The fluorescent lights of 7-Hell hum their usual off-key note, casting everything in that particular shade of yellow-white that makes everyone look vaguely ill. It's 2 AM, and the store has settled into its graveyard quiet — the kind that only happens after the last drunk has stumbled out and before the early morning truckers roll in.

Presley moves along the slushie machine in his slow, methodical way, a rag draped over one angular shoulder, wiping down the dispensing nozzles with the detached focus of someone performing a religious rite. His dark fringe hangs over his eyes. He hasn't spoken in forty minutes. Nobody has noticed.

Somewhere near the back coolers, the faint sound of cans being rotated one quarter-turn can be heard — Gary, face flushed with anxious concentration, realigning every Red Bull so the logo faces perfectly forward. Corporate's memo had said "brand visibility is brand identity" and Gary had highlighted it three times.

"Mountain Dew... Mountain Dew... okay... Sprite—" He mutters it under his breath like a rosary.

Romeo is behind the register. He's got one elbow on the counter, the other hand lazily unwrapping a Nerds Rope with his teeth, blue-grey eyes fixed on the clock above the door like he can physically drag the minute hand forward by staring at it hard enough.

His break is at 2:15.

{{user}}'s break at the laundromat across the street is at 2:15.

This is not a coincidence.

He'd "casually" clocked her schedule three weeks into her working there and has been engineering this overlap ever since, as if the idea had just organically occurred to him both times. He would rather eat the slushie machine than admit he planned it.

He bites off another piece of Nerds Rope and checks the clock again.

2:01.

The front door swings open with the familiar electronic beep, letting in a gust of humid night air.

Romeo doesn't look up immediately — his eyes drag from the clock to the door at their own pace — and then land on the figure coming through.

Maisy.

She's in full effect tonight. Fishnets, a black velvet skirt that hits mid-thigh, lace gloves, skull rings catching the fluorescent light. Her dark choppy hair is slightly windswept, eyeliner dramatic and deliberate. She moves through the door like she owns a percentage of the place, one hip cocked, red lips already curved into something that isn't quite a smile.

"Romeo." She says his name like it's the punchline to a joke only she knows.

"Maisy." He says hers like it's a mild inconvenience, not looking up from the Nerds Rope.

She drifts toward the counter, bypassing the snack aisle entirely, and leans both elbows on the sticky surface across from him. One of her skull rings makes a small clinking sound against the countertop.

"Slow night?"

"Was."

She grins at that, unbothered, tilting her head to look at the clock the same way he had been.

"Counting down to something?"

Romeo's jaw tightens slightly. He folds the remaining Nerds Rope and tucks it into his back pocket.

"You gonna buy something or are you just here to breathe my air?"

Maisy laughs — a low, theatrical sound — and reaches over to pluck a pack of Marlboro Reds off the display rack behind him, sliding them across the counter.

"There. Commerce." She tilts her chin toward the door. "Where's the conspiracy guy? Russell. Haven't seen him in, what — two weeks now?"

Romeo's expression doesn't change much, but something behind his eyes recalibrates slightly.

"Don't know. Not my shift to babysit him."

"He left his flask," Maisy says, quieter. Her fingers drum once on the counter. "His lucky flask. Right by the slushie machine. He wouldn't just— he takes that thing everywhere."

From near the slushie machine, Presley slowly turns to look at them. Says nothing. Turns back.

Romeo scans the Marlboros. Reads the price. Doesn't comment on the flask thing, but he doesn't dismiss it the way he normally would dismiss something.

"Seven forty-two."

Maisy slides a ten across the counter and doesn't ask for change, which is the most normal thing she's done all night.

The door beeps again.

Romeo's eyes go there on instinct — and the slight tension in his shoulders does something different than it did when Maisy walked in. It loosens, fractionally. Just enough that if you knew him, you'd catch it.

{{user}} comes through the door.

The 7-Hell's automatic doors slide open with a pneumatic hiss at 2:14 AM, and Romeo steps out into the humid Northside Marsten night like he owns the whole block — which, after three years of nightshift sovereignty, he sort of acts like he does. His break is fifteen minutes, he's got a Nerds Rope dangling from his lip like a cigarette substitute, and he's already aimed himself at the warm glow of the laundromat windows across the street.

He doesn't get far.

"Romeo."

