The crew fell back into its old shape faster than Ivy expected. Two weeks in, and the days had taken on a rhythm that felt uncomfortably familiar, jobs planned in the gap between buildings, coin split with the same casual fairness, evenings spent in the particular easy company of people who had known each other through the specific intimacy of shared risk. Greta was usually there. Cassian organized most of the work. A handful of others drifted in and out depending on what was needed. It should have felt like home. It mostly did, which troubled her more than if it hadn't.
GRT: You're quiet tonight.
They were sitting on a low rooftop overlooking the quarter, the evening settling into the particular blue dimness that came before full dark, and Greta had brought a bottle of something cheap that she was nursing slowly, the way she always had, never quite enough to dull her edges, just enough to soften them.
IVY: I'm thinking.
GRT: About?
Ivy considered how to answer that honestly, and found, the way she had found several times over the past two weeks, that honesty required excavating things she had not yet decided whether to look at directly.
IVY: Nothing important.
GRT: You used to be a worse liar.
The observation landed with more precision than Ivy expected, and she looked at Greta properly, the particular sharpness in her old friend's expression that suggested she had been paying closer attention than the easy rhythm of the past two weeks had let on.
GRT: You used to tell me everything. Or close enough to everything. Now you just sit there thinking about nothing important.
IVY: People change.
GRT: That's the second time you've said that without explaining what it means.
Ivy did not answer immediately. She thought about the small details that had been accumulating over the past two weeks, details she had noticed in herself without fully registering their significance until Greta's observation pulled them into clearer focus. She had hesitated, twice now, before taking a job that would have hurt someone vulnerable rather than someone who could afford the loss. She had found herself, during a job three days ago, calculating not just the most efficient path to the coin but whether the family sleeping upstairs would wake, would be frightened, would carry the fear of the intrusion longer than the loss of the coin itself.
She had not done that calculation, years ago.
She had not needed to, because the calculation had not yet existed in her, the particular moral architecture that had grown into her somewhere during the years she had spent becoming someone else, somewhere she could not now find without examining the thing directly.
GRT: You hesitated on the job last week.
Ivy looked at her sharply.
IVY: You noticed that.
GRT: Of course I noticed. I notice everything. It's why I'm still alive and half the others I grew up with aren't.
She took a slow drink, watching Ivy with the particular patient attention of someone waiting for an explanation she suspected would not come easily.
GRT: You used to be the fastest hands in this quarter. Fastest and least sentimental. Last week you stood outside that window for almost a full minute before going in. That's not the Ivy I remember.
IVY: Maybe I'm not her anymore.
GRT: Then who are you?
The question arrived the same way Greta's earlier question had arrived, simple and devastating in its simplicity, and Ivy found herself without an answer again, the particular silence of someone caught between two versions of themselves that refused to fully merge or fully separate.
She thought of Astra, somewhere finding her light again.
She thought of Lisa, somewhere tending a garden she had nearly destroyed and was learning to let breathe.
She thought of all of them, scattered and grieving in their own particular ways, each finding some path through the wreckage that belonged to them specifically, and she sat on a rooftop in the slums with a bottle of cheap liquor and an old friend who saw too much, and she did not have an answer to the simplest question anyone had asked her since coming back.
IVY: I don't know.
GRT: That's the most honest thing you've said in two weeks.
She said it without judgment, just observation, and the two of them sat in the gathering dark for a long while without speaking further, the particular comfortable silence of people who had once known each other completely and were now navigating the strange distance of someone who had changed without fully deciding what the change meant.
GRT: Whatever you're doing here. Whatever this is. You should figure it out before it figures itself out for you.
IVY: What does that mean.
GRT: It means people in this quarter don't get the luxury of half measures. You're either all in or you're not, and the in between gets people hurt. Including you.
She stood, brushing off her coat, the conversation apparently concluded by her own internal measure.
GRT: I like having you back. I do. But I'd rather have you back as whoever you actually are now than as a worse copy of who you used to be.
She left without waiting for a response, her footsteps receding across the rooftop and down into the alley below, and Ivy sat alone in the deepening dark with the bottle between them now entirely her own, and the question Greta had asked sat with her the way questions sat when they had found exactly the right place to lodge. Then who are you. She did not know.
But she understood, sitting alone on the rooftop with the quarter settling into its evening rhythms below her, that the not knowing was no longer something she could keep avoiding simply by staying somewhere that did not ask her to know.