The three of us fell into step behind Maribel as she moved through the park’s outer paths toward wherever Shawn’s ho. The afternoon had settled into that particular Atlantic City. Wind through broken windows sowhere down the block. The distant, irregular sound of movent that you’d learned not to investigate unless it got closer. The low murmur of the community going about its business behind us, alive and functional in a world that had done its best to prevent exactly that.
"So you’re a senior mber here?" Cindy asked, falling into pace beside Maribel. "Like, officially?"
Maribel made a sound that was sowhere between a scoff and a laugh. "Not officially anything. Marlon just ant I’m one of the people who knows the full picture, the situation, the threats, the internal structure. Sa as Molly and Rico and a few others. It’s not a title. It’s just information."
"He trusts you though," I said. "That’s not nothing."
She was quiet for a step or two. "My father and Marlon used to fish together. They’d known each other for years before any of this happened." She turned a corner without breaking stride and we followed. "I knew Marlon from when I was younger but we weren’t close. By the ti the outbreak hit I was deep into college and had my own life going on. We reconnected when everything fell apart and people started grouping together." She shrugged one shoulder. "It just worked out that way."
"Hard to picture you in college," I said.
Maribel stopped walking. She turned around slowly and gave a look that could have stripped paint.
"What....?" she said.
"No...I ant—" I recalibrated quickly. "I ant I would have pegged you for soone more outdoors. Sports, maybe. Fishing with your dad. Sothing active and physical, not lecture halls and assignnts."
"You are making it worse," Cindy said quietly beside , exasperated.
Maribel stared at for one more second, then turned back around and kept walking. "I was in college. I was doing well, for the record." A short pause. "I also practiced Capoeira."
"Oh," I said, and sothing imdiately clicked into place. "That explains a lot actually. The way you were moving with that lance, the footwork, the angles to kill . I was trying to figure out what the base was and I couldn’t pin it down."
"S...She was trying to kill you?!" Daisy’s voice jumped up an entire register.
"It was a misunderstanding!" Maribel said imdiately, turning halfway back.
"She thought I was kidnapping Shannon," I explained.
"And your response to that suspicion was Capoeira moves with a lance?" Cindy looked at Maribel with what appeared to be genuine admiration.
"It wasn’t, I wasn’t doing Capoeira at him specifically," Maribel said, the words coming out slightly faster than usual. "I was using movent to control distance and angle while I had the lance, that’s all. The Capoeira is just how I move when I’m—"
"When you’re trying to kill soone," I said helpfully.
"When I’m in a high-pressure situation!" She turned around fully now and pointed at , then apparently decided engaging further was counterproductive and spun back around. "We’re almost there. Stop talking."
"I think she’s embarrassed," Cindy said softly, just loud enough for and Daisy.
Daisy nodded with a tiny giggle.
"By the way," Cindy said, raising her voice back to normal conversational level, "are you Brazilian?"
Maribel’s expression twitched. "It’s not because I practice Capoeira that I’m Brazilian."
"I know, I know," Cindy said easily, "but also, your colouring, your features, your hair. It all sort of fits the picture."
I glanced at Maribel with fresh eyes. She wasn’t wrong. Maribel’s skin was a warm amber tan, deep and even, the kind that looked like it had been built up over years of sun rather than applied by it. Her hair, dark and curly and substantial, caught the afternoon light in a way that made it look almost dark bronze at the edges. Her eyes were light hazel brown, which created this odd contrast that took you a mont to process the first ti you noticed it.
I’d noticed it. I just hadn’t said anything about it.
"I’m not Brazilian," Maribel said. "My mother is from the US. She t my father on vacation in Costa Rica. They fell in love, she moved, they got married, and here I am. Half Costa Rican."
"Half Costa Rican," Cindy repeated, like she was tasting the combination. "I don’t think I’ve ever actually t anyone from that background before."
"Neither have I," Daisy said genuinely.
"Well, Ryan?" Cindy turned to with that look she had.
"I don’t think so," I said honestly. "She’s the first."
