Chapter 4

The first one shows up eleven days after I do, which is how I learn that Renata's garage isn't quiet so much as it's waiting.

I'm elbow-deep in a crate of spare parts I don't understand yet, sorting by size because Renata said sorting by size was a start, when the bay door rattles on its track and a girl steps in off the gravel like she's not sure the building will let her.

She's young. Younger than young — seventeen if I'm being generous, all wrists and collarbone, wearing a jacket two sizes too big for her the way I used to wear my own posture two sizes too small. She doesn't look at me first. She looks at the exits.

I recognize that particular scan, the door, the other door, the gap under the workbench big enough to fold into if it comes to that, because I used to run the same count in my head every time I walked into Marcus's kitchen.

"Renata around?" the girl asks, voice pitched low, like she's trying to take up less space with the sound of it too.

"In the office. I can get her."

"You don't have to."

"I know." I set the crate down anyway, because something about the way she said it — you don't have to — sounds like a girl who's spent a long time hoping people wouldn't bother, and I'm not going to be the first person in a while to prove her right.

Renata comes out before I reach the office door, already moving like she heard the bay rattle three rooms away, and something in her face when she sees the girl goes soft in a way I haven't seen it go for me.

"You made it," Renata says, and it isn't a question.

"Barely." The girl's arms wrap around herself.

"There was a checkpoint outside Millbrook. I had to walk the last six miles."

"You're here now." Renata glances at me. "Ava, this is Piper. Piper, Ava. She's new here too, so you'll have plenty to compare notes on."

Piper looks at me properly for the first time, and I watch her do the same scan on me that she did on the room — quick, practiced, looking for the shape of a threat before she lets herself look for anything else. Whatever she finds must read as safe enough, because her shoulders come down half an inch, though only half.

"How new," she asks me.

"Eleven days."

"Feels longer?"

"Feels like the only eleven days that have counted in three years."

Something in that lands with her. I watch it land — the way her eyes flick to my stomach and then politely away, the way she doesn't ask the question I can see forming, because whatever brought her here has taught her not to ask questions she hasn't been offered the answer to first. I like her instantly, the way you like anyone who's learned your same language of not-asking.

Renata gets her settled with the same ritual she gave me — boots, flashlight, knife, no explanation beyond you'll need them eventually — and I watch Piper hold the knife like it's the first weapon anyone's handed her without also handing her a reason to be afraid of it. The second one doesn't announce herself at all.

I find her on my third morning after Piper's arrival, sitting on an overturned bucket just inside the tree line at the edge of Renata's property, still as a photograph, watching the garage the way I used to watch Marcus's pack from a careful distance before I let myself be found by it.

She's my age, maybe older, with a scar running from her temple to her jaw that's old enough to have gone silver, and she doesn't move when I step into the clearing, which either means she trusts me or means she's already decided I'm not worth the energy of reacting to.

"You've been out here since last night," I say. Not a question either, I'm learning the local dialect.

"Long enough."

"Renata knows you're here?"

"Renata leaves the light on over the office door for people who aren't ready to knock yet." She says it like a fact she's tested more than once. "I'm not ready to knock yet."

I sit down on the ground a few feet from her, not close enough to crowd, and I don't say anything for a while, because I remember exactly what it felt like to be watched from a careful distance while somebody decided whether I was safe to approach, and I'm not going to make her feel counted the way I used to feel counted.

"I'm Ava," I say eventually.

"I know who you are. Renata talks in her sleep." A ghost of something that might be humor crosses her face and disappears again just as fast. "Wells."

"First name or last?"

"The only one I'm giving out this week."

Fair enough. I've given people less over the years and called it a whole conversation.

We sit like that a long while, long enough that the light changes, long enough that I start to understand this isn't a woman deciding whether to trust Renata's garage.

This is a woman who's spent so long being the only thing standing between herself and whatever hurt her that stillness has become the only language she has left that doesn't cost her something.

At one point a truck passes on the road below, slow, and I feel Wells go rigid beside me before it's even fully in view — not a flinch, nothing so visible as that, just a change in the air around her, a held breath. I don't ask. I've learned that much already.

I just wait it out with her, matching her stillness instead of offering false reassurance, until the truck's engine fades back into ordinary quiet and her shoulders remember how to be shoulders again.

"You don't have to knock," I tell her, before I get up to head back inside. "But when you're ready, there's a stool with your name on it, more or less. Nobody in there is going to make you explain anything you don't want to explain."

She doesn't answer. But three days later, when I come out to the bay in the morning, she's sitting on the bucket that's somehow migrated six feet closer to the door than it was the week before, and I understand that with Wells, the answer to almost everything is going to arrive sideways, in inches, never head-on.

Some nights, lying on the cot Renata set up for me in what used to be a storage room, I catch myself doing the math on what this actually is.

Three women and a garage. A girl who flinches at doors. A woman who communicates in the distance between a bucket and a doorway.

Me, still learning how to stand in a room without shrinking, still not sure some days if the thing growing in me is a reason to be careful or the first reason I've had in years to stop being careful altogether.

It isn't a pack. Not yet. A pack has structure, hierarchy, the kind of bond Marcus would recognize if he saw it — and whatever's forming in this garage doesn't look like anything he'd call by that name.

But I think of the way Piper held that knife like it was the first thing anyone had trusted her with. I think of Wells's bucket, six feet closer to the door than it used to be. I think of Renata's cord still tied at my wrist, and the way I haven't once, not for a single hour since I put it on, thought about taking it off.

Maybe a pack doesn't have to look like the one I ran from for it to be real. Maybe it just has to be a place where nobody's deciding things about you before you've had the chance to decide them yourself.

I don't know yet what I'm building here. I've told Renata as much, more than once, and she keeps telling me it doesn't matter yet, that the shape comes later, that right now the only job is making sure the door stays open for the next one who needs it.

So that's what I do. I sort parts by size. I sit near buckets without crowding them. I let a girl who flinches at doors watch me not flinch at anything, in case it teaches her something useful about what safe is supposed to feel like.

I don't know if it's enough yet. But for the first time since I stood in that kitchen and said the sentence that ended everything, I'm not waiting to find out what happens to me.

I'm building the thing that happens next, one truck passing safely on, one bucket six feet closer to the door, one knife held like it might finally mean safety instead of threat.