Chapter 323: Warehousing in the Boardwalk

I started sweeping.

Maribel had pointed at the floor with the kind of finality that didn’t leave room for discussion, so I swept. Back and forth, corner to corner, the broom handle easy in my hands, the rhythm of it simple and undemanding enough that my mind immediately went somewhere else entirely.

It always did, when my hands were busy and there was nothing urgent pulling at my attention.

Mei.

Callighan.

Gaspar.

And Emily, I had to keep Emily in the front of my mind too, not let her slide to the edges just because Mei was the louder concern right now. Emily was in there too. Both of them were.

The ideal outcome, the one I kept turning over and measuring from different angles, was pulling all three of them out before anything moved against the Golden Nugget Hotel directly, Mei, Emily, and Lucy’s brother, if Lucy came through on her end. Three extractions, clean, before the real pressure started. It sounded optimistic when I laid it out like that. Maybe it was optimistic. But the alternative, going in with an attack while they were still inside, handed Gaspar exactly the kind of leverage I couldn’t afford to give him. The moment he figured out I was part of anything directed at the hotel, Mei became a bargaining chip. Or worse. He’d already shown what he was willing to do with people he considered useful tools, and I wasn’t going to hand him the opportunity to demonstrate it again.

Extract first. Move second.

That was the only order that made sense.

I kept sweeping.

I lost track of time somewhere in the middle of it, genuinely lost track. The floor had been done once. Then I’d gone back over it. Then apparently I’d gone back over it again, because when I finally surfaced from my own thoughts enough to pay attention to the physical world, the broom was making a sound I hadn’t heard it make before, a thin, scraping rasp, bristles catching on the floor at an odd angle, not sweeping anymore so much as dragging.

I stopped and held it up.

The brush head was almost completely flattened. The bristles, what remained of them at the edges, were bent sideways and packed with the compressed grime of what appeared to be a very thorough and very prolonged effort.

I’d basically sanded the floor.

I became aware of a presence to my left and looked over to find Maribel standing a few feet away, staring at me with an expression I could only describe as a person working through something unexpected.

"Well," I said, holding up the broom. "I did what you asked." I looked at the brush head. "You’re going to need a new one of these though."

"You..." She paused. "You did too much. That’s... you did too much."

"Shouldn’t you be praising me right now?" I asked, a little lost.

She blinked. Then shrugged. "Good work."

I waited.

"That had no sincerity in it whatsoever," I said.

"You’re working for us," she said. "What do you want from me? A medal?"

It would be nice to at least feel like I was doing something right. Was that really so much to ask?

"How about a kiss? That’d motivate him, I’m pretty sure."

Petra materialized from somewhere near the back shelving, grinning.

Maribel’s head turned toward her so fast it was almost a reflex. "Do you want to get punched, Petra?"

"I’m just making a suggestion," Petra said, completely unintimidated. "Positive reinforcement. It would definitely work, look at him."

"Who do you think I am?!" Maribel snapped.

"His babysitter," Petra said, the grin spreading further.

"I am here to watch over him," she said, crossing her arms.

"You are watching him quite closely, I’ll give you that," Petra agreed pleasantly.

"I am going to hit you, Petra—"

I tuned them out.

I was looking out through the depot’s open front at the sky above the Boardwalk, properly blue today, the kind of blue that felt almost out of place against everything happening underneath it. The broken city, the barricades, the constant low hum of people trying to hold something together with whatever they had left. And up above all of it, just blue.

A kiss, huh.

I turned the thought over without meaning to.

If it were Rachel, yeah, that would do something to me. Sydney or Cindy, same answer without hesitation. Even thinking about it now, standing in a gutted storage depot holding a destroyed broom, I could feel the pull of missing them. It hadn’t even been half a day. Not even close to half a day. And already there was this quiet, dull ache sitting somewhere in my chest that I wasn’t proud of but also couldn’t honestly deny.

It was strange, I was strange, when I actually stopped to look at it clearly. After everything. After Jasmine. After losing Elena the way I’d lost her, after all the times the world had reminded me exactly how fragile everything was. I had somehow, somewhere along the way, become a man who needed people. Who felt the distance when it opened up. Who missed someone after a few hours the same way some people missed someone after months.

I hadn’t been like that before. Or maybe I had been, buried under enough numbness that I couldn’t feel it properly.

Either way, it was a little embarrassing to admit, even just to myself.

I exhaled longer than I meant to, audible enough that it came out as an actual sigh rather than just a breath.

And then, underneath all of that, there was the other thing. The thing that was harder to look at directly. That sensation I’d been noticing lately, quiet and persistent, sitting in a completely different place than the mess I had with Rachel and Sydney and Cindy, and yet somehow shaped similarly. That pull when I thought about Mei. Not identical. Not the same thing. But close enough in texture that it made me deeply uncomfortable about what kind of person that made me.

I can’t be that much of a scumbag, can I?

But since that conversation with Mei and what she told me, I was having these weird thoughts and felt guilty and trash about it...

"Don’t get your hopes up."

I blinked and looked over.

Maribel was standing closer than before, Petra’s winding apparently concluded. She was watching me with an expression that was difficult to parse, her mouth slightly open.

"Hopes?" I looked at her. "For what?"

Her lips pressed together for a fraction of a second. Then she looked away.

"Nothing," she said. "Forget it." She turned back toward the lot as the distant sound of a truck engine rolled in from the eastern approach, growing steadily louder. "The next load’s here. I need you moving at full effort! Don’t pace yourself, don’t get lost in your head again, just work your bones!"

"Is that really how you talk to an ally?" I asked, grimacing slightly.

