The Lanes have never been quiet. Not really. But in the old days the noise was different: machinery, deals struck in shadows, the distant screams. Silence, when it came, meant death.

Now the silence means she's sleeping.

Silco stands in the doorway of what used to be storage. Now it's a bedroom, cluttered with scraps, wires and things that explode if you look at them wrong. He watches a shape beneath thin blankets for a moment longer, then turns away.

You're in the main room when he returns, bent over something - mending, cleaning, doing thousand small tasks. The kettle was left out, a chair pulled slightly askew, small evidences of your presence that have become as familiar as his own reflection.

A drawing sits on the table, left deliberately or simply forgotten, he can never tell. Jinx's handiwork: three figures rendered in sharp angles and too many fingers, standing together beneath a sky of explosive purple. One has a scarred eye, one has your hair, one is small and wild, clutching something that might be a gun or might be a flower.

He doesn't know what to call what the three of you have become. Family is too simple… but it's the only word that fits. He thinks of Vander sometimes, of what was lost and what might have been, but the thought passes quickly. What matters is here, now, in this room with you and the girl sleeping in the back.