At least the first person who looked like Maribel, that specific combination of features and coloring.
"I am not an animal at a zoo," Maribel said, stopping and turning around again with a look of profound exasperation aid at all three of us simultaneously. "Stop staring and analyzing like you’re filling out a form."
"We’re not analyzing," Cindy said, waving a hand. "If anything we’re appreciating. You’re genuinely really pretty, you know that?"
The bluntness of it seed to short-circuit sothing in Maribel. She opened her mouth, then closed it. The hard line of her expression softened by exactly one degree before she caught herself and looked away.
"W...Whatever," she muttered blushing. "Co on."
I found myself smiling a little as I followed.
It wasn’t hard to understand why that particular complint had landed differently for her. She’d ntioned it in earlier, the way people had treated her for being tomboyish, for not fitting whatever image they’d decided girls were supposed to project. The mockery that had followed her for dressing the way she dressed, moving the way she moved, caring about the things she cared about. That kind of thing accumulates quietly over years. You get used to carrying it, but you don’t forget it.
Cindy had just said it straight and ant it completely, and Maribel genuinely hadn’t known what to do with that. There was sothing satisfying about witnessing it.
Shawn’s ho wasn’t far, lucky for him it was part of the area their community had cleared.
It was well past noon Maribel knocked anyway.
"Shawn."
Silence.
"Shawn!"
She knocked again, harder this ti.
Still nothing.
"Step back," Maribel said, shifting her weight onto one foot. "I’m going to break it open."
"You’re going to—" Daisy stared at her, words apparently failing to complete the journey from her brain to her mouth.
Cindy and I stepped back without discussion, both of us curious enough to want to see how this played out.
Maribel raised her foot.
The door swung open.
"You’re not breaking anything today, you feisty woman," Shawn said, growling as he stepped out finally.
He looked, if anything, worse than the last ti I’d seen him. His hair was doing several different things simultaneously, with threads of grey running through the darker parts in a way that suggested it hadn’t t a comb recently. He was wearing a faded t-shirt that had given up trying to communicate what it used to say on the front, and below that — shorts. Just shorts. Legs fully on display, completely unannounced, in the open air of the Atlantic City afternoon.
Legs that none of us had asked to see and all of us were now stuck with having seen.
"Is that..." Cindy turned to slowly, the sentence trailing off as her eyes completed their reluctant top-to-bottom assessnt. "Is that the doctor you ntioned, Ryan?"
"I think the actual doctor might still be sowhere inside," Daisy said quietly from beside , her voice thoughtful and genuinely charitable, "and this could be soone else. Maybe a patient."
The silence that followed was exquisite.
Maribel burst out laughing.
Shawn turned the full weight of his glare onto Cindy and Daisy. It was an impressive glare for this hour of the morning, or afternoon, or whatever he was currently calling it.
Daisy made a small sound and grabbed my arm.
"Disappointing as he looks," Maribel said, pulling herself back together with visible effort, "this is our community doctor. Shawn."
"Doctor Shawn," he corrected, without warmth.
"There is a difference between him and Miss Ivy," Cindy said, thoughtfully.
"Yes," Daisy agreed softly, nodding.
I couldn’t argue with that. Ivy had a whole quality to her, composed, precise, the kind of calm that made you feel like things were under control even when they weren’t. Standing next to Shawn in his current state, that contrast was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Though to be fair, I wasn’t exactly in a position to judge people on appearances.
"Who’s Ivy?" Shawn asked, his gaze shifting between them.
"Our nurse," Daisy said with a small, warm smile.
Shawn produced a sound of profound offense. "Comparing to a nurse."
"Well," I said, "so far Ivy’s the one who’s actually treated my injuries, so the comparison isn’t entirely unfair."
He narrowed his eyes at . The calculation behind them sharpened as recognition clicked in. "You. You’re the boy who ca in with a gunshot wound."
"That’s . And thank you again for that, genuinely."
"You didn’t seem particularly grateful at the ti," he said.
