The King: T'Challa.

Chapter 30: A Solution?

The city had hollowed out.

Emily stood in a doorway off Pier 86 and watched the river move as if nothing had happened. There were boats at their moorings with lines slack and no hands to tend them; a jogger's water bottle lay bleached and forgotten on a bench; wind chased takeaway cups down an empty avenue. On the steamed-over window of the shuttered café beside her, someone had finger-painted a question that had since run in the rain: WHERE DO WE GO? NOW THAT THEY'RE GONE.

Everybody had tried answers—governments with their censuses and briefings, faith leaders with their vigils, grifters with their cures. The truth was simpler; they learned to do without. And they did it badly.

Steve chose not to wear the suit any more. He folded chairs and made coffee and listened. The church basement smelled of bleach and stale biscuits; a circle of metal chairs swallowed too much space.

"So," said the man opposite, working both hands around a paper cup, "first time I've let someone buy me dinner in five years." He offered a diffident smile. "Didn't know what to say."

"What did you end up saying?" Steve asked, not pushing, just steady as a cleared path.

"Oh, you know. Work. The Mets. How it's too quiet some days and too loud on others. Then the food arrived and he—" the man's voice thinned—"he cried. Right there, over the rocket leaves."

Emily watched the corner of Steve's mouth tip. "And you?"

"Dessert got me." He looked embarrassed, then defiant. "We're doing it again tomorrow."

"That's something," Steve said. "Bravest thing you'll do all month, probably."

He let the room breathe. He didn't preach, not really; he just offered a way of thinking that felt like permission. Later, when the chairs were stacked and the light flicked off, he stepped out into the weak winter sun with Emily and a dozen more variations of grief behind them.

"You could tell him it gets easier," Emily said.

He shook his head. "I can tell him it's different."

They split at the kerb, and by early afternoon Emily was back at the compound, climbing a corridor that had been modern when it was built and already felt like a ruin. Natasha sat at the end of the briefing table with a sandwich untouched and the dregs of tea. The projector behind her cast soft maps over the far wall, muted and sluggish, as if even data found it hard to move.

"You know I'd offer to cook," Emily said, leaning against a bookcase, "but you look like you'd call the police."

Nat huffed a laugh that was mostly breath and dragged a thumb under one eye. "Are you here to do laundry or intervene?"

"Bit of both."

"Your timing's terrible." She lifted the sandwich and put it down again. "I keep telling myself if I put enough pins in a board, something will give."

"Maybe not everything needs a pin," Emily said, easing into the chair beside her. It was not a rebuke. They both knew what work meant when work was all you had.

"Once upon a time," Nat said, looking at her own hands, "I had nothing. Then I had this. It made me better. They're gone and I still wake up trying to be that person." She smiled without humour. "Self-improvement by attrition."

Emily squeezed her fingers. "You were better long before you met any of us."

Before Natasha could answer, Steve shouldered in, rubbing at his jaw with his glove. "You'll laugh," he said, not expecting anyone would. "Hudson's clearer than I've ever seen it."