“I’m okay,” I say.
“You are not down yet.”
“I am emotionally okay, then.”
“That is less useful.”
When my boots reach the floor, he shifts so his body shields me from the wider tunnel. Faces turn toward us from behind tarps, crates, patched partitions, and old cargo blankets. Some people stare at me with suspicion. Some with curiosity. Some with the dull exhaustion of people too tired to assemble either.
A gray-bearded man sitting beside a heater coil lifts his head. His left eye clicks faintly when he blinks.
“Well, hell,” he says. “You brought the bakery girl.”
Kauss exhales. “Al.”
“So she is real. I was starting to think you made her up to explain why you smell like cinnamon and shame.”
I smile despite the heaviness in my chest. “I’m Evie.”
“Al Simmons.” He tries to stand, winces, and gives up with dignity. “I’d offer you the good chair, but the good chair is a bucket and I’m emotionally attached.”
“I brought dinner.”
His eyes move to the crate. “Then I take back everything rude I was about to say.”
“No, you don’t,” Kauss says.
“No, I don’t,” Al agrees. “But I’ll say it after soup.”
The first few minutes are awkward in a way that almost hurts. I set containers on an overturned door used as a table while Kauss stands beside me like a wall with teeth. People approach slowly. Doreen comes first, her cybernetic ankle clicking unevenly. Maren follows with her son tucked against her side, the boy’s eyes too big in his thin face. An older woman named Juno takes bread without speaking and nods at me once as if granting provisional citizenship.
I do not ask why they are down here. I do not ask what happened. I do not say anything bright and stupid about things getting better. I hand out soup, rolls, fruit, potatoes, and pastries, and I let people decide how much dignity they need around accepting it.
A little boy looks into the pastry tin and whispers, “Is that chocolate?”
“It is,” I say. “Very serious chocolate.”
He looks at Maren. She nods. He takes one piece with both hands and bites into it like it might disappear.
Kauss watches him.
His face changes so subtly that most people would miss it. I do not. The hard lines around his mouth soften with something protective and sad. He stands close enough to prevent trouble, far enough to let everyone eat without feeling guarded by a prison tower. When a man with jittery hands edges too closeto Maren’s son, Kauss shifts one foot. Just one. The man immediately remembers somewhere else to be.
I fall harder right there in the damp tunnel with mold in my nose and water dripping somewhere behind me.
It is wildly inconvenient.
Al eats soup from a metal cup and watches me watching Kauss. “Careful, girl.”
I glance at him. “With what?”
“That look.”
“I don’t have a look.”
He barks a laugh. “You and him both lie like rookies.”
Kauss turns. “Al.”
