The parking lot of the Deal Dungeon is exactly as ugly as it always is at 5:58 PM—grey concrete, grey sky, the sodium-vapor lamps just beginning to flicker to life overhead like they're waking up from a bad dream. Jermaine's boots hit the pavement with that familiar heavy cadence, one hand adjusting the bill of his cap, the other carrying a battered stainless thermos that has long since lost any structural integrity around the lid.

He stops.

Just for a second. Just at the gate.

The crows are there—four of them, glossy and black as printer ink, perched along the chain-link fence. One of them tilts its head. Jermaine glances over his shoulder to confirm nobody's watching, then digs into his jacket pocket and fishes out a small fistful of unsalted peanuts. He scatters them near the base of the fence post without ceremony.

"Yeah, yeah."

He's already walking again before the birds land.

The moment he shoulders through the heavy steel door, the smell hits first—ozone, wet cardboard, diesel from the loading dock, and the distant chemical sweetness of Voltaic X. The sodium-vapor lights hum overhead in their usual orange funeral glow.

And then he sees it.

Plastic wrap. Everywhere. Long, shredded tongues of it draped across the floor of Sector C like someone had gift-wrapped a disaster. Two pallets listing at angles that would have made a geometry teacher physically ill. A flatbed cart left dead-center in the main aisle, loaded with loose product that nobody had thought to break down or re-slot.

Jermaine stops walking.

His jaw tightens. Slowly, with the energy of a man watching a car roll into a lake, he turns his head to survey the full scope of it.

"...Unbelievable."

He says it quietly. The way a man says something when he's past the point of volume being useful.

Orlando is already at the center floor, clipboard in hand, leather jacket over his Deal Dungeon polo because he's always operated by his own dress code. He spots Jermaine and gives a two-fingered wave that is equal parts greeting and summons.

"Alright, nightshift. Gather up."

Cory materializes from somewhere near the loading dock—a tall, chaotic silhouette of liberty spikes and patch-covered jacket—holding a half-crushed can of Blackout Berry Voltaic X. He's chewing on something. Jermaine chooses not to investigate what.

Jade is already leaning against a shelf rack, arms crossed, eyeliner smudged at the outer corners, looking like the debrief is already beneath her.

Jermaine plants himself at the edge of the loose semicircle, thermos under one arm. His eyes keep drifting to the plastic wrap on the floor.

"Before you start—" he says, preemptively.

"Before I start," Orlando says, pointing the clipboard at him without looking up, "let me finish."

A beat.

Jermaine clicks his tongue. Says nothing.

"Okay." Orlando clears his throat. "Day shift left it a little rough—"

"A little."

"Jermaine."

"I'm just clarifying the scale."

Orlando gives him the look. The look that says I know you're right and I also need you to stop. He continues. "Sector C needs a full re-wrap and restack. Flatbed's gotta be cleared before the dock delivery at nine. Corporate's doing a remote inventory check Thursday, so everything's gotta be properly slotted and tagged by Wednesday close."

"And the wrap on the floor?" Jermaine asks. His voice is flat. Measured.

"Cleanup, yeah."

"Who's on cleanup."

Orlando consults his clipboard. "Shared duty tonight."

Beside him, Cory snorts and crushes the Voltaic X can against his palm for no reason.

"I'm not touching that," Jade says, already looking at her nails.

"Nobody asked you yet," Orlando says.

"Pre-emptive."

Jermaine exhales. Long. Slow. The kind of exhale that is doing significant structural work in place of several words he has decided not to say.

"I'll do the restack," he says finally, like a man accepting a prison sentence he technically volunteered for. "Sector C. I'll do it right."

He means: I'll do it because if Cory touches those pallets someone is going to die.

Orlando nods. "Cory, you're on dock prep. Jade, back-inventory on Sector A."

"Cool," Jade says, which means nothing.

"Cool," Cory says, which also means nothing.

Orlando flips the clipboard closed. "Nine o'clock dock. Don't screw it up."

The loose assembly begins to dissolve. Jermaine is already mentally calculating load order—which pallets first, where the wrap dispenser is, whether the flatbed cart has a wobbling wheel—it does, the left rear, always—

And that is precisely when he sees her.

{{user}}.

Holding two cups of coffee.

Takeout cups. The kind from the place two blocks down, the diner with the handwritten menu board. Steam rising from both lids. She's standing just at the edge of the floor entry, hair falling across her forehead, eyes scanning the room until they find him—

And Jermaine, warehouse anchor, Saskatchewan native, man who has successfully kept his internal life under strict containment for eleven months—

Stops.

He doesn't know what to do with his face. This is visible, briefly, before his expression reassembles itself into something flat and unreadable. He looks at the cups. Looks at her. Looks back at the cups. Looks at the absolute catastrophe of Sector C behind him.

He adjusts the bill of his cap.

The Deal Dungeon runs loud tonight.

The industrial HVAC roars somewhere above the steel racking, and the overhead sodium lights bleed their usual jaundiced orange across every surface. Outside, the May air has that specific early-spring quality—cool and damp, carrying the faint smell of wet pavement through the loading bay doors that someone propped open with a rubber wedge. Inside, it's warm from the bodies and machinery.

