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Buy it myself. With what?

I nodded like that was an ordinary sentence and not something I'd never once had to do.

"And if Alex tells you something's his," Nykos said, reaching past him for an apple, "check first."

"That's mine," Alex said.

Nykos bit into it.

I watched the whole exchange.

Stealing food from your own kitchen was another accepted custom here.

People were strange. Might have to go to the Citadel library, surely they have a manual on people.

Corian took us back through the common room and pointed to a smaller room across from the kitchen. "Washroom. Laundry goes in the basket; a custodian comes in twice a week to do laundry and clean."

"Nobody touches field gear unless you ask," Corian added.

He led me down a hallway off the back of the common room while the others stayed behind. Three doors along it, one opening into a storage room, another at the far end held a room with a long table and paperwork and one more door opposite.

He opened that one.

"This is yours."

I stepped inside and stopped.

The room was twice as big as the one I'd had in the Citadel. That was my first thought. My second was that I had no idea what to do with all the space.

A wide bed sat against one wall, more than enough for both me and Ashter to spread out and not fight over space, He was a blanket hog. A chest at its foot, a desk under one of two windows that looked over the back garden. A wardrobe. Empty shelves. Enough clear floor that Ashter could probably take shape without knocking anything over.

Halver had already set my duffel by the bed, the weapons case leaned carefully against the wall.

Corian crossed to a second door and opened it. "Bathroom."

I followed far enough to see a tiled room, a deep bathing tub, a washbasin, shelves built into the wall.

"Mine?" I said.

"Yes."

Something flickered across his face, there and gone before I could name it. Corian must have read something on my face, because he added, "It's the only bedroom with its own bathroom. We thought you'd rather have it than share the one upstairs with us."

"Thank you."

He paused at the doorway. I braced for another set of rules, some list of where I was and wasn't allowed to go.

Instead he nodded at the room. "Take whatever time you need. We're in the common room if you want anything."

Then he stepped into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind him.

I stood there for a while. The house settled into its own sounds around me. Footsteps crossed the common room. A cupboard opened somewhere. Alex said something I couldn't make out, and Nykos told him to shut up. None of them came back.

For the first time since Janus called me into his office, nobody was waiting on me to do anything.

The warmth at my wrist didn't settle with the rest of me. It thickened, then poured free, black smoke sliding from my sleeve and pooling on the floor. The vapor rolled and gathered itself the way it always did. He came together fast, faster than he had in Janus's office, like waiting even that long had cost him something.

He crossed the room in two strides and pushed his nose into the thin skin over my pulse, holding it there, his attention narrowed on the beat under his nose like he could count it.