“Do you… do you want to go out with me?”

  The words left Mavis’s mouth too fast, as if they’d been shoved out by something inside her she didn’t fully control. She immediately wished she could grab them out of the air and stuff them back into her throat.

  Francis blinked. His smile, which had been soft and genuine only a second ago, froze on his face. The lights above them hummed. Water trickled somewhere in the hydroponics system, the sound suddenly deafening. The leaves of the pale plants looked too still, too fragile, like they were listening.

  Mavis felt heat creep up her neck. She crossed her arms, defensive. “Not like—” she started, and stopped.

  Francis’s eyes widened slightly, then flicked down, then back up. For one foolish heartbeat he looked… hopeful. Not the careful hope he’d carried around the bunker for months, like a bandage. This was something else: startled, personal, dangerous.

  He cleared his throat. “Out… with you.”

  “Outside,” Mavis blurted, too sharply. “I mean outside. Out—there.” She gestured vaguely upward, as if “there” wasn’t a sky choked with ash and a world turned to bones. “I meant… do you want to go outside.”

  Francis exhaled, a sound between a laugh and a sigh. His shoulders lowered, relief and something like disappointment washing through him so quickly he probably thought he’d imagined it.

  “Ah,” he said.

  Mavis narrowed her eyes. “What does that mean.”

  “It means,” he said, trying to keep his voice light, “I thought you were asking something else.”

  Mavis stared at him, mortified. “Like what?”

  Francis’s cheeks reddened. He lifted a hand and scratched the side of his head. “Nothing. Forget it.”

  “Tell me,” she demanded, but there was no venom in it now—just stubbornness and a sudden, alarming curiosity.

  Francis met her gaze, then looked away again, as if the overhead lamps had become painfully bright. “Like… out with me. Out with me, like… you know.”

  Mavis’s eyes widened. Her lips parted. For a second she didn’t speak because she had no words ready for the shape the conversation had taken.

  “Oh,” she said finally. Then, quickly, “No. I meant outside.”

  “I know,” Francis said, too quick, as if to spare himself the humiliation. Then he added, gentler, “But, um. Outside sounds good too.”

  Mavis’s embarrassment eased into something smaller and more tangled. It wasn’t that she hadn’t meant *that* question. It was that she hadn’t known she could. She hadn’t known she was allowed to want something like that. The moment her mind brushed against it, it felt like leaning over the edge of a cliff: thrilling, terrifying, and utterly unfamiliar.

  She swallowed and nodded sharply, as if this were purely tactical. “Good. Let’s go.”

  Francis hesitated. “Right now?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Now.”

  He glanced around the corridor. “You can’t just—”

  “I can,” Mavis cut in. Her eyes flicked toward the ceiling and beyond it, to the layered concrete, the rebar, the tons of earth that separated them from the surface. “But I won’t.”

  She turned to the side of the hydroponics corridor and traced the wall with her fingertips, feeling the way it held still under her hand. Then she turned back, jaw set. “We’ll use the proper exit. You said it matters. ‘Normal’ matters.”

  Francis’s expression softened. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “It does.”

  They walked together down the corridor, past trays of pale greens and faintly sweet, damp air, past workers who stiffened when they saw Mavis and then bowed too low. She pretended not to notice. Francis didn’t correct them; he only walked beside her, matching her pace, as if their steps were the most natural thing in the world.

  But Mavis noticed everything anyway. She noticed the way his shoulders tensed whenever someone’s eyes followed her too long. She noticed how he placed himself half a step between her and the nearest person without meaning to. Protecting them from her, or her from them—she didn’t know which.

  At the security checkpoint leading to an access lift, a guard straightened so fast his spine looked like it might crack.

  “Commander,” he said, voice stiff. He hadn't received any notice of a mission. "Uh—where are you headed?”

  Mavis stared at him long enough that his face began to shine with sweat. “Outside,” she said.

  The guard blinked, his gaze flicked to Francis in silent panic, as if begging for an alternative.