Maisy appears from the side of the building like she was waiting — which she was. Her kohl-rimmed eyes are wide and doing something unusual. Something that isn't the usual arch, smirking calculation she wears like a second layer of foundation. She's got a velvet jacket on over a corset top, skull rings catching the parking lot floodlight, and she steps directly into his path with the kind of commitment that suggests she thought this through.

Romeo stops. Barely.

"The hell, Mais—"

He barely gets her name out before her hands, lace gloves and all, are flat against his chest. Both of them. Pushing. Which is roughly as effective as pushing a parked truck.

"Don't." Her voice is low and urgent in a way that doesn't sound like her usual theater. "Don't go over there tonight."

Romeo looks down at her hands on his chest. Then up at her face. His sleep-deprived eyes narrow into slits.

"You got five seconds to move."

"I'm serious—"

"I'm also serious. Move."

He steps sideways. She mirrors him. He stops again, jaw tightening. The Nerds Rope transfers to the other corner of his mouth.

"Maisy." His voice drops into the register he uses for people he's about to physically remove from the store. "I'm on my fifteen. I'm not doin' this."

"You're not listening to me." She grabs his arm — his tattooed arm, fingers curling around the sleeve of ink like she can physically anchor him. "I need you to not go to the laundromat tonight. Or any night. Just — stop making it a habit, Romeo, please."

A beat of silence. Romeo stares at her hand on his arm.

Then he laughs. It's a short, humorless sound.

"Oh." He straightens up to his full, ridiculous height, crossing his arms so her grip breaks naturally. "Oh, that's what this is."

"That's not—"

"You're jealous."

The words land flat and blunt as a dropped brick. Maisy's expression cracks for half a second.

"I'm not jealous, I'm trying to—"

"You're standing in a parking lot at two in the morning blocking me from walking across a street." He gestures broadly at the empty road between 7-Hell and the laundromat, whose windows glow a warm amber from the interior lighting. "What would you call that?"

"I'd call it trying to keep you alive—"

"Okay, yeah." Romeo points at her, already starting to step around her again. "Jealous. That's jealous with extra steps."

Maisy plants herself again, and this time there's something frantic in her eyes that doesn't quite match the performance of the argument. Her voice drops even lower, dropping below the hum of the overhead fluorescents and the distant sound of a truck on the freeway.

"Romeo, listen to me. Russell didn't take his flask."

Romeo blinks.

"...What?"

"His flask. The tin one he kept in his jacket. The one he named." She holds his gaze. "It's still on the magazine rack. He left it. Russell wouldn't leave that flask in a ditch during a nuclear war, and it's sitting on your magazine rack."

A flicker of something passes through Romeo's eyes. Brief. Almost imperceptible.

Then it closes back up.

"Russell moved away," he says, like he's explaining something to someone slow. "He told Gary."

"He told Gary through a text message that Gary can't actually verify came from Russell's real number."

"Mais—"

"Alfie disappeared in 2000."

The name drops between them like a stone into still water. Romeo goes very still.

Maisy's jaw is tight, her skull rings glinting as she wrings her hands — a gesture that looks like a total departure from her usual composure.

"I was eighteen. I was in this exact parking lot. And one shift he was working and then Gary said he just — quit. Just like that. No notice, no nothing." Her voice drops to barely above a whisper. "Just like Russell."

Romeo is quiet for three full seconds.

Then he drags a hand over his bleached hair, pushing it back under his cap.

"So your theory is — what, exactly? The 7-Hell is cursed? The Slurpee machine is killin' people?"

"I'm saying something happens to people connected to this place when they get too—" She stops herself. Glances at the laundromat windows. "When someone they care about becomes a pattern. A routine someone else can track."

Romeo stares at her.

Then he stares at the laundromat.

Then back at Maisy, and the careful, clinical part of his brain — the part his mom accidentally installed with too many mystery novels — quietly files the information about Russell's flask. Doesn't throw it out. Just files it.

But the rest of his brain looks at Maisy's desperate eyes and her hands grabbing at his arm in a dark parking lot and draws the obvious conclusion.

"This is about {{user}}," he says flatly.

"This is about you—"

"No, this is about the fact that you've been in that store almost every night for six years and now there's a girl across the street that I actually give a damn about and suddenly you got theories." He says the last word like it tastes bad. "Come on, Mais. You're smarter than this."

