was quiet. He let himself in through the front, flipped the sign to closed, and stood for a moment in the reception area. The examination table was visible through the open treatment room door, the overhead light off, the room in the same state he had left it when he walked out yesterday morning. His coat was still on the hook. A half-empty coffee cup from the day before was still on the counter beside the phone.
He picked up the phone.
Seventy-four missed calls.
He stood there and scrolled through the log slowly.
Ten each from Lily, Martinez, and Lucy. The rest from various contacts.
Ah, he thought. Shit.
Lu had turned his phone off during the engagement. Chu's battery had died. Ren's phone he had simply left on the counter.
He pocketed it.
One thing at a time.
He took the elevator to the penthouse.
. . .
Lily had made food.
He didn't know when she'd had time to do it, but when she opened the door the smell came out first: rice, something with soy and ginger, the particular warmth of a kitchen that had been in use. She was still in the same clothes she had been in when he'd last seen her, which told him she had not slept.
She looked at him for a second. Her eyes moved over him quickly, checking, the same habit she had always had of not asking but needing to know anyway. Then she stepped aside and let him in without saying anything.
The penthouse was dim except for the kitchen lights. Martinez was at the table. He had a mug in front of him, both hands wrapped around it. He looked up when Ren came in, held his gaze for a moment, then looked back at the table.
Lily went back to the kitchen. A plate landed softly from that direction.
Ren sat down at the table across from Martinez.
"Hey," Ren said.
"Hey," Martinez said.
Martinez turned the mug slightly on the table. Turned it back.
"The news had it at eleven thousand," he said. "By hour nine."
"I know," Ren said.
Martinez looked at him. "We didn't know the number until the news said it. We didn't know if you were in it."
Ren held that for a moment.
"I wasn't," he said.
"I know that now."
Lily came out of the kitchen with two bowls and set them on the table, one in front of Ren and one at the empty spot beside him. She sat down. She pulled her knees up to her chest. She only did that when she was tired and had stopped pretending she wasn't.
"Eat," she said.
Ren picked up the chopsticks.
For a while none of them said anything. The food was good in the particular way of something cooked out of necessity, when the hands needed to do something and the kitchen was there. The kitchen light held the table warm while everything else in the apartment stayed dark.
Lily picked at a piece of carrot. She was watching her bowl.
"We turned on the news," she said. "Around hour three. We kept it on until the coverage stopped."
Ren set his chopsticks down.
"I didn't know you were watching," he said.
"Where else would we be?" Martinez said.
Ren looked at the table. Martinez looked back, steady.
"Okay," Ren said.
Lily reached across the table and put more rice in Ren's bowl without asking.
"You should have called us," she said. "From the field."
"There were windows," Ren said. "Between the cleanup and the domain dissolving. I should have."
"Yes."
"I didn't think—" He stopped.
"You didn't think we'd be like this," Lily said.
"I didn't think about it at all." He was quiet for a moment. "That's more accurate."
Lily nodded, as though this was the answer she had expected and had been waiting for.
Outside the penthouse windows, the city was still going. From up here you could see two districts: one ordinary and lit, the other dark at the edges where the cleanup was still ongoing. The line between them was visible even at this height.
"There are a lot of calls on that phone," Martinez said.
"Seventy-four."
"People don't call seventy-four times for someone they're not worried about."
Ren looked at the table.
He knew this. He had known it for some time, logged and acknowledged and not given much weight.
Lu Changcheng, whose care came through logistics and infrastructure. The Abominations, bound to him through something without a clean name. Lucy, who had been under a boulder for thirty-seven hours and still had energy to be furious.
And Lily's food. Martinez's hands around a mug that had gone cold because he had stopped drinking when the news started.
"I'm sorry," Ren said.
It came out without preamble.
Lily looked at him. She didn't say anything for a moment, sitting with it.
She reached over and put her hand briefly over his on the table, then took it back.
"Don't do it again," she said.
"I'll set up a check-in system."
"That's not what I—" She stopped. "Okay. Also that."
Martinez picked up his mug, found it cold, and stood to go heat it. The microwave ran for thirty seconds. When he came back he sat down and wrapped both hands around it again.
"You've been here almost a year," he said.
Ren looked at him.
"Since the clinic opened," Martinez said. "I've been trying to figure out if you know that people notice when you're not around." He looked at his mug. "I don't think you do."
Ren was quiet.
"You know it factually," Martinez said. "You just don't feel the weight of it." He glanced up. "That's the part you need to work on."
Ren had no immediate answer to that, because it was accurate and he recognized it as accurate and the recognition didn't produce a solution.
"I'll work on it," he said.
Martinez nodded once. He would remember it was said.
"I'm buying breakfast," Ren said. "Tomorrow. Somewhere good."
"You always find somewhere good," Lily said. "I'll give you that much."
"One of the things," Martinez said.
They stayed like that for a while: Lily with her knees up, the food mostly finished, Martinez with his warm mug, the kitchen light holding the table steady while the rest of the apartment stayed dark.
Ren looked at the table. At the bowl Lily had filled for him without asking. At Martinez's hands around his mug.
Unknown to me, he thought.
All this time, unknown to me.
I'm important to someone.