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I’ve heard him speak before. Once, months ago, a handful of words offered to a room. This is different, closer, low and rough, with an odd layered quality underneath it, like more than one voice is agreeing to say the same thing at once. It moves through me like a hand trailing down my spine, warm and startling all at once. I actually have to stop myself grinning at the oven like an idiot.

“There is cake,” Dis says. “There was also meant to be choux buns. There will not be choux buns.”

“Understood,” he says.

Felix looks between the two of them with the particular fondness of someone who used to find this dynamic baffling and has long since stopped questioning it. “You are always so weirdly formal with each other,” he says. “It’s like watching two retired generals discuss the weather.”

“We were never generals,” Dis says.

“Close enough,” Felix says.

The doorbell goes before anyone can reply, which will be Hex and Adam, always five minutes behind everyone else and only Adam ever apologetic about it.

It’s Adam and Hex. Adam’s got a bottle of something and an apologetic look already fixed on his face. Hex breezes past him into the kitchen like he owns the place, his eyes a deep, banked red that glow brighter than the kitchen light. Sharp featured and grinning, the sort of presence that makes the air feel faintly charged the second he’s in the room, like static before a storm that never quite breaks.

Three of them now, then. My shadow, Dis and Hex. Three shadow men, tucked into this ordinary kitchen. And to think I was genuinely worried when I left the commune that life out here might turn out to be boring.

“Is that the lemon one?” Hex asks, eyeing the cake with open suspicion. “Last week’s was better.”

“Last week’s was not better,” Dis says.

“It had a better crumb,” Hex says.

“You do not know what a crumb is,” Dis says.

“I know exactly what a crumb is,” Hex says. “I simply choose not to pretend it matters as much as you do.”

Adam catches my eye and mouths sorry, though he’s grinning while he does it. I decide, watching Hex needle Dis with the easy confidence of someone who’s clearly done it a thousand times before, that I love evenings like this.

We end up around the dining table for the game, an old trivia set Felix found in a charity shop and has decided is now a fixture of these evenings. It has cards sorted into categories and dice that Dis has personally declared balanced enough to be fair.

Adam and Felix take one side of the table. Hex and Dis sit opposite each other, which I don’t think is an accident, both of them choosing their pieces with the particular focus of people who’d rather die than admit how much this matters to them. My shadow settles into the chair beside me, close enough that his shoulder brushes mine when he leans forward to look at the board, silently declaring himself part of my team without either of us saying so out loud.

“You’re playing alone again,” Hex says to Dis, nodding at the empty space where Dis has set out his own little plastic piece.

“Yes,” Dis says.

“It seems inefficient,” Hex says.

“I do not require efficiency,” Dis says. “I require not being blamed when Felix answers incorrectly.”

Felix, placing his own plastic piece with rather less precision, looks personally offended. “That was one time.”

“It was four times,” Dis says. “I have been counting.”

“You have not been counting,” Felix says.

“I have.” Dis produces, from his shirt pocket, an actual small notebook, and taps it once against the table. “I keep a private tally.”

Nobody quite knows what to say to that. Felix’s face does something complicated, somewhere between horrified and delighted, and Hex laughs so hard he has to put the dice down.

Felix shakes his head, pulls himself together, and starts the game. The category comes up, geography, and Adam reads the question out loud in the careful voice of someone determined not to give anything away.

“Which African country has three capital cities?”

Hex answers before anyone’s even blinked. “Easy. South Africa.”

Dis, across from him, closes his eyes very briefly, the way you’d close your eyes before receiving terrible news. “That is correct.”