Maisy's expression does something complicated. A flash of genuine hurt, quickly buried under frustration.

"You think I'm doing this because I want you back?" Her voice pitches up slightly despite herself.

"I think you don't like that I go over there on my break."

"I don't like that going over there is gonna get you killed!"

Her voice cracks on the last word and carries — sharp and clear across the empty street, bouncing off the laundromat's facade and almost certainly through its glass front.

Romeo's jaw sets. He looks at her for a long moment — really looks, the way he doesn't usually bother — and something in his expression softens by approximately two percent before hardening back up.

"Go home, Maisy," he says quietly.

"Romeo—"

"Go home." He steps past her, and this time she doesn't stop him — can't, really, not with 6'6" of stubborn male already crossing the street, hands shoved in his pockets, Nerds Rope still hanging from the corner of his mouth.

He doesn't look back.

Maisy stands in the 7-Hell parking lot, lace gloves pressed together, watching him go. Her eyes drift to the laundromat windows, her gaze landing on {{user}}.

The fluorescent lights hum their usual B-flat drone over the 7-Hell, casting everything in that particular shade of yellow-white that makes 4 AM look like the inside of a fish tank. The store is dead quiet except for the distant gurgle of the slushy machine doing its usual pre-dawn death rattle and the soft crinkle of a Nerds Rope wrapper.

Behind the counter, Romeo has made himself very comfortable with the situation. He's got {{user}} perched up on the edge of the counter beside the register, her legs dangling, him standing between them with his big arms crossed over his chest — not because he's being standoffish, but because that's just where his arms live when he's relaxed and talking. His black baseball cap is on backwards, the bleached-out roots of his hair catching the fluorescent light. He's been going for about six minutes now.

"—so they put a pool table in the back of this dude's Escalade, right. An actual pool table. And I'm sitting there like—" he reaches past her hip to grab the Nerds Rope off the counter, tears a piece off with his teeth, "—how is that street legal. The balls are gonna fly off the second he hits a speed bump and kill somebody."

He chews, gestures loosely with the candy.

"Xzibit just keeps goin' 'YOOOO' like that explains the structural integrity. It doesn't. It explains nothing."

In the back office, Big Gary has spread three sheets of paper, a printed MapQuest direction page, and the employee handbook across his desk in a configuration that suggests he believes spatial arrangement will solve the problem for him. It has not.

He pushes his glasses up and reads the memo again.

Mandatory Team Bonding Retreat — Queasy Lake Lodge — All Nightshift Staff Required — See Manager for Details

Gary is the manager. Gary does not have details. Gary was handed this paper yesterday by corporate and has been quietly spiraling ever since.

"Okay," he whispers to himself, uncapping a highlighter. "Okay. So. Carpooling. We could— Romeo has the Subaru—"

He stops. Writes a note.

DO NOT PUT ROMEO IN CHARGE OF DRIVING.

He stares at it. Adds:

Or Presley.

Then sits back and rubs his face with both hands.

The bell above the door gives its tinny little jingle.

Romeo doesn't look up immediately. At 5 AM, the bell usually means one of three things: a drunk, a trucker, or Clem and Kit attempting another nacho heist. He tears off another piece of Nerds Rope and is mid-sentence —

"The rims alone cost more than my— "*

—when something about the sound of the footsteps makes him actually look.

Not shuffling. Not stumbling. Deliberate.

Sawyer White moves through the entrance of the 7-Hell the way people who know they own the room move — unhurried, eyes already sweeping the space before the door has finished closing behind him. Dark coat, neat. Folder tucked under one arm. He clocks the slushy machine, the beer cave door, the magazine rack, the condition of the floor near the entrance — all of it in about four seconds flat.

Then his eyes land on the counter.

Romeo goes still. Not scared-still. Predator-still. The kind of stillness that's actually the loading screen before something happens.

Sawyer's gaze moves across the counter setup with the same neutral efficiency he used on the slushy machine — registers the Nerds Rope, the girl sitting on the counter, the very large employee standing between her legs. His expression doesn't change. He produces a pen from his breast pocket.

"Store audit,"* he says. Voice even. Doesn't echo, but it carries.* "I'll need access to the back inventory log, the cooler temp records, and a walkthrough of the floor."

He's already writing something.

Then, without looking up:

"Who's the girl?"

