Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Hayden Pike, Svetlana Vetrova, Original Female Character(s)

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Zombies, Inspired by Warm Bodies (2013), Secret Relationship, Established Relationship, Temporary Character Death, Implied/Referenced Cannibalism, Blood and Injury, Injury Recovery, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Getting Together, POV Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov is a Zombie, Hockey Rivals to Lovers, First Love, Explicit Sexual Content, Explicit Consent, Communication, Happy Ending

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-09-10 Words: 18,333 Chapters: 1/1

The Bad In Each Other

Summary

Six months after Boston went dark, Shane Hollander walks into the Raiders' arena with a handgun to do the one thing he won't let a patrol do for him. The thing walking the visiting-team corridor says his name.

What follows is eight days in two borrowed rooms and a school with a fence: a pulse where there wasn't one, a nurse who wants to know for how long, a friend who will walk you to the door and no farther, and a relationship the two of them never managed to be honest about when they both had a pulse.

Notes

Inspired by the film Warm Bodies: the idea that a dead man's recovery might begin with a person rather than a cure is borrowed from there, and nothing else is. Set in the world of the series, diverging in the spring before the cottage.

The title is from the Feist song of the same name, which is also the tonal reference for the whole thing; no lyrics appear.

All rights to the various IPs belong to their owners, I am just playing in the sandbox with them.

The tape would not lie down.

It had come loose from the bench at one end, a hand's length of white cloth tape that somebody had wrapped there for a reason Ilya could not find, and every time he passed it he pressed it flat with the side of his hand. Every time, it lifted again behind him. The adhesive was dead. He kept pressing it anyway. It was one of the things he did in this corridor.

The other thing was the door. At the far end, past the equipment room, there was a door with a long steel handle that he pulled open and stood in and did not go through, because it did not lead where a door at that end was supposed to lead. It let onto a stairwell and a smell of standing water. What was supposed to be there was ice. He knew that with nothing underneath the knowing, no picture of the ice, no memory of skating out onto it, only the flat certainty that the door was wrong and the building had been rearranged around him while he was not paying attention. He let it swing shut and went back.

The corridor itself he knew. Grey rubber floor with a raised tread that his feet no longer read. A sign bolted to the wall, black letters on white: VISITING TEAM, and an arrow. On a board by the press-room door someone had pinned up a poster for a game that had not happened, two faces on it turned toward each other across the fold, and the face that was his had its mouth set in a way he had disliked when they took the picture and disliked now. He did not stop for it. He did not stop for anything. He went along this corridor and pressed tape flat and opened the wrong door and came back.

The screens along the ceiling were dark. Somewhere over the trainer's room a ceiling panel had filled with water and let a drop go onto the rubber at intervals, and he had learned the interval without deciding to. There was no crowd noise. He did not know why that was the absence he noticed most, but it was the one he kept returning to.

Then there was a living person in the building.

He knew it before he knew anything about it. Hunger arrived first, and it arrived as a direction. Everything in him that could point pointed toward the stairwell end of the corridor, and his body was already going that way before the rest of him had an opinion. The drop fell from the ceiling panel. He was past it.

The living person came up the stair without hurry. He heard the tread and the hunger sharpened. Then he heard the thing under the tread: whoever this was knew the building. They did not hesitate at the landing. They did not stop at the wrong door. They pushed it open from the stair side and came through it and along the corridor toward the visiting rooms and stopped a stick's length short of him, and the hunger said go, and something else in him, something that had nothing to do with hunger, said wait.

He waited. Nothing in him had a record of waiting.

The person was a man. Dark hair, dark eyes, a face that gave away almost nothing and a mouth shut hard. About Ilya's own height. Built through the shoulders and the thighs, built for work, and standing so the work showed: weight even, knees soft, the stairwell behind him and the straight run of corridor in front. He wore a canvas jacket too heavy for the season with the sleeves pushed to the elbow. A bandana was knotted at his throat where he could pull it over his mouth. In his right hand, held low and pointed at the floor, there was a handgun.

Ilya looked at the handgun, and then at the face, and then at the handgun.

The man had prepared. He had come with the gun already out, the bandana already tied, at an hour when the light through the high windows was enough to see by. He had chosen this corridor over the others and put himself where it was straightest. Everything about him had been decided somewhere else, in some other room, and carried up the stair and set down here.

"Hey." Low. Even. It came out too smoothly for a first try; it sounded, to Ilya, practiced. "Rozanov."

The name went into Ilya and found nothing to hold on to and kept going.

The man took one step. Not closer. Sideways, to the wall, so that the ceiling panel was not above him and the stair was still behind him. He was watching Ilya's hands and Ilya's mouth and not, quite, Ilya's eyes.

"Stay there," the man said. "You don't have to do anything. Just stay there."

Ilya stayed. The hunger was at his back now, leaning. He could see the pulse in the man's neck above the bandana, going quick. He could see the man's hand, the knuckles gone pale on the grip. He could see the man's mouth, which shut hard again and then opened.

"I'm sorry it's me," the man said. "I thought it should be me. Not somebody who doesn't—" He stopped. He breathed once through his nose. "Okay. Okay."

He brought the gun up.

He brought the gun up, and Ilya understood the gun: the stairwell behind the man, the straight corridor, the hour of the light, what the man had come to do. He opened his mouth, and what came out of him was air.

The man's arm was steady. His face was not.

Ilya tried again. His throat was a thing he had not used. His tongue was heavy and wrong, and the shape he wanted was somewhere far back, but it was there. He got his jaw around it. He pushed.

"Hol—"

The gun did not move. The man's eyes did.

"Hollander."

It was not much of a word. It came out flat and thick and dragged on the last syllable, and it was the first thing he had said in longer than he could account for.

Shane Hollander did not lower the gun. He stood with his arm locked and he stopped, all of him. His mouth was open. Nothing came out of it either.

Below them, on the stair, something heavy put its weight on a step.

Ilya heard it. He watched Shane hear it, watched his head turn a fraction toward the sound and snap back, because Shane could not look away from Ilya and could not not look at the stair. Another one was coming up. Slow, dragging, careless about the landing. Not living. The hunger had no interest in it. The tread told him.

Shane's arm was shaking now. Ilya could see the gun jump in small movements, and he understood that too: one shot in this building and the whole building would come. Shane had to have known that when he came up the stair. He had known it and come anyway, and now there was a dead man in front of him who had said his name, and something on the stair behind him, and no plan, as far as Ilya could see, for either.

The drop fell from the ceiling panel onto the rubber floor.

Ilya moved.

He went for the door.

Not for Shane. What moved him was the stairwell door and the weight on the stair behind it, and the plain arithmetic that the thing on the stair wanted what Ilya wanted and had nothing in it to say wait.

He crossed the corridor. He felt the gun follow him and did not look at it. The door swung in toward him from the stair side. He put his shoulder to it as it began to open, and it stopped.

It stopped because he was heavy and because the thing on the other side did not understand doors. He could feel it through the steel: a body leaning against the middle of the panel, nowhere near the edge that would have given, pushing with its whole slack weight at the hinges. It did not want him. He knew that. It wanted past him. It wanted the quick pulse in the corridor behind him, and it would have gone through him to get there if going through him were a thing it knew how to do. It did not. It leaned. He leaned back.

His feet were bad at this. They found the rubber floor and slid and found it again. He got his hip against the frame. Something in his shoulder made a sound he could not feel.

Behind him, Shane had not fired. Ilya was aware of that. It was another interval he was learning.

"What are you—" Shane's voice, and then nothing, because there was no end to that sentence that was any use to anyone.

The thing on the stair shifted its weight toward the edge by accident. Ilya felt the door give, a hand's width of cold air along the frame and a smell of the stairwell and of what was standing in it, and then his weight took the door back and he heard the body on the other side go down a step. Two steps. It made no sound that meant anything. It began, without hurry, to come back up.

He could hold this. He could hold this for a long time; time was one of the things he had. But he understood, with the door under his shoulder and Shane's heartbeat going in the corridor behind him, that holding was not what the door was for. There were more of them in the building. There were always more. The sound had been made already, the words and the boots and the door, and the building was slow, but it was listening.

He turned his head. Shane was where he had been, against the wall, the gun up. His mouth had come open a little and stayed that way.

Ilya looked at him and then, deliberately, along the corridor. Past the equipment room. Past the visiting room with its door propped open on a skate guard and the tape that would not lie down. To the unmarked door at the end: steel, a lever handle, and a long scuff along the bottom where carts had gone through it for years.

Shane looked where he was looking, and his chin came up.

"The service stair," Shane said. Flat. Then, lower and irritated: "I know where it goes."

Ilya had not said anything. He waited, and the door leaned against him, and Shane stood with a decision in his hands that he had not brought up the stair with him.

Then Shane moved. He did not lower the gun. He came along the wall, keeping the distance, keeping Ilya in front of the muzzle the whole way, and when he was past he did not go for the service door. He stopped. He stood with his back to the corridor and the gun on Ilya, and Ilya understood that Shane was waiting for him to let go of the door, and that Shane could not make himself say so.

Ilya let go.

The door came open behind him as he crossed the corridor; he heard it, and the tread, and he did not look. He put his hand on the lever of the service door and it turned, and the door swung in on a stair going down, concrete and a smell of oil, dim, and he went through it, and Shane came behind him and pulled the door shut, and the last thing Ilya heard from the corridor was the drop from the ceiling panel.

The stair was three flights. Ilya went first. He did not decide to; he was there and Shane was behind him with the gun, and after the first turn he understood that this was correct, that if there were anything on the stair he would meet it before Shane did, and that Shane, behind him, could see his hands. He kept his hands where they could be seen. He kept his back to the living man and the pulse he could hear going and the smell that came off him, sweat and canvas and gun oil and under it a skin-smell that the hunger reached for, and he went down one step at a time, because his feet were bad at stairs and because the thing that had said wait was the only part of him he trusted.

