She found herself staring into the face of a cold stranger, and for a moment was simply out of options—neither sane nor mad, neither real nor unreal. Her imagination and her rationality both disowned the scenario.

“Lee, listen to me—”

“No! Nobody’s been asking, nobody at all!” Shouting on the street outside a shut station. People were crossing the road rather than getting mixed up in what might be a drunken rant or a lovers’ spat or a full-on mental breakdown. “Least of all you, Mal! Because you went. You went, and I’ve…I…” To her horror, she burst into tears. “Screw you, Mal! How—How—How—” But the words were being washed away.

She felt strong hands holding her as though she might break, one on each arm, an awkward distance still between their bodies. Mal’s face swam in her vision, weirdly twisted like she was trying to remember how expressions worked.

“I’m sorry.” That voice in her ear. “Lee, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry…?”

“Because they’ll come, they’ll ask,” Mal said. “I wanted to find you earlier, but…things happened, things we had to take care of. Lee, it’s all coming down. I…”

“What? You had a mission? You had to deliver the fucking Death Star plans or the world ends?”

For a moment there was absolutely no admission in Mal’s pale, stone-impassive face of any shared cryptids hunted, dungeons crawled, nights spent tangled together outside of parental scrutiny. Not even a flicker for Star Wars. She simply didn’t know what Lee was talking about. Then the cracks came, a twitch about the eyes, a tug at the corner of her mouth. She snorted in that way she had that made her eyes bulge, because she had spent most of her life before she met Lee keeping the funny inside. Because nobody else around her shared it.

Without transition she was hugging Lee, bony chin digging into her shoulder. The new strength in her arms was almost frightening, as though some beast inside her was only waiting for the full moon to make its escape.

“Something like that,” she said in Lee’s ear, voice choked. “Something very much like that. And I’m sorry. Even after this contact, they’ll find you. Maybe they’d have found you anyway. Lee, deny everything; tell them you don’t know.”