  Francis stepped in smoothly. “Surface reconnaissance,” he said, using the tone he’d learned from watching officers. “Just a short excursion. We’ll log it in the shift record.”

  The guard swallowed. His hand shook as he reached for a clipboard. “Yes. Of course. Do you need an escort?”

  Mavis’s eyes narrowed. The word ‘escort’ felt too much like ’guards’. Like ‘handlers’.

  “No,” she said, voice very calm. She had been trying to practice patience. Practice control.

  The guard nearly dropped the pen. “No escort. Understood.”

  He hit the button for the lift access. The lock clunked open.

  As the lift doors slid apart, a thin ribbon of cold air seeped through from above, carrying a stale smell of ash and metal. Mavis breathed in anyway, deeper than necessary. Francis noticed and said nothing.

  They stepped inside.

  The lift rose. The hum of the motor vibrated through their feet. Mavis stood too still, hands clasped in front of her, eyes unfocused as if she were already halfway out of the bunker. Francis stood beside her, glancing at the indicator lights, then at her, then back again. He looked like a man preparing himself for something he’d wanted and dreaded at the same time.

  Finally the lift slowed. The doors opened.

  A steel corridor led to the surface hatch. Another guard station, another heavy door. Two guards flanked it, their rifles held in a way that tried to look ceremonial but betrayed the nervous angle of their fingers.

  Mavis didn’t like the guns. She didn’t like how the metal seemed to hum to her senses—every atom of it a possible insult, every shot an attempt, however futile, to remind her she was unwelcome.

  Francis moved closer and spoke under his breath. “Ignore it. They’re scared. It’s… all they know.”

  “I’m scared too,” Mavis muttered.

  Francis turned to her, startled. “You are?”

  Mavis’s gaze stayed on the door. “Not of them.”

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  The guards unlocked it with a wheel-turn mechanism that squealed, then pushed it open. Light spilled in—not bright sunlight, not the kind from before the long winter, but a grey-white glare filtered through a sky thick with cloud and ash. The cold rushed down the corridor like a living thing.

  Mavis stepped forward and out.

  Francis followed.

  For a moment they stood on a concrete platform surrounded by snow-dusted rubble—the skeletal remains of what had once been a building above the bunker’s main shaft. Twisted rebar poked out of broken slabs. Ash lay in grey drifts like dirty snow. The air smelled sharp and dead.

  Mavis lifted her face to the sky, eyes half closing. Even through the pall, there was openness. Space. A sense of vertical distance that always made something in her chest loosen.

  Francis shivered beside her, adjusting his jacket. He looked around with the wary scan of someone trained to see threat everywhere. His breath fogged.

  Mavis glanced at him. “Cold?”

  “Yeah,” Francis admitted, trying not to seem weak.

  Mavis reached out, hesitated, then placed her hand on his forearm. She didn’t use her powers in an obvious way—didn’t conjure heat or manipulate air like a show. She simply thickened the air in a small bubble around them, reducing the bite of the wind, insulating them from the worst of it. The world outside still howled, but in their little pocket, the cold became tolerable.

  Francis’s shoulders eased. He looked at her hand, then at her. “Thanks.”

  Mavis removed her hand quickly, as if contact itself might betray her. “Come on.”

  She walked toward the edge of the platform where the concrete fell away into rubble and then into open air. There was a drop—nothing dramatic, but enough that a human would be cautious. Mavis stepped off as if gravity had no jurisdiction here and hovered midair.

  She looked back at Francis.

  He approached the edge, then stopped. He peered down, swallowed, then looked up at her again. He tried to smile. It came out thin.

  Mavis folded her arms. “What?”

  “I’m… not exactly great at this part,” he said.

  Mavis tilted her head. “You’ve never flown before?”

  Francis gave her a look that was half incredulous, half accusing. “No, Mavis. I have not.”

  Mavis’s mouth twitched. “But you’ve seen me do it a thousand times.”

  “Watching isn’t the same as… being the one not falling to your death,” Francis said.