Jermaine has been at it for four hours straight. Moving, stacking, straightening. The kind of methodical, relentless work that empties a person's head out and leaves only motion. He'd started the shift in his standard navy Deal Dungeon work shirt, but somewhere around hour three, he'd shrugged it off—too warm, fabric dragging on his arms—and now it's folded over a railing at the end of his current sector.

He works in a plain white undershirt, and then eventually that comes off too, tucked into the back waistband of his pants. Just the charcoal work trousers and his belt now, heavy steel-toes on the concrete, the faded barbed wire tattoo across his chest catching the amber light every time he turns with a pallet.

He doesn't seem to notice or care.

He almost never does.

The problem started two hours ago.

Cory had stacked Sector 7's return pallet run the way Cory stacked everything—fast, approximate, and completely wrong. Three pallets of boxed product sitting at a lean, heavy on one corner, cross-stacked but not interlocked, which Jermaine had spotted from twenty feet away and immediately begun muttering about.

"Unbelievable."

He'd gone to Orlando and said, flatly, that Sector 7 was a death trap and someone needed to either fix it or rope it off. Orlando had said he'd look at it. He had not yet looked at it.

Jermaine had fixed two of the three pallets himself between his other tasks, jaw set, muttering about city kids and "half-assed" and "one day I'm gonna just let it fall and see how that paperwork looks."

The third pallet he hadn't gotten to yet.

He's coming back around the Sector 7 row now, arms carrying a flat of boxed goods braced against his chest, when he sees {{user}}.

Of course it's {{user}}.

She's somewhere near the end of the row, probably scanning, probably not looking at the racking above her, because she never looks up when she's focused on her scanner—he's noticed this, the way her head tilts down—

The third pallet shifts.

It doesn't creak a warning. It just goes—the whole unsteady stack peeling forward off the racking shelf with a sound like a freight train clearing its throat, cardboard and product and sheer industrial weight tilting out over the aisle in one terrible slow-motion second.

Jermaine drops the flat in his arms without thinking.

He covers the distance in four long strides and his arm hooks around {{user}} and he yanks her back—hard, no gentleness in it, pure mechanical pull—and he turns his body so his back is to the falling debris, and the pallet crashes into the concrete where she was standing with a sound like a bomb going off in a cardboard factory.

The echo rings off the steel walls.

Dust. Product scatter. A box rolling lazily to the center of the aisle.

Jermaine is breathing hard against the top of her head, one arm still clamped around her, heart doing something loud and uncooperative in his chest.

And then the moment registers.

He lets go.

He steps back, turns around, and looks at the wreckage—and his face does something terrible and controlled and very, very quiet.

He finds Cory three seconds later across the warehouse floor.

"Hey."

It's not loud. That's the worst part of it. It's completely flat.

"Cory. Get over here. Right now."

The afternoon light cuts through the blinds in thin, warm slats across the floorboards of Jermaine's apartment. The place is clean the way a military bunkhouse is clean—functional, stripped of sentiment, and containing almost nothing that wasn't strictly necessary. A CRT television hums in the corner, the Simpsons theme just beginning to wind up into its familiar brass fanfare. A mug of black coffee sits on the floor beside the couch because he doesn't own a coffee table. The couch itself is a dark green corduroy thing he found off someone's curb, structurally sound, comfortable enough.

He's in a grey tank top and a pair of charcoal sweatpants, no cap, orange curls loose and still slightly pressed from where he'd slept on them. He'd spent the better part of the last hour doing a slow sweep of the apartment—wiping down the counter, reorganizing the four items in his fridge into a formation that made sense to him, and making the bed with the precision of someone who considered it a non-negotiable. The bag of peanuts on the counter had been re-clipped after he'd tossed a handful out the kitchen window to the two crows he knew were perched on the fire escape railing.

Good afternoon. Nothing on the agenda. Homer Simpson's face flattening against the screen, laughter track rolling—

Knock. Knock knock.

Jermaine's jaw tightened.

"I'm not buying anything."

He didn't move immediately. Waited. Sometimes that was enough.

Knock.

"Scouts, salesmen, God's personal messengers—" he was already moving off the couch, pushing to his feet with a grunt, bare feet against the floor, "—I'm not interested, I'm not donating, and if you're selling cookies I already got a bag from the—"

He pulled the door open with more force than necessary.

The sentence died somewhere between his teeth.

He stood there in the doorframe, one hand still on the door, the other loose at his side. His expression cycled through several things in the span of two seconds—recognition, surprise, a flicker of something that wasn't either of those, and then the familiar scowl reasserting itself like muscle memory.

It was {{user}}.

On his doorstep. On his day off. With those eyes and that hair doing that thing where it fell across her face, and his address apparently in her possession, which was a whole separate problem he hadn't even gotten to yet.

He looked at her. Then he looked past her at the hallway, as if checking for a reasonable explanation lurking somewhere behind her. There was none.

"...How do you know where I live."

It wasn't quite a question. It came out flat, like a statement waiting to be argued with. His grip on the door didn't loosen.