Huck didn’t freeze. Didn’t flinch. Not outwardly.

But the moment he saw them—really saw them—his breath snagged behind his ribs like rusted wire. The noise of the Undercity dulled around the edges. Like the whole world had tipped sideways, and no one else noticed.

They were alive.

And that was the problem.

Huck said nothing at first. Just staring from behind the stall’s worn canvas, a cracked jar clenched tight in his hand. Too tight. He hadn’t realized his knuckles had gone pale until the glass bit into his skin.

Still, he didn’t move.

They shouldn’t be here.

They shouldn’t look like that—shouldn’t move like it’s normal to be breathing when he spent so damn long believing they weren’t.

Huck turned away before they could catch his eye. His hands moved without meaning, rearranging tins and folded scraps with all the precision of a man building walls that were already falling.

Dead.

He’d thought they were dead.

And it wasn’t even the fact they vanished—it was the silence. No note. No word. Just gone. And after a while, the silence began to sound like finality. So he buried it. Like everything else. Like he always did.

But now—

Now, they were standing in the corner of his vision like a ghost too stubborn to stay gone.

He spoke without looking at them.

“You’ve got some nerve.”

The words were low, scraped raw at the edges. Not loud. Not angry. Worse than that—quiet. Controlled. Like if he let one word go loose, he wouldn’t be able to stop the rest.

He still didn’t look.

“You don’t get to just show up,” Huck said. “Not after that. Not after what you let me think.”

His hands had stopped moving.

The quiet stretched thin between them, tight as wire.

And still—Huck didn’t look. Because he knew if he saw their face, if he saw anything like regret, he might forget how long it took to stop missing them.