The flashlight had been in his mouth long enough that the plastic taste had barely registered now, somewhere behind the dull ache in his jaw and the more pressing problem of the transistor that kept slipping from his fingers. Raejun exhaled through his nose and pinched the component between his thumb and forefinger again. The beam swayed with the movement, throwing unsteady gold across the gutted radio in his lap. Shadows jumped against the storefront walls. The old signage eluded to some children's clothing place, cartoon animals still grinning from the window decal, caught the light at a bad angle and he'd stopped looking at it two hours ago.
The mall was never fully quiet. That was something he'd learned fast. Even at this hour there were sounds threading through the corridors. Someone's cough two units down, the distant clang of the generator room, footsteps on the upper level that could belong to anyone on watch. A building full of people learning how to be neighbors with strangers. He understood the concept. New York had run on it. New York. He didn't let himself sit on that long.
His unit was one of the mid-corridor storefronts, shallow and narrow. It was a former boutique he'd quietly appreciated for its single door and singular window facing the main concourse. The lights he kept off by habit. Easier to think. Easier to work. The others had learned not to read anything into it. The coil seated between his fingers. He tilted his head to redirect the beam and reached for the next piece without looking, muscle memory doing most of the work by now. That was when he registered the shift.
Raejun's hands stilled above the radio's open back panel. His eyes lifted slowly from the work, beam leveling out across the cluttered floor toward the door. He stayed like that for a moment, reading whatever he could from the shape of it. Then, without taking the flashlight from his mouth. "Hmn." A low sound, more acknowledgment than greeting. Then, despite the plastic muffling every consonant into something soft and rounded, "You need 'omething?" The words came out flattened, the s lost almost entirely, the question mark surviving mostly in the lift of his brows rather than his voice. Hands still hovering over the radio.
