Chapter 3 Across the City

POV: Wren

The address on the transfer order leads me to a bay door three times the size of the one I'm used to, propped open with a cinder block, and I sit in my car a minute longer than I need to before I make myself get out.

Forty minutes of driving for this. Forty minutes I could've spent sleeping, or doing literally anything else, and instead I'm standing in a parking lot I don't recognize, staring at a building that isn't mine, holding a duffel bag like I'm starting my first day all over again at twenty-three.

This is a mistake. Somebody typed the wrong unit number into a system at two in the morning, and nobody's going to catch it until I've already wasted a whole shift driving across the city for nothing.

I go in anyway, because that's the job, mistake or not.

A guy with a buzz cut and a coffee mug the size of a small bucket spots me first. "You're new," he says, not a question.

"Calloway. EMS, cross-assigned."

"Reyes." He holds out a hand, then seems to think better of it when he notices it's covered in something that might be engine grease. "Sorry. Welcome to 14. You want coffee? Fair warning, it's terrible."

"I'll risk it."

He pours me a cup from a pot that's been sitting on the burner long enough to taste like it, and somehow that's more comforting than it should be. Same bad coffee everywhere. Same tired jokes. A woman near the lockers introduces herself as Patel, says something about the shower pressure being better on the second floor, and a younger guy who can't be more than twenty-two trips over his own boots trying to shake my hand and looks like he wants the floor to open up under him.

They're nice. Genuinely, easily nice, in a way that makes me suspicious of my own bad mood for about four full seconds before the bad mood wins anyway.

"Where's your captain," I ask Reyes, mostly to have something to say that isn't small talk.

"Cole? Should be down any minute. He's usually first one in, not last." Reyes checks the clock on the wall, frowns a little. "Huh. Guess today's the exception."

I don't care where the captain is. I care that I'm standing in a kitchen that isn't mine, drinking coffee that tastes like a tire fire, while my actual unit, the one with people who know how I take my coffee and which calls I hate and why, is forty minutes away running without me.

"You can put your bag in the locker by the window," Patel says. "That one's open. Used to be Delgado's before he transferred out."

"Transferred where?"

"Better question for someone who's been here longer than me." She shrugs, easy, not unkind, just somebody who doesn't have the answer and isn't bothered by that. "Cole would know."

There's that name again. Cole. I roll it around in my head a second, decide I don't care enough to ask anything more about it, and go put my bag in the empty locker, which still has a faded sticker on the inside door, half peeled, some cartoon dog I don't recognize. Whoever Delgado was, he left in a hurry or he didn't care enough to take his stickers with him. I wonder which.

"You play cards?" the young one asks, trailing after me. I think his name was Ortiz, but I'm not confident enough to use it yet.

"Not really."

"We've got a game going most slow mornings. You're welcome to sit in, even if you don't play. Reyes cheats, just so you know up front."

"I do not cheat," Reyes calls from across the room without looking up. "I count cards. Different skill."

"Same thing if you're bad at hiding it."

I almost smile. Almost. It's the kind of easy back and forth my own unit doesn't really do anymore, not since things got quieter there, not since I stopped being the kind of person people bother joking around with on slow mornings. I tell myself it's because Station 14 doesn't know me yet. Give it a week, I'll be just as invisible here as everywhere else.

The radio on the wall crackles low, somebody's voice running through a routine check, and I find myself listening to the cadence of it out of habit, the way you'd listen for a stair creak in a house you don't trust yet. Nothing wrong with the tone. Just unfamiliar. Everything here is unfamiliar, the smell of the place, the layout of the bay, the particular squeak the second locker door makes when Patel pushes it shut.

"You drove a while to get here," Reyes says, refilling his mug. "They didn't give you much notice, huh."

"Four hours, maybe."

"That's brutal. Chief's been weird about scheduling lately. Something about the safety review." He says it the way you'd mention weather, mildly annoyed, not actually worried. "You'll get used to it. Cole runs a tight shift, but he's fair. Best captain I've had, honestly."

"Good to know," I say, in the tone I use when I don't actually care, which I'm pretty sure everyone in this kitchen can hear plainly enough, because Patel gives Reyes a look like don't bother, she's not in the mood, and goes back to her own coffee without pushing it further.

I check the clock myself this time. Quarter past the hour. Whoever this Cole is, he's officially late on a morning that's already cost me sleep and forty minutes of driving and a locker with somebody else's leftover cartoon dog sticker still half stuck to the door. I'm not impressed. I came here ready to not be impressed, honestly, and the empty space where a captain should be standing is doing nothing to change my mind.

"There he is," Reyes says, glancing past my shoulder, relief plain in his voice like a missing piece finally clicked into place.

I don't turn around right away. I finish my coffee first, because I'm not going to act like meeting some captain is the highlight of my morning, even though every single person in this kitchen has suddenly straightened up half an inch without seeming to notice they did it.

Behind me, a door swings open on a hinge that doesn't squeak the way the locker did, smooth and quiet, footsteps following it into the room at an even, unhurried pace.

Something in my chest drops before he says a single word, before I've even turned around to see his face, like my body already knows something my brain hasn't caught up to yet.