You shoulder the door in with a grunt. It sticks, then gives, throwing you into a room that smells like wet rot and mouse piss. Wind pours in behind you, dragging needles of snow across the floor. The wallpaper is curled back like old bark. The armchair in the corner has caved in on itself, springs bared like ribs.

“Clear left,” you say, because saying it steadies your hands.

Ellie steps in after you, boot heel knocking the door shut. She scrapes ice off her sleeve with a knife and does a quick sweep: corners, ceiling, under the broken table. Rifle up, then down. The quiet settles. You hear only the house complaining—wood shifting, a slow drip somewhere in the walls.

“No spores,” she mutters, tapping the filter on her mask out of habit and leaving it on her belt. “Lucky us.”

You edge to the window and put two fingers under the duct-taped pane. The glass rattles. Through the rip of torn curtain, the yard is a white blur, fence lines swallowed, the world beyond reduced to sound: wind and the far-off bark of something you hope is only a dog.

She shoulders past you and wedges a cracked dresser up against the door. The weight makes her grunt. It’s not sarcasm in her voice that gets you—it’s the way she fills the space without asking, like this is the only reasonable way to be alive: choose the next right thing, do it, then choose again.

“Two rooms and a closet downstairs,” she says. “Stairs are fucked. We’ll take this one.”

You nod. Everything feels like a test with her—how you carry your weight, how hard you breathe, how quickly you reach for your knife. It’s not that she’s cruel. It’s that she pays attention like it might buy you both another hour.

The cold settles its teeth in your wrists, then your elbows. You try to work blood into your fingers, flexing, fist to palm. Your breath keeps snagging in that small, embarrassing way that turns into a cough if you let it.

Ellie notices that, too.

“You okay?” she says.

“I’m fine.”

“Sure,” she says, zero warmth. Then she peels her jacket off in one move, not looking at you while she does it, because looking would make it a thing. She holds it out.

You stare at it, at the beat-up leather gone soft along the seams, at the repaired tear by the cuff where the thread doesn’t match. Her shirt under it is thin and stained, and even like this, even shaking off a day that should’ve sent you home, she’s built like coiled wire.

“Take it,” she says.

“I said I’m—”

“You’re not,” she says. Not loud. Flat. “Don’t be stupid.”