At the second landing there was a door marked STORAGE, and through the small wired window in it, in the grey that came down the stairwell from somewhere above, a corridor going off flat, low-ceilinged, pipes overhead, carts parked along one side on a raised concrete lip. He stopped. He put his hand on the door and pushed, and it did not give. It would give, if he put his shoulder into it, and it would make a noise the whole building would hear. He knew that. He did not know how he knew it.

"Leave it," Shane said behind him. "Keep going."

He kept going.

At the bottom there was a short passage and a set of doors with a bar across them, and light coming under, grey, real. Shane said, "Stop." Ilya stopped. Shane came past him, close, closer than he had been yet, and Ilya held still and did not breathe, because he did not need to, and because if he breathed he would take Shane in.

Shane knocked on the door. Twice, then once.

It opened on a man in a watch cap, a length of steel pipe in one hand and a handheld radio clipped at his collarbone. He had been listening at the door; it was in how he stood. He looked at Shane. He looked past Shane at Ilya, and his hand tightened on the pipe, and then he made it loosen.

"You didn't—" the man said. He looked at the gun, still on Ilya. "Shane."

"He talked," Shane said.

The man did not say anything.

"He said my name. Hayden. Your guy on the roof said he'd seen one walking the visiting level every day for a week, same loop, same time, and I came, and he said my name, and he held a door, he held a door shut on one of them so it couldn't—" Shane's voice went somewhere and he pulled it back. "He held the door."

Hayden looked at Ilya for a long moment. Ilya looked back. The man's pulse was slower than Shane's. He was afraid, and he stood in the doorway anyway. Ilya did not know his face. The name went in and found nothing, the same as before.

"Say something," Hayden said to him.

Ilya opened his mouth. What was in it was air, and then a shape, and the shape would not come. He shut it again. He lifted one hand, palm out, and lowered it. He did not know what that meant either. It was what he had.

"So what do you want to do," Hayden said, to Shane this time. "Because the answer's not the school. You know the answer's not the school."

"I know."

"They're clearing this whole block in a week. You know that too. That's why you—" He stopped himself. "They'll go through here room by room, and they will not stop to ask him his name."

"I know what they'll do."

"So."

Shane's arm had begun to shake again. He looked down at it. Then, slowly, he lowered the gun. Not away. Down, to his side, his finger along the frame, his eyes on Ilya the whole way.

"The cache," Shane said. "Two rooms and a door that locks, and nobody's going in there before the clearance. I stay with him. You go back and tell them whatever you have to tell them. A week. If he's—" He did not finish that either. "A week."

"And if he isn't?"

"Then I do what I came here to do," Shane said. "And you don't have to be there for it."

Hayden looked at the gun, and at Shane's face, and then, for a while, at the ground. The radio at his collar hissed once and said nothing.

"You're going to walk him over there," Hayden said. "Through all that."

"They don't touch him. You've seen it."

"I've seen it." Hayden breathed out through his nose. "One week. And I'm coming to the cache in the morning, and you're going to be alive to open the door."

"Fine."

"And he—" Hayden looked at Ilya. Ilya looked back. "Fine," Hayden said, to no one.

He pushed the bar. The doors opened onto a loading dock, and beyond it a street with the light gone long and grey, and the smell of the city, which was rot and rain and something burnt a long way off. Ilya went out into it first, because that was the order they had, and he kept his hands where the two of them could see them.

Hayden left at the door.

He had walked them to the door and stopped on the landing. There was a line with Hayden; he would walk you right up to it and not cross it. He stood on the landing with the pipe in his hand and looked at the room over Shane's shoulder, and then at Ilya, and then at Shane.

"Morning," he said. "I'll knock the same."

"Okay."

"Lock it."

"I know."

Hayden looked at Ilya one more time and did not say anything to him. Then he was gone down the stair, and Shane shut the door and turned the bolt and stood for a moment with his hand flat on the wood, and the room got very quiet.

It was two rooms. The one they stood in had a table with one leg shorter than the others, two chairs, shelves along the back wall holding tins and jugs and a stack of folded things, and a window boarded on the inside with a strip of light coming through at the top. The plaster was damp low on the walls and had come away in one place in a shape like a country. Through an open door to the left was a smaller room with a mattress on a pallet and a board over its window, and nothing else. It smelled of concrete and old cardboard and, under that, of the two living men who had just been in it.

Shane set the lantern on the table and turned it down until the light stayed on the table and did not reach the boards. Then he started taking things off the shelves.

He did it without speaking. Water in a jug. A basin. A stack of cloth that had been towels once and were now rougher than that. Clothes: a sweatshirt, a pair of track pants, socks, all of them folded. He set them on the table in the order he would need them, and Ilya watched his hands, and the hunger watched his hands, and they did not want the same thing from them.

"Okay," Shane said, to the table. "Here's what I'm— Here's the idea. You stay here. I stay here. Hayden comes in the morning and I tell him what I've seen. That goes to the people at the school, and they decide if we get another day, and then another one. Up to the clearance. That's the—that's what we've got." He looked up. "Hayden says a week. It's not a week. It's one day, seven times."

Ilya looked at him.

"You can say no," Shane said. "To any of it."

Ilya did not say no. He did not say anything. He turned his head and looked through the open door at the smaller room, the mattress, the board on the window, and then he looked back at Shane and lifted one hand and pointed.

Shane followed the point. "That one. That's yours." He picked the lantern up. "I'll put the light in there so you can—"

"No."

It was the first word in the room. It came out low and rough and entirely clear.

Shane stopped with the lantern in his hand. He looked at the dark of the smaller room, and at its door, and back at Ilya. Then he set the lantern back on the table.

"Okay," he said. "No light. It stays out here."

Ilya had not expected that either.

The wash was Shane's idea and Shane's work. He said what he was going to do before he did it, each time, in a flat even voice that Ilya recognized from years of press conferences and from nowhere else: I'm going to take this off you. I'm going to do your hands. Hold that out. He did not touch Ilya with his own hands. He used the cloth, and he used a great deal of water, and he kept the basin between them and his mouth shut, and he did not once look at Ilya's face while he did it, and Ilya understood why.

The jacket came off in pieces. Under it the shirt was worse. Under the shirt was Ilya, and Ilya did not look down for a while, and then did.

He was grey-white, the color of a thing kept out of the light; he had known that in some way and not in this way. Along his left forearm, above the wrist, the bite was a closed thing with a wrong texture, and Shane's cloth went around it and not over it, and neither of them said a word about it. On his chest, on its chain, the cross had stayed where it had always been, and it was the only thing on him that looked as it had, and Shane's eyes went to it once and came away.

Then Shane did his shoulders, and the cloth went across the back of Ilya's neck, slow, and Ilya's body remembered the weight of that hand at exactly that place on his neck, from a hotel with the curtains drawn, and answered it before he could stop it. He held very still. He looked at the plaster, at the shape like a country, until the cloth had moved on.

Shane's hands did not shake. His breathing did, once.

"Arms up," he said.

The sweatshirt smelled of someone else. It was grey and it said the name of a college on it and it fit across the shoulders and stopped short at the wrists. "There was a run to a store on the second week," Shane said, to the sweatshirt, "before the roads went. They took whatever fit whoever. It's nobody's." The track pants were too short. The socks were dry. Nobody's, Shane had said. Ilya, who had spent six months among what happened to clothes when their owners stopped, did not believe in nobody's, and put it on anyway, and stood in the middle of the room in it, aware for the first time in a long time of being cold, or of the place where cold should have been.

Shane poured the water out into a bucket in the corner and did not use it for anything else.

"Okay," he said again, and Ilya was beginning to hear what the word was for, that Shane used it the way a man uses a handrail. "Two things. Then you can go in there and I'll leave you alone. One. If you need me away from you—if it gets—" He stopped. He did not have a word for it either. "If you need me away. Do something. Anything. Just, the same thing every time, so I know."

Ilya thought about it. Then he lifted his hand, palm out, fingers spread, the thing he had done at the loading dock without knowing what it was, and held it there.

Shane looked at it for a moment. "That," he said. "Okay. That's it. Two." He rubbed the back of his neck. "When Hayden comes. When anybody comes. They're going to ask me things about you, and I'm going to want to answer, and I'm going to be wrong sometimes. So don't—you tell me. When I'm wrong. Even if it's just no. You're allowed to say no to me in front of people, is what I'm—"

"Yes," Ilya said.

Shane stopped. It was the second word, and it had cost about the same.

"Yes," Shane said.

He did not say goodnight, because it was not that kind of night. He sat down in the chair that faced the door with the gun on the table beside his hand, and he did not look at the mattress or at Ilya, and Ilya went into the smaller room and stood in the dark with his back to the wall where he could see the strip of light at the top of the far window and the shape of Shane in the chair.

Shane had said the night. Ilya stood there, and the strip of light went from grey to nothing, and Shane did not move from the chair, and in the other room a living man breathed, and Ilya kept his hand where he could lift it.

In the morning Shane moved the table.

He had been awake before the light, or had not slept, Ilya could not tell which; he had heard the chair creak at intervals through the night, small shifts, a man trying not to make them. Now the lantern was off and the strip at the top of the window was grey again and Shane was standing in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips, looking at the door, and then at the boarded window, and then at the door again, with the expression Ilya had seen him wear across a faceoff dot since they were teenagers.

Then he moved the table.

He moved it across the room so that it stood between the entrance and the door to the smaller room. He moved one chair behind it. He moved the other chair to the wall by the window, then to the wall by the shelves, then back. He took the lantern off the table and put it on the floor and then picked it up again. He was building something, and Ilya, standing in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame, watched him build it and understood after a minute what it was: a place where Shane could sit and see the door and see Ilya, both, all the time, without turning his head.

It was very thorough. It blocked the back window completely.

Ilya let him finish. He let him sit down in the chair behind the table and look at the door and look at the doorway and nod, once. Then Ilya came out of the doorway, and crossed the room, and put both hands on the chair by the shelves, and moved it.

