Chapter 2

Melissa woke at 5:47am the way she always woke — not gradually but all at once, some combat-wired circuit in her brain that had never learned peacetime. Ceiling. Window light. San Diego morning gray bleeding through the blinds.

Then she remembered.

She lay still for a moment listening. The apartment had a silence she’d calibrated over three years — the refrigerator’s hum, the neighbor’s plumbing, the marine layer muffling the street traffic. She knew every frequency of it.

Something was different.

Not wrong. Just different. A smell. Coffee, which she hadn’t made. Something else underneath it, warm and savory and not immediately placeable from the bedroom.

She transferred to her wheelchair with the efficiency of long practice — board under her thigh, weight shift, three seconds — and pulled on a t-shirt. Didn’t bother with the prosthetics. She never did first thing. The stumps of her thighs rested against the cushion and she wheeled to the door and opened it.

Megumi was in the kitchen.

She was standing at the stove in a simple gray top and dark pants — she’d found the clothes Melissa had ordered for her, found them and put them on without being told, which meant she’d located the second bedroom closet sometime in the night. She was making something in the large pan, moving with the unhurried economy of someone completely at home in a kitchen, and the apartment smelled like miso and rice and something green and fresh Melissa couldn’t name from the doorway.