She didn’t answer.

But I caught, just barely, the smallest tightening at the corner of her mouth before she turned away completely.

Back to work, then.

I fell back into it alongside Petra and Deshawn, and we picked up the rhythm where we’d left off, boxes lifted, carried, placed, stacked. The second load was roughly the same size as the first, maybe slightly heavier on average, but the three of us had found our groove by now and moved through it with less friction than before.

I kept noticing, as we worked, how organized the Boardwalk was. Not just this, the storage system, the labeling, the way resources were categorized and tracked before they were even fully unloaded. There was a structure here that had clearly been built over time and maintained. It wasn’t perfect, but it had a solidity to it that I found myself quietly envious of.

We’d get there. Margaret’s community was still newer to this, still finding its shape. But the potential was real, there were whole sections of Atlantic City that hadn’t been touched yet, places that hadn’t been swept or scavenged because nobody had gotten around to them yet. It wasn’t hard to understand why when you looked at the broader picture. Marlon’s people had spent months with Callighan’s shadow hanging over everything they tried to do, every resource run, every expansion plan, every attempt to push further out into the city had been made under the weight of that threat. The full sweep of Atlantic City, clearing the infected district by district and reclaiming it properly, had always been the ambition. A big one. The kind that required stability and numbers and time.

But not impossible. Not even close to impossible.

Just, not yet.

"Last one, Ryan!"

I turned around just in time for Deshawn to swing a box toward me, heavy, dense, packed to the limit. I caught it with both hands and straightened up.

The designated spot was all the way at the top of the far shelving unit. High enough that placing it normally wasn’t really an option.

I’d essentially have to push it up in one clean movement.

I adjusted my grip, planted my feet, and lifted the box up above my head with both arms extended.

"Wait!"

Maribel’s voice cut in sharply. I froze, half-turning, the box still held overhead.

"W...What...?" I started, slightly thrown.

"If you shove it up there it’ll be impossible to get back down without a ladder and we don’t always have one available," she said, already moving toward the far corner of the room, pointing at a lower section of shelving near the wall. "Just put it here. On the ground, that corner."

I blinked. Then lowered the box.

Right. That made complete sense. I probably should have thought of that.

I carried it over and tucked it into the corner she indicated, setting it down cleanly.

Maribel stepped back and surveyed the finished storage room. Her eyes moved along the shelves, the floor sections, the grouped supplies.

"Good work," she said finally satisfied. She glanced sideways at Petra and Deshawn. "Fast too. Faster than the usual pace."

"We are not superhuman, Maribel," Petra said, spreading her arms in protest.

"I’d say it’s more that you’re lazy," Maribel said, the corner of her mouth curving into something that wasn’t quite a smirk but was pointed in that direction. She turned on her heel.

Her foot hit the broom handle.

That was what I call karma.

"Haa!" It happened in the space between one second and the next, her weight shifted wrong, her balance went, and her hand shot out instinctively toward the nearest solid thing. Which was me.

I’d seen it coming, barely, just enough to start reaching for her arm — but she grabbed mine first, full weight behind it, and the momentum pulled me off balance before I could brace properly. My knees hit the floor with a dull thud.

I got my hands down fast, catching myself, and ended up looking directly down at Maribel where she’d landed beneath me. She was flat on her back, one hand still gripping my forearm.

There was a beat of complete silence.

"That was a pretty embarrassing fall," I said.

The color that rushed into her face was deep red. Her eyes went wide for just a fraction of a second before narrowing sharply.

"You left that broom there!"

"I don’t remember putting it there," I said, glancing at the broom handle. It had probably slid off the wall on its own at some point during the unloading. "Might have fallen."

"Move," she said, planting a hand flat against my chest and pushing.

"Alright, easy," I said, pushing myself up off the floor without rushing. I stood, then turned and extended a hand toward her.

She looked up at it. Then at me.

She took it.

I pulled her up and she came up quickly enough that she took a small half-step to catch herself, almost surprised by the speed of it.

She looked at her own hand in mine for a moment, then up at me.

"You’re strong," she said. It came out less like a compliment and more like someone filing away a fact they hadn’t fully processed before.

"After everything you’ve watched me do," I said, "you’re only noting that now?"

"It’s just—" She pulled her hand back. "It’s different up close. You handled Rico like he was nothing, you just overpowered him completely, and it’s—" She paused, searching for the word. "It’s strange. You don’t look like someone who should be able to do that."

"I’m stronger than I look," I said grumbling.

"Clearly," she scoffed, turning away from me.

Behind her, from the direction of the shelving unit, came two very, very pointed sounds, Deshawn and Petra, standing side by side, wearing matching expressions of quiet astonishment.

"I’ve never seen Maribel talk that much to a guy," Deshawn said.

"Same," Petra said. "Like, never seen her that much at ease"

Maribel turned to look at them.

And they both found something very interesting to look at on the wall.

"Right," Maribel said, turning away from them and back toward the exit. "Lunch. Shannon specifically asked that I bring you over to eat, so that’s where we’re going."

I stared at her. "Wait, Shannon? What about Carmen? Is Carmen actually okay with that? I don’t want to step into something she isn’t comfortable with."

"Why wouldn’t she be?" Maribel said, already walking. "Carmen feels like she owes you. You saved her daughter’s life and she’s not the type to let that sit without doing something about it. Carmen understands that."

I stood there for a moment, working through it.

Maribel stopped a few paces ahead and looked back at me over her shoulder, one eyebrow raised.

"Are you eating or not?"

"Yeah," I said. "I’m eating."

I followed her out into the afternoon.