He moved it slowly. That was not a choice; his hands were not good at chairs yet, and the legs caught on the floor and the whole thing wanted to go over. But he got it to where he wanted it, which was against the wall beside the door to the smaller room, angled, so that whoever sat in it could see the entrance and the boarded window and the strip of light at the top of the window, and could get to that window in three steps if the entrance was no longer a way out.

He sat in it. He looked at Shane.

"I had that," Shane said.

Ilya looked at the back window, and then at the table that was in front of it, and then at Shane.

Shane looked at the window. He looked at it for a while. Then he got up and moved the table back to where it had been, with the short leg on the uneven board where it had sat before, so that it did not rock, and he did all of that without saying anything, and when he sat down again it was in the chair by the door, which was the one Ilya had left for him.

"Fine," he said. "Yours is better."

It was not much. Ilya found that he wanted to laugh and did not have the machinery for it yet, and settled for looking at the plaster.

Hayden knocked at midmorning. Twice, then once. He came in carrying a pack that made him list to one side and set it on the table and stood back from it, and he looked at Shane first, and then at Ilya in the chair, and then at the chair, and then at the room.

"You moved stuff," he said.

"He did," Shane said.

Hayden looked at Ilya again. Ilya looked back. He was getting the hang of that, at least.

"So," Hayden said. "They said yes. Sort of. They said observation through the clearance, which is what we said, and they said you report every day, which is what we said, and they said if there's a problem you deal with it, and they looked at me while they said it." He unzipped the pack. "Water. That's four days if you're careful. Tins. There's a can opener, don't lose it. Bandages, the little bottle, tape. This is—" He held up a plastic bag of something pale and crumbled. "Crackers and milk powder, she says. Mix it with water. Mara packed it. Mara's the one who used to be a nurse, you'll meet her, she said tell him hi and tell him she wants to know if he's eating." He set the bag down. "And there's coffee, but it's the last of it, so."

The coffee was in a jar with the lid screwed down tight, and when Hayden set it on the table the lid was not as tight as he thought, and the smell came out.

It was not hunger. It was dark and dry and bitter, and it went into him and found something to hold onto, and held, and he sat very still in his chair by the door and did not know what his face was doing.

Both of them were looking at him.

"What," Hayden said.

Shane said, quietly, "It's the coffee."

Hayden looked at the jar. He looked at Ilya. Then he reached back into the pack and came out with a thing the size of his palm, black plastic, worn white at the corners, with a cord wrapped around it.

"This is mine," he said. "It's got a charge. It's got what's on it, I don't know what's on it, it's been in a drawer. There's a panel at the school, it takes half a day." He set it on the table beside the coffee. He did not look at Shane while he did it. "I'll want it back."

Nobody said anything.

"They asked me why you," Hayden said, to Shane, in a different voice. "Why it's you doing this. I said you've played against him since juniors, you know what he looks like, you'd know if it wasn't him. They asked me again." He waited. "They're going to ask you."

"I know."

"So you should have an answer."

"I've got one."

"Not the one you gave me."

Shane did not say anything to that, and Hayden did not push it, and Ilya sat in his chair and watched the two of them not say it, and understood that whatever it was, it was about him, and that Shane was carrying it the way he carried the gun, low and to the side and never quite put down.

Hayden's radio hissed. He tilted his head at it and it said nothing.

"Jackie's with her folks outside Montreal," he said, to no one in particular, zipping the pack. "Relay says fine, every couple of weeks. There's no road north, so." He shrugged the pack on. "So I'm here."

He went to the door. He stopped with his hand on the bolt and looked back at Ilya, and stood there a moment with his mouth working.

"You look like shit, Rozanov," Hayden said. "You looked like shit before, too, so."

Then he was gone, and the door was shut, and Shane turned the bolt.

Ilya looked at the table. The coffee. The black thing with the cord. He got up, slowly, and crossed to it, and Shane watched him come and did not stand and did not put his hand near the gun, which Ilya noticed. Ilya put one finger on the black thing, a music player, the kind people had carried before phones did it, and pushed it an inch toward himself across the table.

He looked at Shane.

"Yeah," Shane said. "It's yours. He said."

"Give," Ilya said.

It was not the word he wanted. It was the one that came. Shane heard it and did not smile, quite, and unwound the cord and put the thing in Ilya's hand and showed him with one finger where the button was and then took his hand away.

Ilya did not press it. Not yet. He held it, and it was warm from Hayden's pack, and he went back to his chair by the door and sat with it in his lap, and after a while he pointed with his other hand at the jar.

"Later," Shane said. "It's the last of it. We'll do it right."

Ilya nodded. He kept his eyes on the door, which was his job now, and the small warm thing in his lap, and the jar on the table, and he thought, without words, that there were more things in the room than there had been yesterday, and that he was one of them.

On the third day the button on the sweatshirt cuff would not go.

It was not a real button. It was a snap, a small metal thing at the wrist of a college's grey sweatshirt that had come undone in the night and now would not go back, because Ilya's thumb and finger could bring the two halves together but could not do the last thing, the press, the small decisive violence a snap needs. He had been at it for some time. He was not going to ask.

Shane came over anyway. He had been at the table, doing what he did in the mornings, which was count things: the water, the tins, the tape, in a low murmur that Ilya had stopped hearing as words. He crossed the room and stood over the chair and said, "Let me," and Ilya, who had said no to a lantern and yes to a rule and give to a piece of plastic, found that he did not have a third word in him for this, and held his wrist out.

Shane took it. He took Ilya's wrist in his left hand, a working grip, thumb across the inside, and with his right hand brought the two halves of the snap together and pressed, and it went, a small clean sound, and Shane did not let go.

Ilya looked up.

Shane's thumb had not moved from the inside of Ilya's wrist, and he was not breathing in the ordinary way. He was holding it.

"What," Ilya said.

Shane did not answer. His thumb pressed. Not hard. It moved a quarter inch along the tendons and pressed again and stayed.

Then he let go of the wrist and took it up again with the other hand, from the other side, thumb in the same place, and Ilya understood that he was checking, and that the second time was the one that mattered.

The room was quiet enough to hear the cloth of Shane's jacket move when he breathed.

"There," Shane said. Barely a word.

Ilya looked at his own wrist in Shane's hand. It looked as it had looked for three days: grey-white, the tendons standing under it, the bite above it closed and wrong. He could not feel what Shane was feeling. Then Shane's eyes came up to his face and stayed there, wide open, not checking anything, and he had not been looked at like that since the corridor, since before the corridor, since a hotel room in Boston with the curtains drawn against the morning and Shane saying, in that same flat voice, I could stay. For breakfast. If you wanted.

He had not wanted, then. He had said something funny about the visitors' bus.

That was all that came. Not the argument. The morning before the argument, the light on the carpet, the word breakfast in Shane's mouth. Then it was gone and there was only the room and Shane's thumb on his wrist.

"Let go," Ilya said.

Shane did not let go.

"Hollander."

"It's there." Shane's voice was strange. "Ilya. There's a—" He stopped. "It's slow. It's really slow. But I've got it under my— Here. Here, feel—"

He tried to move Ilya's own fingers to the place. Ilya pulled his hand back.

"No."

"Ilya—"

"I said let go."

Shane let go. He stayed where he was, crouched by the chair, his hands open on his knees, and Ilya sat with his own wrist in his own lap and looked at it and did not touch it.

He did not want to feel it. He was surprised by how much he did not want to. Because if it was there then it was true, and if it was true then all of this was true, the chair and the door and the week and the man crouched in front of him with his hands open; and there would be a next thing, and a next, and he would have to be there for them, and he had been a thing that walked a corridor and pressed tape flat, and it had been terrible, and it had not asked anything of him.

"Okay," Shane said. Very quietly. "Okay. You don't have to. I'm not going to—okay."

He did not touch him again. He did stay there, on his heels, at exactly the distance he had been, and he looked at Ilya's face and not at his wrist, and Ilya, who had been ready to hate him for the wrist, found it harder to hate him for the face.

"You're annoyed," Shane said, after a while.

Ilya looked at him.

"You are. That's the face. That's the one from—" Shane stopped. He almost smiled and did not. "I know that face."

"You would not let go."

"No."

"I said."

"I know. I'm sorry." He said it plainly, without the fairness. "I wanted to be sure. I needed to be sure." He breathed out. "I'm sure."

Ilya did not say anything for a moment. Then, because it was easier than the other thing: "Mara."

Shane blinked.

"Hayden said. Nurse." Four words. It was a great many. "She should come."

"Yes." Shane got up. He did it too fast and had to put a hand on the table. "Yes. Tomorrow. When Hayden comes, I'll tell him. She'll want to. Yes." He stood there with his hand on the table and his mouth open on the next word, and did not find it, and shut his mouth, and opened it again, which Ilya had never seen him do, not once, in all the years of trying to make him.

"It could be nothing," Ilya said.

"It's not nothing."

"It could be."

"It's not." He looked at Ilya, and then he sat down on the floor, right there, with his back against the leg of the table and his knees up, so that his head was below Ilya's and his eyes were level with Ilya's hands. "It's not nothing. But okay. Mara. Tomorrow. We'll let her say."

Ilya nodded.

They stayed like that. After a while Shane reached out, slowly, and put two fingers on the back of Ilya's hand where it lay in his lap, not the wrist, just the hand, and left them there, and did not check anything.

Ilya let him. He looked at the two fingers on the back of his hand, and at the bite above them that had not changed, and he felt the hunger where it always was, patient, and under it he felt nothing at all in his wrist, nothing he could find. Shane sat on the floor with his fingers on Ilya's hand and did not say the word. If it was there, Ilya thought, he would rather Shane had it for a while, and held it, and did not make him look.

Mara came at the hour she had said she would.

