Emily did not like retreating back to her room. They had sourced her a bed, and a desk, and a few changes of clothes, and nothing else. Like a low-end hotel, it carried the implication that they did not expect her to be there long enough to give her anything nice. The only indication that she was there, and not some other traveler, were the broken shards of the glass she had knocked over, scattered on the desk.

 In the time since Tanya, Duke, and Winterwing had been chased down a hallway, there had been two more shifts, and the creature had not returned. No one quite believed that it wouldn’t. The ducks were unwilling to give up their home, and she was unwilling to give up the one space they allowed her unsupervised. So, instead, she relived a long forgotten childhood fear, and lay the sleepless night on her back, staring at the ceiling and listening for any sound that signaled a monster coming to eat her.

There was a knock at the door. When it opened at her tapped command, Grin stood there, gazing down at her.

“Oh,” she said. “I uh. I guess I understand why the ceilings are so high in here.” She looked up at him, shielding her eyes as if trying to make out his form against a bright sun. If he noticed the joke, he did not say as much.

“Am I interrupting something?” he asked.

She shrugged, unable to form a coherent answer, and made a non-committal noise.

“I believe we owe you an apology,” he said. “Sometimes we overlook the small things because of the large ones, and the large ones because of the small.”

Emily blinked. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’re not eating,” Grin said.

She coughed a little. “Well that can’t be true, can it? People can’t just… not eat.”

He leaned his head to the side, in silent questioning.

“Would you believe me if I said everything tastes wrong?” she asked.

“I suspect we’re acclimated to things that you are not. However, there are many similarities between here and there. It may help.” He held up a plastic bag that rustled as it moved. “I had dinner delivered.”

She did not know exactly what to make of Grin. He was extremely quiet, in a way that she was not used to. It was not shyness, nor passive aggression. His position was always just a little behind the rest of his cohort, and they all had their say and their portion before he reached for his own. It was a meekness that did not coincide properly with his size. He spoke gently, in a sort of poetic way that clashed with the constant commotion that existed around him.

Similar to Nosedive, Grin did not seem to regard her as any sort of threat. While the other four treated her as an illness, Grin was never annoyed when it was his turn to watch her. He preferred quiet activities, and sometimes when speaking seemed surprised by his own voice, that he had heard it so sparingly. But he was not cruel or suspicious or unfair when he did speak, and she had no choice but to credit him for it.

“Well, that is… thoughtful,” she said, carefully. “There’s just one problem,” she stood to the side, so that he could better see behind her, into the sparse room. “The warden hasn’t let me out furniture shopping.”

“I anticipated sparse accommodations,” he agreed. He held out his other hand, and waited until she put out hers to take its contents. He placed a rock in her palm. “I have brought you a geode.”

She stared at the little, shining trinket, pondering for a moment a similar interaction she had had in the white desert, with another inscrutable, hulking creature. A coincidence that she could not quite shake.

“Well, this will fix everything,” Emily said, and turned to set it down on the desk. It clinked against the broken shards of glass.

Grin did not seem to notice her regarding the collection, and sat on the floor facing her, as if it were perfectly comfortable, pulling boxes of steaming food out of his plastic bag and arranging them according to a system only he knew.

“It seems that all people who eat have tradition,” he explained as she watched, “and put special emphasis on the sharing of meals to mark occasions. Puckworld tends to be very homogeneous. It’s a mark of the Empire. It seems there are many thousands of things humans have invented.”

She sat down and rested her back against the desk, quirking a little smile. “Your hobby is food?”

“The monastery of the barrier mountains is known quite well for its warrior monks,” he inclined his head. “But also has something of a reputation for its orchard.”

“I’d never been in the north, before. I did not know that.”

“The mountain is covered from top to bottom in terraces. It spreads for miles, the leaves glow orange in the sun,” Grin seemed to ponder this with the distant sadness of lost things remembered. “It was a good morning, when you could sit at the edge of the overlook and look out at the lines of trees.”

“I grew up on the river, you could see the harbor from the hill where my mother used to live. I… can’t remember the last time I saw open water.”

“There is an abundance of that here,” he said, and this thought seemed to cheer him a bit. “Perhaps we will be able to show you.” He opened the boxes he had placed on the floor, and offered her one. She did not recognize anything in it. A sort of grain covered in a brown sauce, with chunks of something unidentifiable on top. She suspected it was supposed to be appetizing, yet something in the aroma smelled slightly off to her, like dust baking in the sun.

