Eli and Dawn settled into an odd sort of routine over the next week, generating their own little orbits that regularly intersected with each member of the team.

“Morning.” Beake was always first in the kitchen. He’d nod to his two guests, who were normally sipping coffee at the table, then disappear into the basement. He wouldn’t resurface until dinner or later.

Grim and Sherry lingering a little longer in their orbit—Sherry chatting about nothing at all, Grim mumbling updates in a gruff, sleepy voice. As they took their coffee and parted ways, Banneker slid in, ready for a game or two.

But from lunch to dinner, Eli drifted on his own.

“What city are you looking at?” he asked Dawn, leaning around a laptop to look at her. She was hunched over another laptop, biting her lip and scribbling in a notepad.

“Milwaukee.”

Eli scoffed. “Milwaukee? Come on.”

Dawn shrugged and continued scribbling. “It’s one of the ones on Grim’s list, what do you want from me?”

“I want you to not move to Milwaukee.”

The day before, Grim had given them a list of cities they could reasonably disappear into. Eli had secretly been hoping for something in Italy or France—a seaside village, perhaps, or a little town filled with cobblestones and cafés—but Grim’s short list conjured up no such images.

“Kansas City’s next on my list,” Dawn said. Eli stretched his arm across the table and rested his cheek against it.

“No.”

“Eli, we’re literally on the run. Where did you wanna go, Paris?”

Eli gave an indistinct grumble. His current problem was that he didn’t wanna go anywhere just yet. He could he? This stupid cabin still held more questions than answers. He knew next to nothing about what sort of experiments Beake and Sherry conducted from sun-up to sun-down, nor what their next steps were.

Not that he was still hunting them, of course—he wasn’t. But he couldn’t just shrug off months of investigating not to know.

“What about…” he lifted his head and squinted at Grim’s list, “Rancho Cucamonga?”

Dawn flipped to a new page in her notebook. “Already looked.”

“It’s a no?”

“It’s a no.”

#

Eli had already tried sifting through the cabin itself for information. For as cluttered as the place was, the flannel brigade didn’t leave many clues lying around. No mail to sort through, no journals or unlocked tablets. Unless he wanted to analyze the significance of the five moose paintings hung around the living room, the space wasn’t going to give Eli anything more than what he already knew.

So that evening, he turned to the flannel brigade itself.

“Need any help?” He sidled up to Grim, who was stirring a mix of peppers and tomatoes in the kitchen.

“Sure.” They jerked their head back to the island, where a cutting board and pile of vegetables waited. “Chop those for me?”

“What can I do?” Dawn tapped on the island as Eli sorted through the vegetables. Grim waved her off.

“You helped me yesterday. Go play games with Banneker or something.”

Dawn rolled her eyes and straightened. “He’s already beat me five times, I don’t need that kind of blow to my ego!”

“What if I let you win this time?” Banneker called from the couch. Dawn’s face darkened.

“Nuh-uh, no, I’m gonna beat your ass fair and square, kid—“

As she whirled around to face off with Banneker one more time, Eli evaluated Grim’s mood. Their stubble-covered frown lines had softened a little, as they usually did when it was their turn to cook dinner.

Eli could probably venture a question or two.

“Hey, Grim.”

“Mm?”

“How’d you become part of Beake’s crew?”

Grim didn’t respond right away—they just kept stirring the pepper sauce. Eli’s grip on his knife tensed. Perhaps he had miscalculated.

“I was head of security at Ariata,” they finally said, not looking up from the saucepan. “Was his…third organization at that point, I think.”

Fourth, Eli corrected silently. Fourth illegal icefall organization, if the agency’s files were correct.

“So he was already high up in the roster,” Eli said. Grim nodded.

“At that point, yes. We worked together on almost every mission.” As they shifted to check the pasta, Eli thought he heard a tired sigh. “I’m sure you know how Ariata got taken down.”

Eli winced as he dropped the carrots into the salad bowl. “I wasn’t a part of that raid, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, figured you weren’t.” Grim shrugged. “Beake knew the head of the company was going to betray them. Asked me if I wanted to team up with him just before it all went down.”

“And you said yes.”

“I said no.”

Eli paused halfway through slicing a cucumber. “No?”

Grim weighed a bottle of lemon juice in their hand. “Said no. Not unless he took Banneker, too. We were a package deal or nothing.”

Grim’s voice had gone quiet. Eli sliced more slowly to make sure he heard them. “So Beake took the deal.”

“He grabbed Banneker thirty seconds before the agency reached the security room.”

An icy stone dropped into Eli’s stomach. Though he hadn’t been part of the raid, he had heard it was a bloodbath. If Banneker had been in the room when the agency reached it…

“Dammit, Banneker!” Dawn shouted from the couch as Banneker laughed and held up his controller in victory. Eli suppressed a shudder.

“You made a good call,” he mumbled and turned back to the cutting board.

#

As Grim drained the pasta, the basement door opened. Eli frowned and looked over at the laughter now coming from the open doorway.

“Did she really say that?” Beake was grinning at Sherry. “How come you never told me?”

“Never came up before,” Sherry said, still chuckling as they wandered into the kitchen. “I’ll have to tell you about what her cousin said some other time. Grim, how can I help?”

She rubbed their shoulder as she leaned over to inspect the pasta. This is when Grim’s expression softened the most—whenever Sherry was with them in the kitchen.

“No helping, I’m almost done.” They nodded to Eli. “He took your job.”

“That’s very kind of you, Elias.” Beake swung around the island and plucked a cucumber slice from the salad bowl. It oddly lifted Eli to see that his smile hadn’t yet disappeared. Their experiments must have gone well—he had never seen Beake’s face quite so bright.

“Eli,” he found himself saying. Beake frowned.

“Hm?”

“Call me Eli.” He reached for the salad bowl. “No one calls me Elias.”

“All right.” Beake grabbed the bowl first and held it up. “Grim, have you checked to confirm Eli isn’t poisoning anything?” He picked a carrot out of the salad and laughed as Eli yanked the bowl away from him.

“Oh, please, I’m not poisoning you, Bond.”

“Still at it with that, are we?” Beake leaned against the island. “You know, I seem to recall someone else wearing a tuxedo at a gala recently. Sipping champagne, dancing, refusing to give up information…”

Eli could distinctly feel Dawn’s curious eyes on him from the living room, and didn’t dare turn to meet her gaze. Beake leaned in closer.

“Call me Ambrose,” he murmured, then stepped away, leaving Eli alone to fight the unreasonable blush creeping up his neck.