Twenty-seven days after the confrontation with Asteroth, Winterwing and Emily had completed another round of tactical torture, proctored by Captain McMallard. It was not an enjoyable experience, and there had been no test, manufactured or real, to see how fruitful the exercises were.

Sometimes Wildwing appeared in the periphery of the sessions, not to add any wisdom of his own, but to watch proceedings as an ominous presence. At least, Emily thought ‘ominous’ was what he was going for. In reality, Wildwing seemed to be just as uninterested in being there as she was, and would stare into the middle distance at least as much as he did any observation.

She could not gauge whether this was good or bad, and Winterwing’s opinion was a shrug. He reminded her that the training, however much of it was useful and not simply Mallory bullying them, was an indication that maybe things would be okay between them and the team, so long as they followed instructions.

Perhaps the training was a stay of execution, but it remained to be seen if its end result was to be a favorable evaluation of their worthiness. It was something of a strange stalemate that Winterwing and Emily found themselves in, that they had not yet actually been given the chance to actually earn trust in a combat situation, but had also not yet squandered it either.

The two of them returned to the residential block with feet dragging and legs trembling, exhausted in a way that Mallory herself never seemed to be.

Their rooms existed in a section that had previously not existed or been planned for, attached to the same hallway as the others but squeezed in between the other essential systems. It meant exiting the elevator, passing six identical doors, split three and three, and then turning a corner to the left, into a new hallway where on the left-hand side was her door, and on the right was Winterwing’s. Technically part of the block, and yet clearly separated from the rest.

Only this time, turning the corner revealed Grin, standing by her door, and waiting with the serene patience of someone that had either been there two minutes or an hour.

Both she and Winterwing faltered in their step, so unused to seeing anyone else around that corner. Their conversation stopped, though it had been something innocuous and benign, because all of the sudden, a mountain was standing in the hallway that was usually empty.

Grin had seen that strange pause, and heard the silence as the last of their whispered conversation stopped bouncing on the echoing walls, and looked quizzically between them.

“Am I... interrupting something?” he inquired.

“You would know if you were,” Emily said, and then, before he could think about it too much, “What’s up?’

“I was hoping to speak to you alone.”

She blinked, still stuck in that hesitation. No one wanted to speak to her alone.

Winterwing was smarter of the two of them, and regained his step with far more convincing frivolity than she could have mustered. “I’ll catch you later,” he said, and waved them away before turning his back on the both of them, tapping his door open, and disappearing through it, all as if it meant absolutely nothing to have done so.

Well played.

She knew she was staring at the closed door too long, made herself stop, looking back to her visitor, but not making a move to open her own door. She was not so dramatic as to call it a cell, but she would not have described it as any place a person had lived. It was a bed, a desk, a dresser, and a bathroom. It had all been picked out and designed without her input.

The problem was Grin may notice the room was going completely unused, and was accumulating the stale air of a place no one ever was. The shower had no drops of water on the floor, the towels would be bone dry, the clothes had been moved elsewhere. Given the long empty hallways that always seemed spotlessly clean she maybe shouldn’t have worried, but she could not shake off a thought that Grin, of all people, was probably perceptive enough to notice if a layer of dust was beginning to form on the furniture that she wasn’t touching.

Emily could not decide if it even mattered if he did notice. She didn’t think Grin would care, he seemed the absolute last person to have interest in salacious details, yet everyone here was an extension of Wildwing, and just like Wildwing knew about the fork she destroyed with an impulsive thought, Wildwing would know shortly that she was not sleeping in her own room, she was sure of it.

So, she stood in the hall, and Grin did not remark on it.

“I am troubled,” Grin explained, when he was satisfied it was appropriate to talk.

“Because you regret giving me your vote,” she finished for him. “You feel guilty.”

“No,” he said.

“No?” she repeated, stupidly. “Even though your friend died?”

“You said you do not cause it. Did you?”

“No.”

“I do not think you lie. I think you evade and omit, but I do not think you lie,” Grin said. Emily could have sworn, in that moment, that his eyes drifted over to Winterwing’s door.

She could not tell if this was supposed to be an allusion to their dalliance or just an unintended implication, and she made a point of not following his gaze. Better to pretend that she didn’t notice.

“Then why?” she said.

Here he seemed to struggle a bit with the formulation of his words, and he spoke very carefully when he decided on their order, “Bodies are neutral.”

She blinked at him, waiting for him to explain, and when he didn’t, gave him the slightest push, “What?”

“A body is both valuable and valueless—a thing that should never have a price but has a cost. It is a neutral thing, neither good or bad in its existence.”