“We had a creed, on the mountain,” Grin continued. “Everyone eats. The dining hall was at the top, of course, but everyone eats, even if we had to carry them ourselves. It is a small kindness, but I maintain it.” He must have seen her looking doubtfully at her own bowl, “It’s vegetarian. I was not sure what you would prefer.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” she lied.

Food had become worse than a chore. It was not that she was not hungry. Of course she was hungry. Food was a sensory overload. Any of the normal experience was superseded by an unbearable, unbreaking awareness of eating. Of the act of digesting. There was a great deal, it turned out, of things that happen without thought in the body, and Emily did not enjoy her sudden hyperawareness of everything.

It was the parasite, moving in the deep, because it must have been. It focused far too hard on everything that she spent a lifetime ignoring. It babbled, and by extension she had the thoughts unbidden, that told her exactly far too much. Some days it was all she could do to push away its constant fascination with blood. It would trace the circular movement everywhere, from heart and lungs down all the way through capillaries, and she was left trying to focus on something other than the fact that her mouth tasted of iron all day as it fixated. Water was just barely tolerable. It may have been that, having been made in large part of water, the deep did not find the addition of more exceptional, and largely kept quiet about it. 

It occurred to her that she had no idea what the thing actually ate. Presumably, if it were like a regular parasite, it was enjoying a steady meal of the organs it had happily dug into. This did not help her own appetite.

“I have heard that you have requested to join our mission,” Grin broke her thoughts, by way of completely unrelated conversation.

She sighed, looking down into her untouched bowl, “Yeah.”

“May I ask why?”

She blinked. “That’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? For us to volunteer? Because it’s the right thing to do or something?”

“Does that make it the right thing for you to do?” he asked.

“I’m not… sure what that’s supposed to mean,” she said carefully. This conversation had already been the most she had ever heard Grin say, and it was becoming clear that his motive was something beyond a meal.

“What do you wish to accomplish by joining?”

“Why do I have to answer that?” she countered, putting the food aside.

“Surely you expected to.”

“You guys keep treating me like a problem. I’m not even really sure how long I’ve been down here. I literally haven’t seen daylight. Why do I owe anyone an answer after being treated like that?”

With anyone else, she would have expected an argument, but he seemed to take this in stride. “A fair point. The paranoia has been counterproductive. It is a result of circumstances outside your control.”

She could not think of anything to say, beyond an irritated noise.

“Trust in this place comes both from the common cause and transparent individual goals,” Grin said.

“Why does this sound like I’m being lectured?”

“To demonstrate. The team was formed to stop Dragaunus. My personal motives were far more selfish.”

He stood then, fishing in pockets for something. He handed her a small display pad, the sort with such small memory it could only store a few pictures. “Material things are trouble, but memory is a fickle thing.”

The quality of its display appeared to be slightly degraded, as if over time an edge had cracked, and the pixels themselves had started to wander. But, the image itself was clear enough. It was Grin and a screaming mass of approximately six children, all under the age of twelve, clambering over him, appearing to try to topple him.

“Okay, so this is about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” Emily barked a short laugh. 

“They were good kids,” Grin nodded in approval. “Especially the ones that were trouble.”

“Were?”

“A figure of speech. I do not know where they are, now.”

“Dragaunus took them?”

“No,” he said. “Or at least, I think not. The barrier mountains have their name for a reason. There were many seasoned mountaineers that worked alongside the monastery. They took who they could and set deep into that wilderness. The cold blooded would not survive, out there. Or their clumsy machine army.”

She offered the display back. “Well, I hope you see them again. It would be nice for good things to happen again, eventually.”

He took it gratefully, and sat back down, and ate quietly for a time.

“There’s no one back there I feel a need to fight for,” Emily said, answering his implied question. 

“You mentioned your mother,” he suggested.

She grimaced, just a little, and discarded the idea. “I hadn’t spoken to her a long time before the invasion. It’s not, it’s not really that we were fighting, I just didn’t have anything left to say. She wasn’t ever going to change and I didn’t have to put up with it anymore, once I’d moved out. So, I didn’t.

“Maybe if I were a better person. But no, I’m not going to lie and say its for her. I already know I’m not seeing her again.”

“Friends?”

“No. They killed the one friend I had, that first night.” The memory was distorted now. It had mingled with the dream, where she had vanished into white mist. Presumably, if she were to return to the hill where Maria had actually fallen, the body would still be there, mingling with the dozen others in the grass between scorched trees.