Hayden knocked, twice and once, and stood aside, and she came past him into the room without looking at it. She was a compact woman in her forties with grey coming in at the temples, a canvas bag across her body and a second, smaller one in her hand, and her hands were already working before she had finished coming through the door: the bag off the shoulder, onto the table, unzipped, a folded cloth laid flat, the things inside set on the cloth in a row. Then she looked up, found Ilya in his chair by the door, looked at his face, his hands, the skin at his wrists, and looked back down at her cloth.

"I'm Mara," she said. "I'm going to stand about here. Is that all right."

Ilya nodded. He had not expected to be asked, and it took him a moment.

"Good. I've got until the light goes and then Hayden takes me back, so I'm going to be quick and I'm going to be rude. Shane says there's a pulse."

"There is," Shane said, from the shelves.

"I'd like to find it myself." She was looking at Ilya. "May I touch your wrist?"

The room was very small with three living people in it. The hunger knew where each of them stood: Hayden at the door with the pipe and his weight on his back foot, Shane by the shelves, and this one, close, smelling of soap and wool and the outside. Ilya kept his left hand in his lap where he could lift it. He held out the right.

Her fingers were cold. She laid two of them along the inside of his wrist and looked at a watch on her other wrist and did not say anything for a long time, and he sat with a stranger's cold fingers on him and the hunger leaning and found that he was counting too, without knowing what he was counting.

"Thirty-one," she said. "Then a gap I didn't care for. Then it picked up." She let go. "That's a pulse. It's slow and it isn't steady. Skin's cool, not cold. Was it cold yesterday?"

"Yes," Shane said.

"Was it," Mara said, still to Ilya.

Ilya looked at her. Nobody had asked him a question with a right answer in a long time, and he had the odd, unwelcome feeling of being back in front of a microphone. "Yes," he said.

She wrote something in a small notebook with a pencil. "Have you eaten?"

"He hasn't been able to—" Shane began.

Mara's pencil stayed above the page. She did not look at Shane. The sentence went on a little way on its own and stopped, and in the quiet Ilya heard Hayden's boot shift at the door.

"Have you eaten?" she said again, to him.

"Why do you ask me." It came out before he had decided to say it, rough, with an edge. "He knows."

"He knows what he's seen. I'm asking what you know."

He looked at her for a moment. Then: "No."

"Do you want to?"

He thought about it, and the thinking was strange, like reaching into a coat pocket he had forgotten he had. "The coffee," he said.

She wrote it down. "Tomorrow try a spoon of something. Small. If it comes back up, that's information." She wrote. "What makes the other thing worse. The hunger."

He did not want to say it in front of Hayden. He looked at Hayden, who looked at the floor, and that helped. "Close." Then, because she waited: "Blood. When he has been—" He did not have the word. He moved his shoulders. "Working. The smell."

"Sweat."

"Yes."

By the shelves, Shane's head came round. Nobody had told him that; Ilya had made sure of it.

"Then you'll want to wash before you sleep," Mara said to Shane, "if you're sleeping in here." She wrote. "What do you remember."

"It's patchy," Shane said. "He doesn't—" He heard himself. He stopped on his own this time, and looked at the floor, and then at Ilya, and did not finish.

"Not much," Ilya said. "The corridor. Him." He tipped his head at Shane without looking at him. "Before that, some. Not in order."

Mara wrote that down too, and closed the notebook, and put the pencil behind her ear. "Here's what I've got. A pulse where there wasn't one, a temperature that's moving, a man who answers questions. One pulse doesn't tell me he's safe. It tells me something changed, and I want to know for how long, and I want someone besides you two to see it change." She said it to the room. "I'll come the day after tomorrow, same hour. If he eats, tell Hayden how much and whether it stayed. If the hunger does anything new, tell Hayden that first."

She began to pack the bag. She put the things back on the cloth in the order they had come out, and folded the cloth around them, and zipped it.

Hayden had not moved from the door. Now he did, one step.

"They're going to want to know why it's you." He was talking to Shane. "Not me asking. Them. Tomorrow. So say it now, in front of her, and then it's said."

Shane looked at the shelves for a moment. Then he turned around.

"We've played each other since juniors," he said. "Then the league. Every year. I know how he skates. I know how he takes a hit. I know what his face does when he's about to do something stupid." His voice was level and he did not look at Ilya once. "I'd know if it wasn't him. That's why it's me. There isn't anybody else in that building who would."

It was true. Every word of it was true, and Ilya sat in his chair and heard under it a hotel room, the curtains, the light on the carpet. If you wanted. His own voice saying something about the bus, and Shane not laughing, and Shane saying it again, flat: You never let me stay. And Ilya, who could have said yes, saying instead, You never ask like you mean it, and Shane picking up his jacket, and the door.

Mara looked at Shane for a long moment with her bag over her shoulder.

"All right," she said. "Day after tomorrow."

When they were gone and the bolt was turned, Shane stood at the door with his hand on it.

"That was—" he said.

"Yes."

"I couldn't—"

"I know." Ilya got up. His hands found the arms of the chair and pushed, and the room did not tilt. "You would know if it was not me. You said."

He went into the smaller room. There was a door and he had not used it, in four days, and he used it now, not shut, not quite, a hand's width of dark left open. He lay down on the mattress for the first time. He turned to the wall. Behind him, through the hand's width, he heard Shane not follow.

He lay there with his eyes open. His wrist was doing whatever it was doing. He did not check.

The knife went in wrong.

The opener had done its work and stopped an inch short, the way it did on the tins with the rolled seam, leaving a ragged tongue of lid standing up, and Shane had gone at the tongue with the knife to lever it back. Ilya heard it before he saw it: the lid giving all at once, the blade skating off the rim, Shane's breath going in through his teeth. Then the smell. It arrived as a direction, and every part of Ilya that had learned to point in five days pointed across the room at the side of Shane's left hand, where the first finger had opened along the knuckle and the blood was coming up bright and fast and living.

He was on his feet. He did not remember standing.

Shane had the hand up and away from the food, a reflex, and was looking at it with the small flat frown he gave to anything that had failed to behave. "It's fine," he said. "It's small. It just needs—"

Ilya put his palm out. Flat, fingers spread, the sign they had agreed on the first night. He backed. Two steps, three, until the frame of the doorway to the second room was against his shoulder blades and the smell was a little less of a direction and a little more of a fact.

"Ilya—"

"Don't come here."

"I'm not. I'm not moving." Shane's voice was even. His eyes were not; they had gone very dark and very still. "Okay. You're over there. I'm here. Tell me what's happening."

"You know what is happening."

"Tell me anyway."

Ilya's jaw did not want to. He made it. "I want to." The words came out thick, uglier than he meant, and he let them. "Right now. You cut your hand and I want to. So don't tell me it is fine."

For a moment Shane did not say anything. Ilya watched him look at the blood running into the crease of his palm, and past it, at nothing, and could guess what he was setting against it: two days of pulse, Mara's dry voice saying something changed and I want to know for how long. Then Shane said, carefully, "You didn't move toward me."

"No."

"You moved away. You put your hand up. You did the thing we said." He was speaking slowly, and he was being fair, which was worse. "That's not nothing, Ilya. That's something. Yesterday you were warm. You're warmer than yesterday. You've had a pulse two days. You ate with a spoon this morning. It's better than it was, you can't tell me it isn't better—"

"I am not telling you that."

"Then what—"

"I am telling you it is not gone." He heard his own voice go up and brought it down. "Better is not gone. You want it to be gone because it is easier, and it is not. It is here. It is in the room with us."

Shane looked at his hand. He looked at it for long enough that Ilya thought he might have won, and then Shane said, "You'd never."

"Wash it," Ilya said. "Wash it and cover it. Now. Go."

Shane went. He did it in order, without wasted motion: the basin, the carried water, the little bottle from the kit, the roll of white tape. Ilya stood in the doorway and did not watch, and then watched, because the alternative was to watch the door to the stair instead. The smell thinned under water and soap. It did not go. He had learned in five days that very little went.

When Shane had the finger wrapped, he pressed the end of the tape flat with his thumb and it held. He sat back on his heels and looked across the room.

"Okay," he said. "It's covered. Can I—"

"Stay there."

He stayed there. He put his taped hand flat on his knee and kept it there, and Ilya hated that too.

"You are going to say it again," Ilya said.

"Say what."

"That I would never."

"You wouldn't."

"I did."

He had not planned to say it, not today, not with the smell still in the room, and now it was said.

"Before," he said. "Before you came. I don't remember all of it. I remember enough." His hand had found the door frame and was holding it. "I remember that it was not hard. That is what I remember. That it was not hard to do."

Shane's mouth opened. "That wasn't you. You weren't—"

"Don't."

"You didn't know what you—"

"Don't." It came out in Russian first, one word, and then again in English. "You were not there. You do not know what it was. You want to give me something, and you do not have it to give, so don't."

The room was quiet. The drop of water Ilya had been half-listening for since the first day did not fall, because it was a different building, and he noticed himself listening for it anyway and was, distantly, annoyed.

Shane had gone still. He looked at the tape on his finger. He looked at the basin, the pink water in it. He looked at Ilya, and the look went on for a while, and Ilya let it, because Shane was looking at his face and not at his wrist.

"You want me to say it could happen," Shane said.

"Yes."

"That you could. To me."

"Yes."

A long breath, out through the nose. "It could happen."

Ilya had to look at the floor for a moment.

"Okay," Shane said. His voice had changed. It was lower and it had lost the fairness, and Ilya liked it better. "Then I don't get to decide where I stand. You do." He waited. "Where do you want me."

"There."

"Here."

"There. Not closer. Not tonight."

"Okay." He did not move. "And the food?"

"Eat it. In there." Ilya jerked his chin at the far corner. "I will not watch."

"You'll have to eat too."

"Later."

"Ilya."

"Later. When it is not—" He did not have the word. "Later."

