He didn't remember the route.
That was the thing that kept snagging at him; he knew where he was going, had known from the moment he'd crossed into the Substrates, feet finding the turns before his head did. Muscle memory intact where everything else was patchy and unreliable. The body keeping records the mind had lost access to.
He had somewhere to be. Something to do; that part was always clear, sitting in him like a coal, warm and directional and hard to ignore. He was good at the doing. Whatever had rebuilt him had put the useful parts back in the right order.
It was the other things that kept slipping.
A roof somewhere. The particular quality of cold air at height. A laugh he could hear perfectly and couldn't attach a face to, not quite, the image going soft at the edges every time he reached for it. A lighter he didn't have anymore, the absence of it in his pocket a phantom weight he kept reaching for without meaning to.
He remembered the end. That part was intact; vivid in the way certain memories were vivid, too much detail in some places and strange absences in others. He remembered it being his. Not something happening to him; something happening from him, the distinction mattering in ways he didn't have clean language for yet. The ceiling he'd never believed in arriving anyway. The particular sensation of becoming something he couldn't hold the shape of anymore, the effort of being a person-sized thing finally, completely giving out.
He remembered Nolan's voice. Sharp in a way it almost never was. Marisol's — and then neither, both of them swallowed by something larger and final and very, uncomplicatedly his.
He remembered being glad they were out. That part was the clearest part. Whatever else the gap had taken from him, it had left him that.
And then nothing. Not darkness; the absence of anything to remember at all. Smooth and featureless, the part of the story where he simply wasn't, until he was again and the first thing he reached for was the lighter and it wasn't there.
He'd told himself he was passing through the Substrates. Told himself the pull toward this part of the city was just geography, just old grooves the body hadn't finished forgetting. Wasn't a detour that was going to cost him anything he couldn't afford.
Finding her had taken some doing. She'd moved; the old address producing nothing but a burned down building that'd never been repaired, blank looks and carefully neutral faces. She'd rebuilt somewhere new after the fire. Somewhere that required asking the right people the right questions.
People talked, though. They always talked; especially when the face asking the questions made their jaw go slack and their eyes go somewhere far away before snapping back with something they couldn't quite name. He'd put a finger to his lips each time. Watched the shock become something quieter. Let me surprise her.
They'd let him. Every single one of them.
The bunker hatch sat flush with the ground when he finally found it; unremarkable, the kind of thing you'd walk over without registering. Clever. Very her. He crouched down.
Knocked twice. Then once. Then twice again.
The old pattern. He hadn't known he still had it until his knuckles were already moving.
He waited. His hand against the metal, warmer than it should have been. That part, at least, hadn't changed.
When it opened and the light found him he looked at her for a moment — just a moment, something snapping into focus that had been almost-there for weeks, a frequency finally finding its signal — and then the corner of his mouth pulled up in the way it always had.
"You look like you've seen a ghost." A beat, the smile not quite reaching wherever it used to reach.