  Mavis floated closer until she was right in front of him, face level. Her hair stirred gently in the insulated air bubble around them.

  “You trust me?” she asked.

  Francis held her gaze. His voice was quiet. “Yes.”

  Mavis stared at him for a beat longer, as if confirming the truth of it inside his body—the pulse, the microtremor of muscle, the warmth of breath. He wasn’t lying. He was afraid, but he wasn’t lying.

  “Okay,” she said. “Then come here.”

  She held out her hand.

  Francis stared at it. He could see her fingers, clean now, nails trimmed. Not the bloody, ragged hands from the days of her first rampage. He’d seen those too. He’d seen her crush a man’s arm like it was cardboard. He’d seen her disintegrate guns in midair, bodies into dust. And yet here she was, holding her hand out like a simple invitation.

  Francis put his hand in hers.

  Her grip closed around him gently—gentler than he would have expected possible. He could feel her strength waiting underneath like a coiled spring, but she held him as if he were something fragile she didn’t want to break.

  Mavis stepped backward into the air, pulling him forward.

  Francis’s foot left the concrete edge.

  His stomach dropped. His body screamed *no*. His fingers tightened instinctively around hers.

  He didn’t fall.

  The world simply… released him.

  He was suspended, weightless, held by nothing he could see. His other hand grabbed for her forearm. She let him, bringing him closer to her, turning him around as she pressed his back to her front.

  “Breathe,” Mavis said. “You’re okay.”

  Francis inhaled sharply, then forced the air out. His heart hammered. He looked down. The platform was already a few metres below them. Rubble and broken beams lay like scattered bones.

  He looked up instead—at the sky, vast and heavy. It felt wrong to be here. It felt like trespassing.

  “Ready?” Mavis asked.

  “Ready for what?” Francis croaked.

  Mavis’s eyes gleamed. “For outside.”

  Then she rose.

  Francis’s breath caught as the ground slid away. The ruined structure shrank beneath them. The bunker hatch became a dot. The landscape spread—ashen fields, frost-covered debris, broken roads leading nowhere. Far in the distance, jagged silhouettes of collapsed buildings stood like dead teeth against the grey horizon.

  The wind outside their bubble roared. Snow and ash swirled in streaks. But around them, the air remained calm, a pocket of quiet carried by her will.

  Mavis turned her head slightly, looking at Francis from the corner of her eye. “Still okay?”

  Francis’s voice shook, but he forced it steady. “Yes.”

  It wasn’t entirely true. He felt like his lungs didn’t know what to do without the ground. But he couldn’t bring himself to ruin the moment by asking her to stop.

  Mavis rose higher.

  The world became something distant and flat, a map rather than a place. Above them the clouds were thick and low, but she guided them along a gap where the ceiling of grey thinned and the air brightened.

  A small patch of blue appeared—pale, washed out, but unmistakable.

  Francis stared at it like it was impossible.

  “Mavis,” he whispered.

  “What.”

  “It’s… blue.”

  Mavis glanced up. Her face softened. “Yeah.”

  They drifted in silence for a while, flying not with the frantic speed she used in battle, but with a slow, controlled glide. She seemed to feel the currents without thinking. Francis clung to her arm at first, then slowly loosened his grip as the panic ebbed into cautious wonder.

  “I didn’t know you could do this,” he said finally.

  “Fly?” Mavis asked, amused.

  “No,” Francis said. “This. The quiet. Just… flying without killing anyone.”

  Mavis’s jaw tightened. Her gaze dropped toward the ruined land. “Neither did I.”

  She adjusted their direction, turning them along a ridge line dusted with snow. Beneath them a frozen river curved through the landscape, its surface cracked and dark. Here and there, blackened tree trunks poked up like spears.

  Francis’s voice was soft. “Do you like it?”

  Mavis didn’t answer right away. She watched the world pass beneath them. She could feel the air changing, subtle shifts in humidity and temperature like textures against her skin.

  “It makes me feel… free,” she admitted.