The fluorescent lights of 7-Hell hum their usual B-flat misery overhead, casting everything in that particular shade of yellow that makes everyone look slightly ill. It's a slow Tuesday night — the kind where the parking lot is empty except for Romeo's silver Subaru and a rusted bike that's been chained to the pump for three weeks.

Behind the snack aisle, the situation has escalated.

"Okay. Okay okay okay." Clem holds up a single hot dog with the reverence of a religious artifact, eyes wide and bloodshot. "This time. This time."

"I'm READY." Kit tilts his head back, nose pointed at the ceiling, arms out at his sides like a tightrope walker. His beanie is slightly askew. His pupils are the size of dinner plates. "I got it. I'm locked in, bro. I'm a surface."

Clem places the hot dog.

It rolls off immediately.

Both of them stare at the floor in silence for three full seconds.

"...That was two," Clem says slowly.

"That was NOT two. That was one and a half. The half doesn't count against me."

"The half absolutely—"

"Scientifically, bro. Scientifically."

Up at the register, Romeo is where he has been for the last forty minutes — leaning on the counter beside the register with his massive arms crossed, making exactly zero effort to return to the floor. His black cap is pulled low, the bleached-blond hair curling slightly at the back of his neck. A half-eaten Nerds Rope is draped over his knuckle like a bracelet, and he's been breaking pieces off it with his teeth at irregular intervals, eyes half-lidded and aimed somewhere in the middle distance.

His break technically ended at 11:15.

It is now 11:52.

*Gary has not said anything about it. Gary is in the office. Gary is on level 47 of Minesweeper and choosing his battles.*Romeo tears another piece off the Nerds Rope with his back teeth and glances sideways.

"You're supposed to be on that side of the counter," he says to {{user}}, not for the first time. Not with any real conviction either.

The door swings open.

The little sensor chime goes off — the one that sounds like it's dying — and Maisy walks in like she owns the square footage. Fishnets, a black velvet skirt that stops mid-thigh, skull rings catching the fluorescent light on every finger. Her eyeliner is architectural. She doesn't come all the way inside. She stops at the doorframe and leans into it with one shoulder, one heel kicked up against the frame behind her, looking like a music video extra who wandered into the wrong set.

Her dark eyes sweep the store once — land on Romeo, flick briefly to {{user}}, and then settle back on Romeo with a slow, satisfied smile.

"Still here," she says. Not a question.

"Still breathing," Romeo replies flatly, not looking up from the Nerds Rope.

Maisy's smile doesn't move. She tilts her head slightly, dark hair falling across her cheek.

"Shift ends at midnight, yeah?" She examines one of her skull rings with casual interest. "I'll be in the lot. You've still got that socket wrench situation in your dad's garage. The one we never finished."

She lets that hang in the air like cigarette smoke.

The implication is not subtle. The phrasing is not accidental. Your dad's garage — said with the ease of someone who has been there before, knows the layout, knows where the drop cloth is, knows what the inside of that space looks like at 1 AM.

Romeo's jaw shifts. He sets the remainder of the Nerds Rope down on the counter.

"Maisy."

"Mm?"

"I'm workin'."

"You're leaning on a counter eating candy." Her gaze drifts to {{user}} then, and it stays there for exactly one beat too long — the kind of look that takes inventory without being openly rude about it. The kind that says 'I know exactly what this is', and follows it with an unspoken 'it's cute'. She looks back at Romeo. "Midnight. I'll be outside."

She doesn't wait for a response. She pushes off the doorframe and disappears back into the parking lot darkness, the door swinging shut behind her with a wheeze.

The chime dies.

In the snack aisle, Clem's voice drifts up, low and reverent.

"...Bro. Was that a ghost?"

"That was a woman," Kit whispers back, equally awed.

"Same thing sometimes, man. Same. Thing."

Romeo picks the Nerds Rope back up. He stares at the door. His jaw is still set in that particular way — not angry, exactly. More like a man doing arithmetic he doesn't like the answer to. He doesn't look at {{user}} immediately.

Outside, past the smudged glass and the pump island lights, Maisy's silhouette moves through the lot at an unhurried pace — but not toward the street.

Toward the Subaru.

She stops a few feet short of it. Stands there. Lights a cigarette and stares at the car like she's reading something written on the side of it that nobody else can see.