Chapter 4 Two Strangers, One Ghost

POV: Wren

"You're late," he says, before I've even turned all the way around.

"I'm exactly on time." I check my watch to prove it, even though I already know I'm right. "Maybe your clock's fast."

He's tall in the kind of way that makes a kitchen feel smaller without him doing anything on purpose, and he's looking at me with an expression I can't read yet, something careful, something measuring, like he's already deciding what kind of problem I'm going to be. I don't love being measured before I've said three words.

"Captain Gideon Cole," he says, holding out a hand.

"Wren Calloway."

Something moves across his face when I say my name. Quick. Gone before I can be sure I saw it at all. He recovers fast, hand still out, waiting, and I shake it because not shaking it would be its own kind of statement and I'm not ready to make one yet.

"Welcome to 14," he says. "We run tight here. I expect my medics to follow command on scene, no exceptions."

"I'm not one of your firefighters, Captain. I answer to my protocols. Not your radio."

"On my scenes, you answer to both."

"We'll see about that."

Behind me, Reyes makes a small noise into his coffee mug that might be a laugh he's trying to swallow. Cole doesn't look at him. Doesn't look away from me either. There's a stillness to him that bugs me, the kind that makes you want to say something just to break it, and I almost do, except Patel chooses that exact second to announce the morning truck check needs doing, and the room scatters into motion before either of us can finish whatever we just started.

The shift moves fast after that, the way new places always do at first, everyone watching to see if you'll keep up. I keep up. I always keep up. By midmorning we've run two calls, a fall at a grocery store and a minor burn from a kitchen fire that turned out to be nothing more than burnt toast and a panicked elderly man who apologized eleven separate times for wasting our time. Cole runs the second call from the doorway, arms crossed, watching me work instead of hovering, which I respect more than I expected to and resent for the exact same reason.

"You're fast," he says afterward, loading the gear back into the rig.

"That a compliment or a complaint."

"Observation."

"Fine. Observe quietly next time. I don't need narration."

He almost smiles at that. Almost. I catch the corner of it before he kills it, and something about watching him fight his own face is more satisfying than it has any right to be.

By early afternoon the kitchen's gone quiet, most of the crew scattered to chores or naps, and I go looking for restock supplies because my kit's down two rolls of gauze and I'd rather fix that now than discover it mid call later. The supply room is at the end of a hallway that smells like bleach and old cardboard, shelves stacked floor to ceiling with bins labeled in handwriting that isn't mine, isn't anyone's I recognize yet.

I find the gauze on the third shelf, behind a box of nitrile gloves shoved in crooked enough that it's clearly been disturbed recently. I pull the box out to get to what's behind it, and that's when something slides loose from the gap between the shelf and the wall, falls, lands flat on the floor by my boot.

A page. Torn along one edge, like it got ripped out of something thicker instead of removed on purpose. I almost leave it. Almost just kick it back where it came from and move on with my afternoon, because it's not my supply room and not my mess to clean up.

I don't leave it.

I pick it up because that's what I do, fix small wrong things even when nobody's watching, and I'm three sentences into reading it before I understand it's not a maintenance log or a supply order or anything as boring as I assumed it'd be.

It's a structural assessment. Half of one anyway, the rest torn away with it, cut off mid paragraph in a way that makes my stomach turn slightly before I even know why. Building name redacted with a thick black line somebody drew by hand. A list of clearance signatures, most of them smudged past reading. One badge number still legible at the bottom corner, four digits, the first two matching nothing I recognize and the last two close enough to something I do that my hand goes still around the page before my brain catches up to why.

I tell myself it's nothing. Old paperwork left over from whoever used this supply room before, some routine call that went fine, filed wrong, forgotten in a gap between two shelves for who knows how long.

Then I see the date stamped in the corner, faded but not faded enough, ink gone gray instead of black but the numbers still readable if you know exactly what you're looking for.

I know exactly what I'm looking for.

I've known that date for two years the way you know your own birthday, the way it sits in your chest whether you want it there or not, and my eyes go to the time stamp printed beside it almost without my permission, my own breath gone shallow and fast in a room that smells like bleach and cardboard and absolutely nothing that should be making my hands shake this badly.

The date on the torn page matches the night David died. Down to the hour.