“I think I’m going to have to be honest with you,” Emily said. “It’s just me. I want to do it for me. I’m not brave or smart or anything else like that. I just want them gone, so that I can sleep, and do whatever it is comes next. I don’t have anything special to offer, or skills that would help, I’m just me.”

Grin seemed to consider this very deeply. “I do not think that you and I have much in common.”

She snorted, “No, I suppose not.”

“But, I do not have much in common with most of those here, other than we are here,” he said, thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s acceptable your motivation is purely self centered. I am not sure. I will have to meditate on it.”

She suspected this was not a figure of speech, and that he actually planned to do so. 

“Well, thanks for not outright saying ‘no’, I suppose,” she said.

“If you had asked me a year ago if I would be comfortable assisting a con man and a drill sergeant, I would have refused. Circumstances are strange. We all have shortcomings, it is good that you are at least aware of them.”

It did not sound like a compliment, but it did not quite sound she was intended to take it as an insult either. 

“Oh, yeah? And what’s yours?” she asked.

“I do not like crowds.”

“I suppose that makes sense, after living on a mountain.”

“This city is a bad place to be if you do not like crowds,” he sighed, and looked pointedly at the untouched food that she had set aside.

Emily looked down at the bowl, defeated, and picked it up with a bit of sarcastic flair. She supposed it was only fair that she give it a try. 

What it actually tasted like, she did not know. What it tasted like to her was a field, somewhere, under a blazing hot sun. Or maybe a root that sat in soggy soil, or maybe tree bark. There was a bit of fire in there as well, as the deep had never encountered the phenomenon of spice before, and had no other thing to compare it to.

Well, he had said it was vegetarian, and she could not deny these were all things that she would have associated strongly with plants.

“I’m not sure I have ever seen anyone make that face,” Grin observed.

“It’s, it’s fine,” she coughed.

“Perhaps I should have asked what you find agreeable.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t have helped.”

“As you said, you must be eating something, as you don’t appear any different than you did three weeks ago.”

He was not wrong. She had remained the same, and had no explanation for that, either. The cacophony that accompanied eating had been enough of a deterrent that she should have been losing weight. 

She tried her best to finish enough of the dish to satisfy him, and tried to ignore that it tasted like eating a field that had been threshed a few days prior during a dry summer and transported piecemeal a couple thousand miles to a stove.

“I wasn’t under the impression you were in a position to turn anyone away,” she muttered.

“Perhaps not,” he agreed. “I suspect it is mostly for your protection.”

“Protection,” she repeated.

“It is not an idle conflict you find yourself in.”

“I know,” Emily leaned in, annoyed. “They stripped me down and glued me to the floor.”

Grin seemed taken aback by her bluntness, but in turn, apologized.

“I don’t even get what the kid is doing here, if your club is so exclusive,” Emily said, looking down into her remaining food, internally despairing at how little progress she had made. “What’s his special skill?”

“Stubbornness,” Grin said, somewhat amused.

“Oh, was that in short supply?”

“Perhaps not. It was not really by anyone’s choice but Wildwing's that he is here. It would have been preferable that we had left him behind, and we likely would have been poorer for it. He has earned his place, but I take your point, perhaps it is only fair that we give you a chance to earn yours.”

She realized she had not taken a bite in some time, and absently she tried again. It was no better than previous, but this time there was something else to it that she had not noticed before. A strange, chemical taste that brought up an association of a black, unwelcome puddle. She very calmly extracted the fork and narrowly avoided choking on the food as she swallowed. 

She had not been as subtle as she had hoped. 

“You dislike it that much?” he asked with visible disappointment.

She stared at him, unsure of how to answer, before turning her attention to the offending plastic fork, grasped carefully between two fingers, and still it somehow radiated that same impression of black, chemical ooze.

Grin had come making the best, and most generous offer of friendship that anyone had given her in some time. 

She was going to have to tell someone eventually, and the longer she put it off the more suspicion was going to fall on her that she hadn’t.

“How about this? Is this a good enough reason?” Emily asked.

That impression of ooze became subsuming, and for a moment of time that probably felt much longer to her, it was all there was. The points where her fingers made contact with the fork were pricked with a sharp, searing pain, as if she had tried to grasp at something hot. Deep in her chest there was a fluttering feeling of something that should not have been there moving.

That was her perspective, what Grin would have seen was the fork lose cohesion and waver with a blue sheen, its tines elongating and writhing like disjointed fingers, then burst into a small cloud of black dust, destroyed beyond recognition.