  Francis nodded slowly. “Me too.”

  Mavis looked at him then—really looked. He was still a little pale from fear, but there was a kind of light in him she hadn’t seen in the bunker. Up here, the usual roles felt blurred: he wasn’t the boy with guilt on his shoulders and she wasn’t the weapon everyone bowed to. They were just two figures suspended in sky.

  Mavis’s hand, still holding him, tightened slightly. Not in threat. In anchoring.

  “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly.

  Francis blinked. “For what?”

  “For making you scared,” she said. The words came out rough, scraped raw. “For… everything.”

  Francis swallowed. “Mavis—”

  “I don’t want to be alone,” she said, cutting him off, voice shaking with a fierceness that sounded like anger but wasn’t. “I don’t know how to be what people want. I don’t even know what I want. But I know… I don’t want to lose you.”

  Francis stared at her, and in his eyes she saw the moment he decided not to be careful.

  “You won’t,” he said quietly. “Not if I have any say in it.”

  Mavis’s breath hitched. She didn’t look away this time. She held his gaze, and the space between them felt suddenly fragile, like a glass surface that could crack if either of them moved wrong.

  Francis’s free hand lifted, hesitated, then touched her wrist lightly where she held him. The touch was so small it could have been accidental. It wasn’t.

  Mavis didn’t pull away.

  They floated there, suspended, the ruined world below and the blue patch above, as if they had found the only narrow strip of existence where the apocalypse couldn’t reach.

  Mavis leaned closer without realising she was doing it.

  Francis’s breath fogged in the cool air bubble around them.

  For a second Mavis thought: This is what I meant when I said ‘out’. Not outside. Not the sky. Something else.

  She stopped herself—her instinct for self-preservation kicking in, fear of naming the thing and watching it die.

  Instead she turned her head, abruptly, and gestured at the horizon. “Look.”

  Francis followed her gaze.

  Far away, beyond the grey, a line of sunlight broke through a gap in the clouds. The light spilled like molten gold onto a distant patch of snow, making it glow.

  “It’s still there,” Mavis said, almost to herself. “Even after everything.”

  Francis nodded. His voice was thick. “Yeah.”

  Mavis’s expression shifted—something hopeful, something hungry, something determined. She glanced back at him and the hint of mischief returned, a small echo of the girl who had once tasted chocolate for the first time.

  “Want to go faster?” she asked.

  Francis let out a startled laugh, nerves returning. “No.”

  Mavis smirked. “Too late.”

  She surged forward.

  Francis yelped—half terror, half exhilaration—as the world blurred beneath them. Wind roared outside the bubble. The sunlight line on the horizon drew closer. His grip on her tightened again, but now it wasn’t only fear. It was laughter, too, ripping out of him uncontrollably.

  “Mavis—!” he shouted, but the word was swallowed by speed.

  Mavis laughed as well—an unguarded sound, bright and startling against the grey sky. For that brief stretch of flight, she sounded young. Not ancient with violence. Not weighted with loneliness. Just alive.

  And Francis, clinging to her arm as the world raced by, realised something with sudden clarity:

  This—this was the first time he’d seen her happy. Not victorious. Not satisfied. Not fed. Happy.

  When she finally slowed, easing them into a gentle glide again, Francis was breathless, his face flushed.

  Mavis looked at him, eyes shining. “Okay?”

  Francis panted, then managed, “Never… do that… again.”

  Mavis’s smirk softened into something fond. “You’re lying.”

  Francis tried to glare, but it collapsed into a grin. “Maybe.”

  They drifted again in silence, the ruins below, the thinning clouds above. The air smelled faintly cleaner up here—less ash, more cold water and distant snow.

  Mavis’s fingers, still entwined with his, shifted slightly. Their hands fit together strangely well—her strength careful, his fragility accepted. Neither of them spoke of it, but neither of them let go.

  And for a while longer, suspended between a broken world and a patch of blue sky, Mavis allowed herself to believe Francis’s promise.

  That she wasn’t alone.