Shane nodded once. He got up and took the tin and the spoon and the knife and went to the corner Ilya had pointed at, and sat with his back to the wall where Ilya could see all of him, and did not look up while he ate, which Ilya understood was for him.

Ilya stayed in the doorway. His shoulder blades knew the frame now. Behind him was the second room and his blanket and the window with the board over it, and to his left, past Shane, was the door to the stair, and he had been looking at it for some time before he understood that he was looking at it.

"If I go," he said.

Shane's spoon stopped.

"If I go tonight. Then it is decided." He made himself keep his eyes on the door. "For you also. You do not get to—" He stopped there.

The spoon did not move. Shane's eyes had come up and stayed on him.

"No," Shane said finally. "I wouldn't get to."

Ilya nodded. He did not say he would stay. He did not know whether he would.

He stayed in the doorway, and Shane ate, and neither of them said anything else for a long time, and the tape on Shane's finger stayed flat.

Shane changed the tape on his finger at the far side of the room with his back half turned. It was the sixth day. Hayden would come at the hour and carry back to the school whatever Shane told him, and Ilya, in the chair by the door, watched Shane press the end of the tape flat, and watched his lips move once, without sound, and thought: he is practicing.

"Say it," Ilya said.

Shane's hands stopped. "Say what."

"What you will tell him. When he asks again. You are saying it in your head. Say it out loud so I can hear how it sounds."

Shane turned around. He looked at Ilya for a moment, and then he said it, level, the way he had said it to Mara: "I've played against him since juniors. I know how he moves. I'd know if it wasn't him."

Ilya let it sit in the room.

"Tell him also I am very hard to skate against," he said. "For the report."

Shane did not laugh. He stood there with the roll of tape in his hand and looked at Ilya, and Ilya heard what he had just done, in the quiet after it.

"That," Shane said. "That's the bus."

"Yes."

"You did it in the hotel and you did it just now."

"Yes. I know." Ilya looked at his own hands, the left one, the one he lifted. "I looked at the door two nights and let you see me look." He made himself look up. "Tell him we were sleeping together."

Shane's jaw worked.

"You told him you would know my face. He has that. Tell him you have had it in your hands."

"That's not the part they're asking—"

"It is the part you left out. I sat here and listened to you leave it out."

Shane looked at the shelf for a while. Then he tried it, low, to the shelf: "Before this. Ilya and I were—" He stopped. He put the tape down. "I can't say it to a shelf."

"Then say it to him. Not to me. I know already."

Shane nodded. It took him a moment. Then, still to the shelf: "I told you it was better. Yesterday. You put your hand up and told me it wasn't gone, and I gave you a number."

"Yes."

"I'm not going to do that again. I might. I'm not going to mean to."

"Okay," Ilya said.

Hayden and Mara came at the hour. The supply exchange was short: two jugs in, one out, the tape gone, the cracker bag half eaten and reported on. "A spoon yesterday, two this morning, it stayed," Shane said, and Mara wrote it down, and looked at Ilya, and Ilya said, "Yes," and she wrote that down too.

Then Shane said, "Hayden," and Hayden, who had been reaching for the empty jug, straightened up.

"Before this," Shane said. "Before March. Ilya and I were— We were together. Not together. We were sleeping together. For years, on and off, more on. In hotels, mostly. Nobody knew. Nobody was supposed to." His voice was level and he did not look at Ilya and he did not look away from Hayden. "That's why it's me. Not because I'd know his face. Because when this is over, whatever over is, I want to be with him. Out loud. That's the answer I didn't give you."

Nobody moved for a moment. Mara's pencil had stopped.

Hayden put the empty jug down on the table with some care.

"So," he said. He rubbed his jaw. "So everything you've told me for six days about how he's doing. I've got to re-weigh all of that now."

"Yes."

"Because you're not a guy who knows what he looks like. You're a guy who—" He stopped, and looked at Ilya, and Ilya looked back, and Hayden said, more quietly, "Yeah. I get it." He turned back to Shane. "That's a worse answer for them, you know that. That's a lot worse."

"I know."

"It's a better one for me." He said it flat. "But I'm not the one deciding. So."

"It changes who watches him," Mara said. She had not looked up from the notebook. "Not whether. I'll do the reporting from here on. Shane can tell me. I'll tell them." She looked at Ilya. "If that's all right with you. It's your body they're deciding about."

"Yes," Ilya said. And then: "Not him. You. When I am— when it is bad. You check."

Shane's head came up. He did not say anything. Ilya did not look at him. It was not for him.

"All right," Mara said, and wrote.

"So here's the practical part," Hayden said. "Clearance starts the day after tomorrow, first light, from the arena end. I'm here before it's light and we walk to the school. Surface. It's not far." He looked at Ilya. "Can you walk it."

"Yes."

"And if the street's bad? If they've pushed a bunch of them up our way?"

Shane said, "Under. Through the arena. The service level."

"That's back toward the clearance."

"It's under the clearance. Different thing."

Hayden did not look convinced. Ilya, who knew the building and had known it since before either of them had been allowed in it, said, "Storage."

They looked at him.

"Storage corridor. Second landing. Goes through. Comes out the far side, by the loading." He moved a hand: down, along, up. "Door sticks."

"Sticks how bad," Hayden said.

"Shoulder."

"Great."

"It is a way," Ilya said.

Mara closed the notebook. "Then here's mine. After the pickup, he doesn't go in with everyone. There's the annex. It's got its own door and its own key and a window that faces the yard. They've been using it as the sick room; it empties the day after tomorrow, which is the other reason it's the day after tomorrow and not tonight. I'll put it to them: observation there, weeks, not days, and I'm the one in and out. One week with nobody but me and Hayden. Then we look at it, and we keep looking every three days." She looked at Ilya. "That's a room with a lock on the outside. I'm not going to pretend it isn't. Do you agree to it."

Ilya thought about the second room, and the hand's width of dark he had left open, and the door to the stair he had looked at for two nights.

"Who has the key," he said.

"I do. And Hayden. Not Shane."

"Then yes."

Shane made a small sound, and stopped it.

"Good," Mara said, and stood, and began to put her things back in the order they had come out.

Hayden had gone to the shelves. He came back with the cracker bag, already mixed, and a spoon, and held them out to Ilya, not to Shane, and stood there until Ilya took them.

"Go on," Hayden said. "She wants a number."

Ilya ate a spoonful of it. It was crackers and milk powder and water, a paste, and it tasted of very little, and of the bag, and he swallowed it, and it stayed, and three living people watched him do it, and the hunger was where it always was, at the back, patient, and he ate a second one anyway.

"Two," Mara said, writing. "Witnessed."

On the seventh day he was cold before he was out of the door.

Not the old cold, which had not been cold at all but an absence he had only understood afterward. This was the other kind. It came in at the wrists where the grey sweatshirt stopped short and it came in at the neck and it made his shoulders want to climb, and he stood at the top of the stair with the door open on the grey street and did not, for a moment, know what to do with the information.

"Here." Shane had the canvas jacket off and was holding it out. "You're going to argue and I'm going to stand here holding it, so."

Ilya did not argue. The jacket was warm inside from Shane and smelled of him, and the hunger noticed, and Ilya put his arms in the sleeves anyway.

The plan was small. Two blocks toward the school, to the corner where Hayden had said there were usually a few, and see. See whether Ilya could walk it. See whether they still looked through him, because if they did, tomorrow's plan had a shape: Ilya ahead, checking each corner and doorway and waving the two of them up when a stretch was clear, the one man on the street the dead would not turn toward. Shane would stay at the doorway of the first building with the gun and not come out unless he had to, and Ilya would go down the block alone, and turn around, and come back, and then they would know something.

It went wrong at the first corner.

He felt it before he saw it, and that was the wrong part: he felt it. Six days ago he would have walked into the middle of them and felt nothing but their nearness, the way you feel furniture in a dark room. Now there were three of them in the mouth of the side street, standing in that slack unplaced way, and one of them turned its head.

It turned its head and it looked at him. Not through. At. Its face found a direction, and he knew from the inside what that felt like.

Ilya stopped.

The second one turned. The third had been facing the other way and was slower, and Ilya watched it register the change in the other two before it registered him, and then all three of them were pointed at him, and one of them took a step, and its foot dragged on the pavement with the drag he knew from the inside, his own for six months, and he understood with his whole body that he was on the wrong side of that sound now.

He backed up. He did not run. He knew, still, how slow they were. He knew how slow he had been. He backed up one step at a time with his hands where he could see them, and when he reached the doorway Shane's hand closed on the jacket at his shoulder and pulled him in and the door shut and Shane's back went against it.

They stood in the dark of the hall and listened to nothing come.

"They didn't follow," Shane said after a while. His voice was very controlled. "They're slow. They lost you."

"Yes."

"Okay. Okay. So that's—"

"It looked at me."

Shane stopped.

"It looked at me, Shane. It knew. I was—" He did not have the word. He put his hand flat on his own chest, over the college's name, where something was going now that had not gone a week ago. "I am on the other side. To them. I am one of you."

Shane was quiet for a long moment. Ilya waited for it, the reasonable thing: one corner, three of them, maybe. Shane did not say it.

"Then the surface is out," Shane said. "For you. It's out."

"Yes."

"Okay." A breath. "Then it's the storage way. Under. We tell Hayden when he comes."

That was all. Ilya stood in the dark hall with his hand on his chest and his back against a wall he could feel the cold of, and found that he had been braced for an argument. There was none. He stood there braced anyway.

They went back up the stair. His legs did not want to, and he made them.

Hayden came at the hour and was told, and said, "Well, shit," and then, after a moment, "Under. I'll be here before it's light. You're going to want to be at the dock by first grey, because they start at the far end at first light and it'll push everything this way." He looked at Ilya. "You good for a flight of stairs and a corridor."

"Yes."

"You weren't good for a corner."

"Corner had them in it," Ilya said. "Stairs do not."

