I put it on Kenzie’s table with other papers and weighed it down with a small hammer.

After another fifteen minutes of work, I got my laptop and put it on the table at my station. Once it booted up, it took a while to connect to the internet—long enough for me to sweep the entire floor.

No disasters so far today. No major fighting, the blackout and phone connectivity tracker was already up, and there weren’t any fresh outages.

I left it on in the background, music playing, while I resumed work, so the group could have its fresh start if and when we resumed working out of this headquarters. My work was punctuated by my searches online.

I paused to stop and check my arm. The muscle twinged. I’d go easier, I decided.

Trash collected from the small bins and put away, stray boxes returned to where they belonged. Rain had left us a few stray pieces of traps, and blades both with and without handles. I left those where they were, because a tinker’s stuff was sacrosanct, even if it didn’t look like tinkerings.

Though I’d have to touch it anyway. Odds were slim that he’d be the one to turn up here and collect it.

I was wiping surfaces clean of dust when I heard heavy steps on the fire escape.

I flew, heading first to the ceiling, my sudden movement stirring some of the thin snakes of damp dust and hair that I’d been wiping away. From the ceiling, I headed to the space above the door.

The footsteps were quieter as the person reached the top.

“Hello?” he called out.

“Tristan,” I said. I dropped down to the floor.

He pushed the door open. He wore his costume top, helmet, and jeans. He had his usual rugged gym bag with him, heavy with his costume stuff.

“Yeah,” he said. “I saw the door open and thought maybe someone broke in. You got the email from the landlord?”

“Yeah.”

“I wasn’t sure if it was only me. Huh. You beat me to it.”

“I fly,” I said. “Tactical and logistics advantages.”

“And I’m jealous,” he said. He stepped inside, pulling off his helmet, then looked around. “I was thinking I’d sweep or something, but I guess I made the trip for nothing.”

“I did send out emails, trying to set the plan.”

“Outages. My ulterior motive was that I wanted to come here and see if the internet and phones were working. Besides, it seemed like the thing to do. If we can’t communicate with anyone else, we should go to the nearest rendezvous point.”

“Until Lookout gets us some means of communicating reliably,” I said. I remembered the conversation.

“Yeah.”

He put his bag down. He wasn’t gentle, and I could feel the weight of it settling through the floor.