“You… might have to meet me more than halfway on this one.”

Grin was perhaps the most patient person she had ever met. A decent skill for someone that talked nearly exclusively in riddles. “Illness is a kind of misery, the experience of the body being unwell, we make it a negative experience in our minds,” he said at long last.

“With you so far.”

“The negative travels, to those around us, and by extension it becomes not the illness that is wrong, but the body that carries it.”

When she did not stop to ask him to rephrase again, he concluded: “But, a body is a neutral thing, its attributes can be neither be morally good nor bad. It has no capacity upon which to make a moral decision, it simply is.”

Emily shifted uncomfortably in space, “I think I understand?”

“A great deal of time and effort has gone into understanding your affliction, and the circumstances around its acquisition are hostile,” he explained. “There’s been a conflation of you and that hostility. I am troubled because it strikes me as… unfair.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I wanted to acknowledge it, and apologize for it,” he said. “I will try to make a case to Wildwing about it, when he is perceptive to hearing it.”

She quirked a smile, a tight corner of the mouth that saw no actual humor in the situation. “That seems like it might be a while.”

“It may. I would like to discuss it with the others, in the mean time,” he hesitated. “if that is alright with you.”

She shrugged, “You know them better than me. If you think it helps, I guess.”

Grin nodded, and his voice lowered to barely perceptible over a whisper. “Are you okay?”

She blinked again, in surprise. A strange question, because aside from Winterwing, no one else had bothered to ask it. She instantly reached for a litany of plausible placating answers that were non-answers, the ones that she was used to using. She remembered what he said, about the omissions and evasion, and thought the better of it. It was a bit of a peace offering, that he would come to her when everyone else still avoided her, and apologize. She could perhaps return the gesture with a slight bit of honesty.

“No,” she said, “but I am working on it.”

Grin nodded again, as if he understood, and excused himself to leave. His form turned the corner and Emily watched his long shadow follow him down the corridor. She waited in silence, fixed in place until she heard the opening and closing of another door. She thought, from the distance and time that it took him to reach it, it was the elevator, and not his own room. She stood for several moments still, to be sure there were no footsteps, though she could not articulate why. The ground tremored slightly as the carriage moved upward at last. No one had actually explicitly forbidden or even dissuaded her from having a relationship with anyone. It was as Grin said, that the hostility of the act of infection had carried over, and it would be seen as suspicious that anyone would want to spend time with her.

When she was as certain as she would ever be that she was alone in the hallway, she tapped the door control to Winterwing’s room, to find that he was simply standing there, turned away with arms crossed and fidgeting, though he turned to face her as she walked in, fixed in place until the door closed.

“Have you just been pacing this whole time?” she accused.

“What happened?” he responded, releasing his elbows and coming to her, though she stepped back, just for a moment.

“I’m not sure. I guess he wanted to say sorry?”

“Sorry? For what?”

“Everything I guess.”

He took another step forward and she raised a finger to hold him in place, and he finally caught the full shift of her mood.

“What is it?”

“I’m not sure, he said something,” Emily reached out with that finger and touched the feathers of his collarbone. There was, as she had told him, the reminder of warm featherdust, and it became more intense as she pressed the full flat of her palm against him. “About being sick, that there’s a difference between sickness being bad and a sick person being bad.”

Winterwing tilted his head to the side, pondering, “That’s reasonable.”

She pressed against his collar harder, so that now she could feel the bone under her fingers, and he flinched a bit at the pressure, confused, but did not back away. A bit of trust, a bit of compromise. There was something else in the sensation that she could not quite explain, smooth and straight under her fingers, like the skin under his feathers were nothing more substantial than the warp of a cloth.

“It was the way he said it,” Emily thought aloud. “A body has no capacity to make a moral decision.”

“Yeah, I believe that’s a thing he would say.”

She stared at the back of her hand, and she wondered if Winterwing actually was as delicate as as woven cloth, that she could just push her fingers between the strands and meet the bones underneath. Or further, into the network of red sinew underneath.

She must have given away that mental image with something on her face, because he went from confused to concerned.

“What is it?” he asked.

The strands of him tensed under the pressure of her palm, but they neither parted nor broke, thankfully. They shifted, moved as he breathed in a slow rhythm, pulsed faster with a heartbeat, held taut but fragile. She could not see whatever it was she felt under her hand, but somewhere in her imagination formed the image of the thread he was made from, with each individual strand a different necessary color, or the weave would make something else, someone else.

“I hope he’s right,” she said.