Hayden looked at him, and then at Shane. "Fine," he said. "Before light."

When he had gone, Shane washed. He did it without being asked, at the basin in the corner with his back turned, and Ilya sat in his chair by the door in Shane's jacket and did not watch and then did. The sweat came off him into the water. The smell thinned. Ilya breathed, because now he did, and it was easier.

Shane dried his hands and came and sat down on the floor with his back against the table leg, where he had sat on the third day, so that his eyes were level with Ilya's hands. He did not say anything. He seemed to be waiting to be asked.

"After," Ilya said.

Shane looked up.

"Tomorrow. If it goes. Then the room with the lock, and Mara, and weeks." He turned the cuff of the jacket over and back. "And after that. If there is. What is it."

Shane did not answer right away. He looked at Ilya's hands and then at Ilya's face, and took a breath.

"I want to be with you," Shane said. "I don't know what it's called here, or where it goes, or if they'll let it. I want to find out with you in the room. Not in a hotel. Not on the phone. In the room." He stopped. "I've had six months to look for a better answer."

Ilya sat with it.

Then he took his hand out of the jacket cuff and reached down and took Shane's hand off Shane's knee and held it. Shane's fingers closed around his.

"I am cold," Ilya said.

"Yeah."

"All the time. Since yesterday. Is this what it is."

"Every day. Nobody likes it."

Ilya kept his hand. Outside, the light went. He thought of the three of them at the mouth of the side street, still standing there, probably, with their faces pointed at nothing now that he had gone; and then he stopped thinking about them, and held on harder, and that was the seventh day.

Hayden came before it was light, and by the time it was grey they were at the dock, and by the time they were at the dock it had already gone wrong.

He heard it first: what the clearance was doing, a sound like a slow tide in the streets beyond the arena, feet and more feet, a whole population of the dragging tread he had lived inside for six months being pushed, block by block, toward the only open ground in this part of the city, which was the square between the arena and the school. Hayden went up the alley to the corner and came back with his face set.

"Surface is gone," he said. "It's a wall. Under."

The dock door had not latched right since spring; Hayden knew where to lift it. It let them into the dark of the bottom passage, the smell of oil and standing water, and the last thing Ilya saw before Shane pulled the door to behind them was the grey square and, at the far side of it, the shapes beginning to spill into it.

"Up one," Hayden said. "Then it's yours."

They went up. The stair was the same stair, the concrete, the cold rail he could feel now; Ilya went first because that was still the order, and behind him Shane, and behind Shane Hayden with the pipe, and the sound of the three of them was too much, was the loudest thing he had heard in a week. At the second landing the door said STORAGE. He put his hand on it, and it did not give, and he put his shoulder in it, which he had known for seven days he would have to do, and it gave, all at once, with a sound that went down the stairwell and up it and did not stop for a long time.

"Great," Hayden said.

The corridor beyond was low and long and dark. Pipes overhead. Along the left wall the floor stepped up onto a concrete lip the height of a stair, a loading platform running the length of the passage, and the carts were parked along it, the wheeled steel kind, some on their sides, one with its rail snapped off and the stub of it standing out over the edge. Shane turned the lantern up. It showed them twenty feet of concrete and then black.

"Straight through," Ilya said. "Then the door."

"How far."

"Far. Stay off the ledge."

They went. Ilya first, one hand along the right-hand wall because his legs had learned yesterday that they could stop being his; Shane behind him with the lantern in his left hand, the taped finger wrapped round its handle, and the gun in his right; Hayden last, with the pipe. Ilya could hear Shane's breathing. He could smell it, the work already in it, the thing Mara had made him say out loud on the fourth day, and the hunger sat up at the back of him and paid attention, and he kept walking. He had walked through worse than wanting. He had done it for six months without a single thing to walk toward.

Behind them, at the landing, something came through the door he had opened.

He did not need to turn. He knew the sound. So did Shane; the lantern jerked. "Keep going," Shane said. "Don't— keep going. They're slow."

"They are slow," Ilya agreed, and kept going.

The corridor bent. It had not bent in his memory, and then it had, and there was the door: steel, a bar across it at waist height, a scuff at the bottom, the kind that opened outward when you pushed the bar and swung shut on its own weight. He put both hands on the bar and pushed, and it went out into another passage with a line of grey at the end of it, and the air that came back at him was outside air, and he had not known how much he wanted it.

Behind them Hayden said, "Ah—" and there was the sound of a man going down onto concrete.

Shane was past Ilya in one movement. He set the lantern down on the floor just inside the door, where its light lay back along the corridor, and put his back against the open door to hold it, and brought the gun up in his right hand toward the dark where the dragging sound was, and he could not hold the door and cover the corridor and go back.

Ilya went back.

It was not far. Eight steps, ten. Hayden was down below the ledge with his left leg folded wrong beneath him and his face grey at the edge of the lantern's reach, the pipe rolled away against the platform, and he was already trying to get up and already failing.

"Did it get you," Shane said from the door. His voice cracked on it. "Hayden. Did it—"

"Ankle. Left. I stepped off the ledge, he said stay off the ledge, I— it's the ankle. Nothing bit me. Nothing's near me." Hayden's teeth were shut. "Go. Get him through. Go."

Ilya did not go. He got his right arm under Hayden's and pulled, and Hayden was heavy, and Ilya's arm had spent six months lifting nothing and had not been asked for this since, and Hayden came up anyway, and his left foot touched and he made a sound and his whole weight came onto Ilya at once. Ilya's right hand went out to catch them both and closed on the snapped stub of the cart rail.

The pain was immediate and exact: a line drawn hard across the palm below the fingers, then heat, then wet. He had not felt anything so specific in six months. He looked at his hand. There was blood across the palm, his own, bright, living, and he stood for one half of one second looking at it, with Hayden's whole weight on his shoulder and the dragging sound coming up the corridor behind them, because he had bled.

"Rozanov," Hayden said. "Move."

He moved. He got Hayden's left arm across his shoulders and his own arm round Hayden's back and took a step, and Hayden's good leg took one, and it was slow, slower than the things behind them, and Ilya's legs told him plainly that they had done enough for one week and he told them plainly that they had not. Ten steps back toward the light on the floor. The corridor was longer going back than it had been going forward. Shane had the door with his back and the gun with his right hand and his eyes on the dark past Ilya's shoulder.

"Come on. Come on, come on—"

"Don't shoot," Ilya said. His breath was going. He had breath to go, now. "Noise."

"I know what noise—"

"Then don't."

Five steps. He could smell Shane fully now, the sweat and the fear in it, and the hunger stood all the way up, and Ilya carried a man past it with his hand bleeding and did not look at Shane's throat, and that was the hardest thing he did that day, and no one saw him do it.

Shane put the gun in his jacket. He kept the door with his shoulder and reached with both hands and got Hayden's right arm, and the three of them went through sideways, in a knot, Hayden's left foot dragging, and Shane hooked the lantern off the floor with two fingers as he came, and let the door go. It swung and hit the frame and latched. A moment later something arrived on the other side; Ilya heard the weight go onto the steel, high up, and stay there, and the bar was not pushed. Leaning on the panel, he supposed, the way the first one had leaned on the stairwell door, with the bar at its hips and no idea what a bar was for.

They stood in the far passage breathing.

"Shoulder," Hayden said, eventually, to the ceiling. "You said shoulder."

"Yes."

"You didn't say ledge until we were on it."

"I said it before you were on it."

"Barely."

"Great." He was shaking. So was Ilya. So, Ilya saw, was Shane, who had both hands on Hayden and was not looking at anyone.

The far dock let them out into the grey. It was the wrong side of the arena, the quiet side, a service street with nothing in it, and beyond it the school's fence, and beyond that a low brick building set apart from the rest with a single door in it, and a woman standing in the door with her hands already moving.

Ilya did not remember the walk across. He remembered that his legs stopped at the fence and that Shane's arm came under his, and that his right palm was bleeding onto the grey sweatshirt and onto the sleeve of Hayden's jacket, and that Hayden was saying it's the ankle, it's the ankle, nothing bit me, over and over to Mara in the doorway, and that Mara said, "I heard you the first time, sit down," and then looked at Ilya, and at his hand, and said, "That's a good sign. Bring him in."

He was brought in. The door had a lock on the outside. Mara shut it from the inside, and turned it, and put the key in her pocket, and knelt in front of him with a basin, and asked him whether she could touch his hand.

Mara put gloves on before she touched his hand, and said why.

"You're not cleared. You bled today, and I want to know where it went before I decide it doesn't matter." She had already looked: Hayden's sleeve, where it had soaked the canvas and gone no further; Shane's hands, which she had turned over one at a time and checked, the tape on the left first finger still dry and whole under its edge. "Sleeve. Tape's intact. Nothing on anyone's skin that was open. I don't think it matters anymore and I'm not going to act like I know that." She turned the palm to the light from the yard window. "Right hand. It's clean. It's deep on one side. This is going to hurt. Tell me if it's more than you can hold still for."

It hurt. He let it. The annex room was whitewashed block, two cots, a crate, a window onto the yard with a wire grille over it, and it smelled of bleach and, under the bleach, of the sick people who had been in it. Across it Hayden sat on a cot with his boot off and his foot up on a crate and told the room what he had seen, in order, without looking at anyone in particular: the wall of them in the square; the door; the corridor; his own foot going off the edge of a platform he had not known was there; a dead man who was not dead coming back ten steps for him with things behind him in the dark, and getting him up, and bleeding, and not stopping. He said it plainly. He said "he came back for me" twice, and the second time he heard himself and stopped, and said, "Anyway. That's what I saw."

Then Shane told his part, standing, with his back to the door: the pulse, the corner, the things Mara already had in her book. And then the thing she did not have. "I cut my hand on the fifth day and he wanted to, and he told me so, and he put his hand up and walked away from me, and I told him it was fine. It wasn't. I want that written down with the rest." He stopped there, and looked at Ilya, and waited, and Ilya understood that there was one more thing and that Shane was not going to be the one to say it.

