Page 30 of Legacy Ascended

"Who wrote the log?"

"Declan started it," Sophia says, already in her corner of the couch. "Then everybody wanted a go. It stopped being useful at about four in the afternoon and became more of a coping mechanism."

"Whose bags?"

"Ours. For when they let us come." She says it as though it's the most ordinary thing in the world. "Luke said no. Declan argued with him until Luke stopped answering. So we packed anyway and put them by the door, because if somebody rang at three in the morning I was not going to be looking for socks."

Declan has the soup on. Renzo is arranging a plate at the table, and when I get close enough, I see the scrap of paper beside it: HERS in block capitals.

"Roast potatoes," he says. "From lunch. Which I saved, and then defended, because Declan tried to put them in the trash at six o'clock and I said absolutely not, those are for when she gets back, and Sophia said if, and I said—"

"I said it once," Sophia says.

"—and I said when, and everybody got upset, and then Freya made me put a label on them so nobody would eat them by accident." He pushes the plate an inch toward me. "They're probably not even good anymore."

I sit down and eat cold roast potatoes at two in the morning while my friends watch. For the first few bites, I can barely swallow.

"They're fine," I say.

"They're a war crime," Declan says from the kitchen.

"Don't say war crime," four of us say.

Then there's soup, bread, and a long argument about whether Renzo is allowed to tell people I fought off a wolf pack. I end it by threatening to tell Natasha he cried.

"I did cry. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm a man of great feeling."

"You cried at a door," Declan says.

"Declan broke the door, and nobody's talking about that—"

Torres has ended up on the floor with his back against the couch. His hand rests on my ankle. Every so often his thumb moves, absently, and I feel it all the way up.

Luke sends one message, reads the reply, and puts the phone face down on the table and doesn't touch it again. He takes the far end of the couch and lets Sophia interrogate him about whether his family owns a helicopter. Apparently, they do. She finds this outrageous.

I shift against the couch again. Soren gets the cushion off the ugly chair and tucks it behind my shoulder. Then he sits beside me, and I lean into his warmth.

Ander remains just inside the door until Declan notices him.

"Ardent, do you eat, or is it beneath you?" Declan asks. He hands Ander a bowl before he can answer. Ander sits down with the bowl in his hands, looking faintly stunned.

Jon stays by the counter with a cup he isn't drinking.

"Elise?" I ask him.

"Guest accommodation, two rooms down from a very tired Council recorder. Her material's in the secure store with two signatures on the sheet, one of them hers." He turns the cup. "Falken wanted a meeting scheduled for tomorrow. I said nobody's questioning her until she agrees to the meeting and chooses who sits in, and he agreed without arguing, which surprised me."

"Good."

"She asked whether you'd eaten." The corner of his mouth lifts. "I told her you were about to."

"I like her. She keeps trying to feed me."

My friends keep talking and it starts to blur together.

I lose the thread of a sentence twice. The second time, everybody notices.

Sophia takes me into my room and finds the enormous gray shirt I stole from Soren without asking any questions. She helps me out of the borrowed shirt, working the left sleeve down an inch at a time, and doesn't make a single comment about the state of me.