“We can’t forget this whole episode happened?” Vista asked.

“Just making conversation,” I told her. “I’m… backing you two.”

“I know. I heard some of that. Thank you for telling him to get me flowers. That’s the sort of thing so dumb I wouldn’t know how to hint at it. I’ll look forward to that.”

She was fidgeting a lot.

I walked with my hands in my pockets.

“He said he really likes me,” she said, quiet. Vista, who was still petite, even after growing most of the way up, who had taken up a vaguely grungy, ‘tough’ look, with the black eyeliner and patched jacket, looked outright bashful.

“You realize what I said to him about not hurting you goes for you too? He’s recovering, he’s vulnerable.”

“I know. Tristan’s really helpful there. He’ll tell me if I’m being dumb.”

I nodded.

“He was getting better and they needed the hospital room. So he has a dorm room. We were talking and I suggested, uh, my room’s closer to the hospital room than his new room. And skinship, skin to skin contact, it’s apparently good for mending.”

“Wow,” I said. “Wow. Didn’t actually need the details.”

“Shut up. And you did, because if I didn’t tell you, you’d wonder or worry.”

“Tristan said you were forward, but—”

“Shut up. And it wasn’t a dumb pickup line, because it worked. Tristan even said it was the right line to get through to Byron. We went to my room instead of his. We cuddled, we napped. That’s all it was. Anything else has to wait until he and Tristan figure it out and Byron gets better.”

She was blushing, and furiously trying to suppress it and hide it, messing with her wavy, dirty-blonde hair by combing it with her fingers, arms up near her face, hiding most of it. But I could see that her ear was pink.

“Valkyrie said she’d have some answers about the weird interdimensional stuff. But I had to bring you to her, or whatever? Just to let you know what’s what.”

“Fill me in? What even happened last night?”

I filled her in, broad strokes, the general details of what we’d done, why. What we’d seen and done.

We navigated our way down a floor, then off to the side. To the garden balcony, which was an extended ramp that stood out from the side of the building, with a number of planters that had bushes, trees, and flower beds on it. It was covered more in frost than snow, the plant life withering in the cold. Vista pulled on the coat she’d had under one arm.

Valkyrie wasn’t there. Two others were. I belatedly connected to what Valkyrie had intended when she’d said she wanted Vista. She was still arranging the meetings.