"Before," Ilya said. To Mara, because she had the pencil. "Before he came. I fed. Like them. I do not remember who. I remember that I did." He kept his voice level and it cost him. "You should have that for your book."

Mara looked at him for a moment. Then she wrote it down, and did not write anything after it, and did not say anything to soften it.

"Thank you," she said, to the three of them. "That matches." She had been checking Shane against Hayden, Ilya realized, and both of them against what she had seen with her own hands.

By the time she had finished with the palm, and then with Hayden's ankle, and then with the palm again because the first dressing had soaked through, the light had moved across the yard and the room was warm with it. Hayden's radio spoke twice and he answered it. Then Mara sat back on her heels.

"The clearance went through the arena at midday," she said. "They sealed the visiting level. There's nothing left in there to go back for." She said it to Ilya, and waited, and when he nodded she wrote that down too. "You stay here. This room, that yard, me in and out. Hayden when he can walk. Not Shane, for the first while."

"How long is the first while," Ilya said.

"A week with nobody in here but me and Hayden. After that you and I sit down every third day and I tell you where you stand and you tell me where you disagree, and if the hunger has done nothing new and you're still eating, we widen it: he visits with me in the room, then without. That's the whole of it. I've written it down and you can read it." She peeled the gloves off. "Ask me one thing. I know there's more than one."

He thought. There were a great many.

"Where does he sleep."

Mara looked at Shane, and Shane looked at the floor.

"In the main building. Where he's been sleeping since spring." She said it without softening it. "The rule is that you're observed by people who aren't him. That's the rule that gets you in the door. He knows it."

"I know it," Shane said.

"Yes," Ilya said. And then, because it was the truth and she had asked him and not Shane: "I don't like it."

"Good," Mara said. "Neither does he. Sleep now."

He did not, right away. When Mara had gone with Hayden leaning on her, and the door was locked from the outside and the key was in her pocket, Shane stood where he had been standing and did not go.

"I have one more," he said.

Ilya waited.

"I came there to kill you." He said it to the room first, and then he made himself say it to Ilya's face. "Not to see. Not to find out. I brought the gun and I picked the hour and I came to do it, because I thought it should be me and not somebody who didn't know your name."

Ilya looked at him for a long time. The dressing on his palm had begun to throb in time with his own pulse, which he was not yet used to, and he put his other hand over it, and the door behind Shane had a lock on the outside.

"I know," he said. "I saw your hands."

"Ilya—"

"I would have wanted it to be you." He had not known that until he heard it. "Before. If I had known what I was." He turned the dressed hand over, and the dressing pulled, and he looked at that instead of at Shane. "And you did not. I am glad. I am also—" He did not have the English for it, or did not want it. "Ask me in a week. She says a week."

Shane nodded once. He did not say anything else. He went to the door and knocked twice and once, and after a moment it was opened for him, and he went out, and it was locked again, and Ilya lay down on a cot in a room with a lock on the outside and slept, which he had been doing, badly, since the fourth night, and this time did not wake until the yard was light.

The annex was three weeks.

He learned it a day at a time, and by the second week he had stopped counting and by the third he had started again, for a different reason. The first week was Mara and Hayden and the yard. The second, Shane came with Mara in the room, and sat on the far cot, and said very little, and came again. The third, the door opened on Shane alone. He ate. Small, then not small. He slept, badly and then less badly. He was cold in the mornings and told Mara so and was given a second blanket, which he considered a victory. The palm closed and itched and closed further. The bite on his forearm did not change at all, and he stopped expecting it to.

People came who were not Shane. Mara, twice a day, with her cloth and her pencil and her questions. Hayden, on a crutch and then on a stick and then on his own bad foot, swearing, with the radio at his collar and an opinion about the yard's drainage. A man from the building he did not know, who brought water and looked at him for a long moment and then said, "Raiders fan, sorry," and left. He was asked things. Whether the yard door should be barred at night, and by whom. Whether he would take a turn at the fence in the mornings, when he was cleared. Whether he wanted the window open. He answered. His answers got longer. He asked things too. Whether the relay reached Moscow. It did not; it reached a town north of Montreal and stopped, and Mara, with the pencil above the page, asked who. "Svetlana," he said. "Sveta. She is—" He did not have a category for her that would fit in a notebook. "Mine. From before everything. She knew about him." He tipped his head toward the main building. "The only one who did." Mara wrote the name down and did not promise anything.

The hunger got quieter, and then he stopped being able to find it. In the second week Mara changed the dressing on his palm with bare hands for the first time, and he noticed that her hands were warm, and noticed a moment later that that was all he had noticed. In the third, Hayden caught the back of his hand on the fence wire and swore and bled, a bright line of it across the knuckles, three feet from Ilya, and Ilya looked at it and reached into his pocket and handed him the cloth Mara had given him for his own hand, and nothing in him pointed anywhere. He stood at the fence afterward with that for a while. Then one morning he noticed that he was hungry for eggs, specifically.

In the third week, Mara said, with the pencil above the page, "There's a report from the east side. Not ours. One of them turned its head at a name." She wrote nothing. "That's all anyone's got. I'm telling you because you'd want to know, not because it means anything yet."

"Yes," Ilya said. "I would want to know."

She looked at him. Then she closed the notebook.

"Tomorrow," she said, "they'll want to talk to you about a room."

The room had been an office. It still had the nail holes where somebody's certificates had hung, and a radiator that did nothing, and a window onto the yard with the fence beyond it and the low brick shape of the annex beyond that, so that he could stand at the glass and look at the place he had spent three weeks looking out of. There were two cots. There was a table with a drawer that stuck, which he had opened once and left alone since, on principle. There was a door with a lock on the inside, and a key, and the key was in his pocket, where Mara had put it that morning without ceremony, and said, "It's yours. Don't lose it. We haven't got a spare."

He had been in the room for an hour. He had not sat down.

Shane came at the hour he had said he would, and knocked, and waited to be let in. He had a jar in one hand and a pot in the other.

"Hayden says you've got the drawer that sticks."

"Yes."

"He says it's the only one on the floor."

"He would know."

Shane set the jar on the table. It was the coffee, the last of it, the lid screwed down hard. "We said we'd do it right," he said. "There's a burner in the kitchen they'll let us use for ten minutes if we're quick and Hayden vouches. I don't know if it'll be good. It's been in a jar since spring."

"It will be terrible," Ilya said. "Bring it."

It was terrible. It was also coffee, dark and dry and bitter, and he held the cup with both hands because his hands were cold and because he could, and he drank it at the table with the sticking drawer while Shane drank his standing at the window, and neither of them said anything for a while, and it was the best thing that had happened to him since March.

Shane put his cup down on the sill and looked at the cots. They were against opposite walls, where whoever had carried them in had left them. He looked at them for a while, and then he went and took hold of the end of the one by the door and began to pull it across the floor toward the window.

Ilya watched him.

"What," Shane said, not stopping.

"Nothing. It is a good wall."

"It's the wall away from the door."

"It is my wall. I have the fence at six. Mara cleared it." Ilya set his own cup down. "I will be up before it is light. I will be stepping over you."

Shane stopped with the cot halfway across the room. "Then I'll sleep on the door side."

"You have the runs with Hayden. You come back late."

"Then I'll step over you."

"You will not. You will stand in the door and decide the quietest way, and it will take you ten minutes, and I will be awake anyway." Ilya got up. His legs were his, mostly; they had been for a week. He crossed the room, and took the other end of the cot, and they carried it the rest of the way together and set it down under the window beside the other one, and stood back, and looked at what they had made, which was one wide bed with a seam down the middle, on Ilya's wall, with the table and its sticking drawer beside it.

"That's bad for stepping over," Shane said.

"Yes."

Shane rubbed the back of his neck. He was not looking at Ilya. "They put both names on the door. On the list. Hayden knows, Mara knows, the committee knows, because it was the answer I gave them. The guy who brings the water asked me and I told him." He looked up. "I'm telling you that first. Before you decide about the cots."

Ilya looked at the cots, which were decided.

"I am not in this room because there is nowhere else," he said. He picked his cup back up, because his hands wanted something. "I am here because I want to be here. With you. Out loud, you said. So. It is out loud."

Shane nodded once. Then he checked the seam between the cots with his hand, and pushed them a half-inch closer.

"Hayden's asked about Jackie," he said, to the cots. "Whether there's a way north, come spring. Mara thinks maybe. If there is, I want to try for Ottawa. My parents." He straightened up. "I don't know what your—"

"No way east." Ilya said it the same way. "Not for a long time. I know that. Alexei will have done what he does, which is manage. And Sveta—" He stopped. "Sveta knew about you. Before I did, almost. She will have decided I am dead by now, and she will be angry with me for it, and when there is a relay to Moscow she will say so."

"Okay."

"Ottawa, then. If there is a way. I will come."

Shane looked at him.

"Your mother will want to see what you have brought back," Ilya said. "It is only fair."

"Yuna," Shane said. "My mother's Yuna. My dad's David."

"I know their names," Ilya said. "You say them in your sleep. You have for years."

Shane opened his mouth, and shut it, and looked at the cots. Then he said, to the cots, "When there's a relay to Moscow. I'd like to be the one who tells her."

"She will not believe you."

"No."

"She will make you say it three times."

"I'll say it three times."

There was a knock, twice and once, and Hayden put his head in without waiting. He had a folded blanket under his arm and his bad foot in a boot that did not lace all the way.

"Your second one, from the annex," he said, and dropped it on the table, and looked at the two of them at the table and the coffee and the drawer. "Great," he said. "Okay. Good."

Ilya reached into the pocket of the grey sweatshirt and took out the player with the cord wrapped round it and held it out.

Hayden looked at it.

"Keep it," he said. "Jackie hates what's on it anyway." And went, and shut the door.

