“You’re up early,” Traig said.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
His gaze flicked past me toward the medical bay. “The clatterwing?”
“Cooper,” I said. “And he’s fine. Stable.”
“Cooper.” Traig tapped something on his tablet. “You named him already?”
“I did.”
He studied me with narrowed eyes. “I already took a quick look around. You reorganized the medical bay.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Traig lifted one brow. “Everything’s alphabetized.”
I’d forgotten about that. “It’s more efficient that way.”
“You don’t alphabetize.” He set the tablet down on the counter, his full attention on me now. “You group by frequency of use, and it drives me out of my mind. What happened last night?”
“I told you. The clatterwing?—”
“Cooper,” he said. “You told me about the bird. I’m asking about the alphabetizing.”
“It made sense at the time.”
“Why?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Or I did, but it wasn’t one I wanted to say out loud. Laina had been looking for a particular size syringe to give the bird sedation, and I’d pulled three wrong ones before finding the right one. Afterward, I’d thought it would be easier if they were organized in a way that made sense to someone who wasn’t me.
Traig was still watching me with that look he got when he was waiting for a person to admit something they didn’t want to name.
“The veterinarian who came last night,” I said. “She’s very organized.”
His expression didn’t change. “And?”
“And nothing. She does good work. Cooper’s wing is stabilized.”
The door at the far end of the hall banged open, and Drogar strode in, rain dripping from his hair and his coat soaked through. He was broader than me, louder than all of us, and he moved through the world like everything in it might be interesting if he looked at it the right way.
He spotted Sofia perched on the reception desk and his grin widened. “Brovish. Why does the emberkit guard the door like she waits for a mate?”
“She’s not guarding anything,” I said.
“She sits. She watches. She does not move.” He shrugged out of his coat and tossed it over a chair. “This is guarding behavior. Did someone new arrive last night? Please say it was a mate for Gerald. He grows lonesome.”
“Gerald is not lonesome,” Traig said from beside me. “He’s territorial. There’s a big difference between lonely and territorial.”
Traig was the most surface-fluent of all of us. He’d learned human systems, their paperwork, and the way they organized everything into categories and subcategories. He kept the league running because he understood how humans thought.
“He can be both things,” Drogar said with a shrug. “I’mboth things.”
“You’re neither,” Traig said. “You just don’t understand boundaries.”
“Boundaries are suggestions,” Drogar said with a lopsided grin.
Krem appeared in the doorway behind Drogar, juggling the clipboard he insisted on using instead of a tablet, two mugs of something that smelled like sprymint tea, and a bag of mail. He was the smallest of us, not quite seven feet tall, and the one humans found easiest to talk to because he smiled a lot and asked questions about everything.