"Ryan has a complicated relationship with accepting help," Cindy offered helpfully. "Also he gets defensive when people say anything about Ivy because he—"
"Cindy," I said.
"—has a very high opinion of her work ethic," she finished, with a smile that ant sothing slightly different than what she’d said.
I let it go. She wasn’t wrong, exactly, Ivy had patched up more tis than was probably a good sign, and she did it without asking too many questions or making feel worse about having needed it. That kind of person you protect, even just in conversation.
"Anyway," Shawn said, crossing his arms and leaning against the doorfra. "What do you want at my door at this hour?"
"It is the afternoon," Maribel said.
"Everyone has their own relationship with ti," he said simply.
"We don’t want to take much of it," I said, stepping slightly aside so Daisy was more visible and gesturing toward her glasses, the cracked lens catching the light in a way that made the damage look even worse than usual in direct daylight. "We’re looking for optical centers. Anywhere that might have had pre-orders sitting uncollected, spare stock, anything that might give us a prescription close enough to work for her. Do you know the area well enough to point us sowhere?"
Shawn looked at Daisy. At the glasses. At the single cracked lens she’d been managing with for longer than was reasonable.
"That must be genuinely unpleasant to live with," he said.
"It is what it is," Daisy said quietly slumping her shoulders.
"I’m a doctor," Shawn said, turning back to with the tone of a man setting the record straight. "I appreciate that you assu I have a comprehensive ntal map of every dical-adjacent facility in Atlantic City, but that is not a thing I have."
"Fair enough," I said. "We’ll figure it out ourselves."
What had I been hoping for exactly? A man who answered his door in shorts and answered knocking on the third attempt wasn’t necessarily a walking directory of local optotry services. We’d just have to cover ground the old-fashioned way.
"I didn’t say I couldn’t help," Shawn said.
Cindy tilted her head. "Really?"
"I know a few places. Not because I catalogued them, just because you pay attention to what’s around you when you’re moving through a city and trying not to get eaten." He glanced past us toward the street, sothing shifting in his expression to sothing more alert. "I assu you’re going now."
"That was the plan," I said.
He almost smiled. "Then wait. I have things I need to collect as well. I’ve been needing a good escort for a while and nobody here volunteers for the privilege of my company." He turned back into the unit without waiting for a response, already moving toward what I assud was wherever he kept clothing that covered more of him.
"You’re joking," Maribel called after him.
"I am completely serious," his voice ca back from sowhere inside.
"I’m not losing our only doctor to a scavenging run for reading glasses," she said, louder.
"We can handle it," Cindy said, glancing at Maribel with a reasonable expression. "Getting him there and back in one piece isn’t going to be a problem."
Maribel looked at her. Said nothing.
"You should co along as well, Maribel," Shawn’s voice floated back.
"Asking as if I hadn’t anything better to do," she grumbled.
"Well from now on you are Ryan’s personal guide," Cindy said.
"I am not following him everywhere!" Maribel said, loud enough for the whole building to hear, her face going visibly warm. "That is not what guide ans!"
"Nobody’s asking you to follow everywhere," I said. "But if you’re worried about Shawn getting into trouble out there, coming along makes sense. And honestly I wouldn’t mind having you around."
An extra hand, and soone as skilled as her was definitely welcod.
She looked at . The expression was hard to read for a second, sowhere between caught off guard and shocked. Then she scratched at her hair and looked away.
"It’s not like I have a choice," she muttered.
Two minutes later Shawn reappeared. He had, thankfully, put on actual trousers. His hair remained entirely unaddressed and his overall presentation remained firmly in the category of man who has stopped caring about certain things. But he was dressed, he was carrying a bag too.
"Right," he said. "Let’s go. And before anyone says it, glasses for the girl first, my list after."
"That was going to be my exact note," Cindy said approvingly.
"Thank you," Daisy said, quietly but genuinely.
He waved her off like gratitude was an inconvenience, but sothing in his expression softened just enough to be visible if you were paying attention.
I smiled and fell into step with the rest of them.
It was well past ti Daisy got a pair of glasses she could actually see out of.
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