Page 98 of Redline Baby

"I do, actually."

"Do you know how to check tire pressure?"

"I do."

"I know how to check tire pressure too," she informs him, entirely unprompted and radiating pride. "Uncle Soren taught me. I do the front tire. He does the back one because the valve is harder to reach."

"That's an excellent division of labor."

She squints at him for another second, apparently satisfied, and then, without further ceremony, grabs two of his fingers with her whole hand and starts towing him toward the porch.

"Come see my submarine. It has a periscope."

Kit looks back at me over his shoulder as he's dragged away, an expression on his face that's several things at once—startled, charmed, faintly panicked, entirely unable to do anything but follow.

I fall into step behind them, grinning the whole way up the walk.

Maren catches my eye in the doorway before either of them reaches her, one eyebrow arched, already reading everything she needs to read off my face alone.

"Friend," she repeats quietly, just for me, as I pass her into the house.

"We'll get there."

"Mm."

Entirely unconvinced. Entirely delighted.

She goes back inside to finish setting the table.

Rue has Kit deposited on the living room rug before I've even gotten my boots off at the door, a battered folder of drawings already flopped open across both their knees.

"This is the submarine," she announces, tapping a finger against a lopsided crayon shape that is, generously, submarine-adjacent. "It goes really deep. Deeper than sharks."

"Does it have a name?"

She looks at him like this is an insultingly obvious question she can't believe he's asking.

"The Rue-marine."

"Extremely strong branding," Kit says, entirely serious.

I don't know how he doesn't laugh.

"What's branding?"

"It means you picked a good name and you're sticking with it. Like—my bike's called Vera. I've had her three years. Never once considered renaming her, even when she was mad at me and threw me into a ditch."

Rue's whole face lights up, delighted and slightly scandalized.

"Your motorcycle threw you in a ditch?"

"Once. We're past it now. We've talked it through."

"You can't talk to a motorcycle."

"That's what people who've never had a motorcycle throw them in a ditch always say." Kit leans closer, conspiratorial. "You gotta apologize to the tires sometimes. It's a whole thing."

Rue considers this with the same gravity she gave the tire-pressure conversation earlier, clearly filing it away as a fact to repeat to someone later, and flips to the next page in the folder—a horse, badly proportioned in a way that's somehow charming rather than bad, all four legs bent at angles no actual horse leg has ever achieved.