Ilya unwound the cord. He had done this before, at the annex window, with the volume as low as it went, and knew where the button was; he pressed it, and a woman's voice came out of the small speaker, thin and close, with a guitar under it, at a volume that would not carry past the door. He set it down beside the coffee jar. Shane looked at it, and then at the door, and then at Ilya, and blinked twice, and looked at the door again.

"He was never going to ask," Shane said.

"No."

"He said he would."

"He says many things. Jackie is wrong, also." Ilya came round the table, and Shane came to meet him, and for a moment they were only standing, an arm's length apart, in a room with both their names on the door.

"You waited in the corridor once," Ilya said. "After a game. Here. Your bus went and you were still standing by the sign, and I came out of the room and you did not say anything much, and I did not say anything much, and you got a cab."

Shane went very still.

"You asked me once if I wanted you to stay. I am asking you. Not for breakfast. There is no breakfast; there is a fence at six." He held out his right hand, the one that had closed, and Shane took it. "Stay. Tonight and the one after. I want you to."

"Yes," Shane said. "Obviously."

Ilya kissed him.

Shane's mouth tasted of terrible coffee. His hand came up to Ilya's face and stayed there, warm, and Ilya's were cold, and Shane made a sound about that against his mouth that was not a complaint, and outside the window the light went across the yard toward the annex and the woman on the player kept singing.

"I want to," Shane said, against his jaw. "You should know that before anything." He found Ilya's left hand, the one that lifted, and pressed it flat against his own chest, over the heart going hard there. "That still works. Any time."

"I know it works."

"I'm saying it once so I don't have to keep—"

"You will keep. I know you." Ilya left the hand where Shane had put it and set the other, cold, against the side of Shane's neck, and felt the heat there and the quick beat under his thumb. "Yes. I want to. Ask me again when it is hard for you not to."

Shane laughed. It was a strange sound in that room, short and unpracticed, and Ilya wanted to hear it again immediately.

They ended up on Ilya's side of the seam, because that was the side they reached first, and stayed there, because moving would have meant letting go. The frame complained. The blanket that had been on the bed went onto the floor and stayed there. Shane's jacket went after it, and then the shirt under it, and Ilya, who had seen this body across a faceoff dot since they were both too young to be looked at, put his hands on it for the first time since the hotel and found that it had changed: harder through the shoulders, leaner everywhere else, a long white mark below the ribs that had not been there before. He put his thumb on it. He did not ask. There would be time.

"Yours," Shane said, and meant the sweatshirt, and Ilya let him.

The sweatshirt went over his head and onto the floor and there he was, in the light from the yard window, and he did not look down for a moment, and then he did. His skin had color in it now, not much, the pallor of a man kept indoors since spring. The bite on his forearm was a closed pale wrong thing, and Shane's mouth went to it without hesitating, and stayed there, and Ilya's breath caught and did not come back for a moment.

"Don't," he said.

Shane lifted his head.

"Not don't. I don't— it is fine. It is—" He did not have the word. "Do it again."

Shane did it again. His mouth was hot on the scar, and wet, and Ilya could feel the shape of it, the lips and then the edge of teeth, not biting, resting, on the place where teeth had gone in and taken him out of the world; and what went through him was not fear and had no name yet, and he let it go through.

They lay down because standing had stopped being possible. Ilya on his back, because his arms would not hold him up for long and he knew it now; Shane over him, on his elbows, careful of the healing hand without being asked, and then not careful, because Ilya took the hand and put it where he wanted it on Shane's back and pressed, and it hurt, a little, an ordinary amount, and he kept it there.

Shane kissed him. It went on. It had coffee in it, and under the coffee the taste of Shane's mouth, which Ilya had not had in his own since the hotel and had, it turned out, kept somewhere exact, because he knew it at once. Shane's chest came down against his and it was hot, all of it, a furnace of a man, and Ilya's hands were still cold and Shane made a sound about that against his mouth that was not a complaint, and pressed down harder, and Ilya felt himself get hard against Shane's hip, and stopped.

He stopped everything. Shane lifted his head.

"What."

"Nothing." His voice had gone strange. "Nothing. I am—" He could not say it. He moved his hips instead, once, so that Shane could feel what he was feeling, and watched Shane feel it.

Blood went there. That was all it was. Blood went there, which meant it was moving, which meant the thing in his chest that Mara had counted with two cold fingers on the fourth day was doing its plain job, pushing him around his own body, all the way out to the end of him. He had not thought of it. In three weeks of eating and sleeping and being cold he had not once thought of it, and now it was the only thing in the room.

"Yeah," Shane said, very low. He had not looked away from Ilya's face. "Yeah. That's— yeah."

"Shut up."

"Okay."

He did not shut up; he put his mouth on Ilya's throat instead, and then lower, the notch of the collarbone, the flat of the chest where the cross lay, and moved the cross aside with his nose and put his mouth where it had been. The first sweat came up at Shane's temple. Ilya saw it in the yard light before he felt it under his thumb, and stopped, and looked at it. Then he felt his own. It came up on his upper lip and in the crease of his neck and along his ribs where Shane's hand was, a prickle and then a slide, the first time since March that his skin had done anything on its own, and it smelled, when he turned his head into his own shoulder, like himself. Not like the corridor. Like a man in a warm room.

Shane was working down him. He was not hurrying. He put his mouth on the ridge of a hip and his hand on the other one, and he pulled the track pants down and off with a practical two-handed yank that made the cot frame speak, and threw them at the floor, and then he stopped, on his knees between Ilya's legs, and looked.

Ilya let him look. He was hard, and it was ordinary, and it was the most extraordinary thing his body had done since March: a cock standing up off his belly because his heart had put it there.

"Still yes?"

It was hard for him; Ilya could see that. He put his good hand in Shane's hair, and it would not close all the way, but it could hold. "Yes. Do not ask again for a while."

Shane did not. He put his mouth on him.

Ilya's head went back into the flat pillow and stayed there. He had been dead. He had been a thing that walked a corridor and pressed tape flat, and now there was a hot mouth on him, and a tongue, and the wet sound of it, and Shane's breath going out of his nose against the crease of Ilya's thigh in short hard pushes, and the scratch of a day's beard on the inside of his leg, and his own hips coming up off the cot without his permission and Shane's forearm coming down across them to hold them there. He made a sound. He had not made it since a hotel with the curtains drawn against the morning, and Shane heard it and made one of his own, around him, and the sound went into Ilya through the place where Shane's mouth was.

His hand in Shane's hair could not grip and did not need to. He held on with the flat of it. The room was warm now; that was Shane, the radiator did nothing. It smelled of coffee and sweat and wool and the two of them, of sex, the plain human stink of it that he had not smelled since the hotel and that arrived now as the best evidence he had been given yet. The window fogged at one corner. The frame creaked under them in a rhythm Shane's mouth was setting. Somewhere down the corridor a door shut and neither of them cared.

"Shane," he said. "Shane. I am going to—"

Shane did not lift his head. His hand came up and found Ilya's on the cot and pressed it flat, and Ilya came like that, into Shane's mouth, with his cold hand pinned under a hot one and his back arched off the seam of two cots in a room with a lock on the inside, and it went on longer than he remembered it going on, and he heard himself the whole time, and did not stop the sound.

Shane came up him slowly afterward, mouth and then chin and then the whole weight of him, and lay along Ilya with his face in Ilya's neck, exactly where a bite would go. Ilya thought it. He felt Shane go still in the same place, for half a second, and did not know what Shane was thinking and did not need to; he said, "Yes," to the stillness, and Shane breathed out against him and stayed.

Shane was hard against his hip. Ilya got up onto one elbow to reach him, and held there for a few breaths, and the arm went, and he let himself down, and reached instead from where he lay, and got his hand around Shane's cock, hot and heavy and slick at the head, with a grip that was more forearm than fingers. Shane's whole body jerked.

"That's— yes, that." Shane put his own hand over Ilya's to show him the pace, and then took it away and let him. "Like that."

So Ilya did it like that. His forearm burned. He did not stop. Shane's breath came against his neck in the rhythm of the hand and then faster than it, and his hips began to move into Ilya's fist on their own, and the sounds he made were small and shocked and not in any language, and Ilya turned his head so he could watch Shane's face do what it never did, which was everything at once, mouth open, eyes shut, the fixedness gone out of it. When Shane came it was across Ilya's stomach and hip, hot, and Shane shook, and said Ilya's name into his neck like something he had been holding in his mouth for six months, and Ilya held the back of his neck with a cold hand until he had finished shaking.

Afterward the seam was a problem, and there was the matter of Ilya's stomach. Shane found the cloth Mara had given Ilya for his hand, on the table by the jar, and used it, and did a bad job, and Ilya let him. Then Shane went to get the blanket off the floor and came back with it and lay down again facing him, on Ilya's side of the seam, where there was not enough room for two men and a blanket, and they made room.

Ilya lay and looked at him.

Shane's eyes were shut. His hand had come to rest on Ilya's chest, open, palm down over the breastbone, and it lay there, and after a while Ilya understood from the weight of it that Shane was asleep. He was asleep with his hand on the chest of a man who had wanted to eat him three weeks ago. Ilya lay there in a room with both their names on the door and let the hand be heavy.

He looked at the ceiling for a while. His heart was still going hard, and he lay and listened to it, and did not count.

He was cold. Shane had, in his sleep, rolled and taken the blanket with him, and was lying on most of it, and the part that was not under him was not on Ilya either. The other blanket was where Hayden had dropped it, on the table, across a cold floor.

He took hold of the blanket's edge and pulled. Shane, asleep, made a small offended sound and did not wake, and the blanket came, and Ilya got it over the both of them and tucked the end under his own cold shoulder where it would stay. Shane's hand on his chest did not move. Shane's face came the last inch across the pillow until his forehead was against Ilya's jaw, and stayed.

Ilya lay there under his half of the blanket. In the morning there was a fence at six. He shut his eyes.