Page 132 of Immune

“It’s fine,” he says quietly. “It’s still there.”

My hand remains on the brim, and for half a second, the world flashes backward. A kitchen. Black nail polish. A laugh I haven’t heard in six years. Fingers knocking the cap onto my head and telling me it swallowed my face whole.

Then the memory is gone, and I’m still standing in a corridor with dead things behind me and an Alpha in front of me who is seeing way too much.

I lower my hand, muttering, “Don’t.”

Ewan nods only once. “All right.”

No question. No pushing. He simply slides down the wall opposite me, careful and slow, leaving the corridor between us like it’s a neutral country. Then he pulls his headphones from around his neck and I stare at them before grumbling, “If you even consider putting those on me, I’m going to break your fingers one at a time.”

“Gotcha,” he says, before he sets them on the floor between us and nudges them halfway across the Switzerland of corridors between us. “It’s for the ghost.”

I frown. “What ghost?”

“The one that keeps accepting things you don’t want,” he answers, proving that he’s been seeing too much for much longer than I would have liked.

I should throw them at him, but my hands are shaking too hard to make it really satisfying. Instead, I watch as Ewanremoves a small device from his pocket. It’s old, scratched, and held together with tape and a mountain of faith. He plugs the headphones in, taps the screen, and after a weighted second, a song crackles faintly through them.

Old music. Soft and not loud enough to hide the danger, but enough to give the world edges that aren’t sharp enough to cut.

I stare at the headphones like they’re a new trap.

“They’re clean,” Ewan promises. “Well, mostly, anyway.”

“That’s reassuring,” I murmur.

“I maintain a high standard for the word mostly,” he tells me, nodding slowly.

I eye the headphones and mutter, “I don’t want them.”

He shrugs. “I didn’t say you did.”

The music keeps playing faintly from them. It’s a woman’s voice, warm and distant, singing like there are still cars driving on roads and lights still on in houses and people dancing badly in kitchens.

My throat tightens, because it’s something gentle to focus on. Something soft. Something impossibly safe. And that thought hurts enough that I almost violently shove it away. I come close, but instead, I sit. Not because of him, but because my knee hurts and standing is stupid.

The headphones are close enough to reach for, but I don’t. Not at first.

Ewan leans his head against the wall and peers down the hallway, giving me his profile instead of his attention. Then he says, “Very rude, by the way.”

I blink. “What?”

“You and that Runner,” he explains. “I was having a pretty decent kind of day before the little murder sprint through the tunnel.”

A frown forms on my face. “You realize you were in an apocalypse service tunnel, right?”

“I never said the word decent wasn’t relative,” he points out.

“Your standards are actually haunting, you know that?” I ask seriously.

He shrugs. “What can I say? They’ve adapted over the years.”

Against all reason, my mouth twitches. It’s barely a twitch, really. A small, traitorous movement that moves my bandana slightly. But Ewan sees it. Of course he sees it.

He looks away immediately, which is the only reason I let him live.

I pick up the headphones, just to inspect them. Obviously. Then, because the corridor is echoing and my hands are still shaking like leaves in a thunderstorm and the music is old enough to actually hurt, I put one side over my ear. Not both. Never both, because I’m not completely reckless.