For the first hour, she simply sat.

  The house settled around her with all the small noises that empty houses make: the tick of the clock, the soft pad of Skippy's paws as he wandered from room to room, the occasional creak of floorboards. Magnolia stayed at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around tea that had long since gone cold, letting the silence wash over her.

  It was peaceful. Rather too peaceful, in fact.

  She tried to relax. She told herself, quite firmly, that she was safe here, that Yi had promised not to involve the Peacekeepers. These were all perfectly reasonable things to tell oneself. The trouble was that Magnolia had never been particularly good at believing reasonable things.

  As the hours crawled by, doubt started to creep in.

  He was awfully quick to leave.

  She hadn't meant to think it. The thought had simply appeared and now it sat there in her mind, growing thorns.

  What if he went to the Peacekeepers after all?

  She thought of the alley. The hound. That long-haired man's blade, so impossibly fast she hadn't even seen it move.

  "I'd suggest you stop running, girlie."

  Skippy whined.

  The sound cut through her thoughts. She looked down to find the little dog sitting at her feet, staring up at her with enormous, worried eyes, his tail going in quick nervous sweeps.

  Magnolia forced herself to breathe properly.

  He fed you, she reminded herself. Clothed you. Drew you a bath. If he wanted to turn you in, he could have done it while you were unconscious.

  The truth was simple, even if it wasn't comforting: she didn't know whether Yi was trustworthy. But she was exhausted, and hungry, and she had nowhere else to go.

  Running now would mean running forever.

  Magnolia sank back into the chair. Skippy trotted over and rested his chin on her knee, tail still wagging with that determined optimism that dogs seem to possess in unlimited quantities.

  "I'm fine," she muttered. "I'm fine."

  The dog did not look convinced.

  * * *

  The hours crawled by with the particular slowness reserved for hours spent waiting for disaster.

  Afternoon bled into evening. Evening into night. Magnolia couldn't bring herself to eat, despite the hollow gnawing in her stomach. She simply sat there, watching the door as though it might burst open at any moment to reveal Peacekeepers with their hounds.

  The clock ticked. Skippy dozed at her feet, twitching in his sleep. She hadn't noticed the light go. The room had dimmed to shapes around her.

  He's not coming back.

  They've taken him for questioning.

  You should have run when you had the chance.

  The door opened.

  Magnolia was on her feet before she'd decided to move, heart pounding, hands already raised.

  Yi stepped inside.

  He looked like hell. Hair going in three directions, clothes smudged with soot, and his face had that hollow, bruised look of someone who hadn't slept in days.

  He saw her standing there, frozen and wild-eyed in the darkness, and blinked.

  "You're still up?"

  Magnolia didn't answer. Couldn't.

  Yi kicked off his boots and hung his jacket on the hook by the door.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "Sorry I'm late. The supervisor kept us overtime." He yawned. "There's bread in the pantry if you haven't eaten. I'm too tired to cook."

  He shuffled past her toward the stairs, pausing only to scratch Skippy behind the ears.

  "Get some sleep," Yi mumbled, already halfway up. "We'll talk tomorrow."

  And then he was gone, leaving Magnolia standing alone in the dark kitchen with the sudden, overwhelming feeling that she had been very, very stupid.

  Magnolia woke before dawn.

  The house was still wrapped in darkness, the only sound the distant call of birds greeting a sun that hadn't yet bothered to appear. She lay there for a moment, staring up at the unfamiliar ceiling.

  Yi had taken her in. Fed her. Clothed her. Asked nothing in return.

  She couldn't remember the last time someone had shown her kindness without expecting something back. It was, she thought, a rather sad thing not to be able to remember.

  I should do something.

  She couldn't pay him. She had no money, no possessions. Nothing but the clothes on her back.

  But she could try.

  Magnolia got out of bed and went looking for the kitchen.

  It was, she could see at once, the kitchen of someone who knew what he was doing. Pots hung in graduated rows from a rack above the counter. Knives gleamed in a wooden block. The stove was spotless. There were vegetables, placed in a ceramic bowl, and a shelf of seasonings in small glass jars, mysterious powders and dried leaves whose purposes she could not begin to guess.

  Magnolia stood in the middle of it all, feeling confused and overwhelmed.

  Skippy padded in behind her and settled in the doorway. His ears went flat.

  "I can do this," she told him. "It's only cooking."

  In the Satellite, there had been no cooking. Canned food and stale bread. Meals that asked nothing of you but a can opener and low expectations. Simple. Bleak. Sufficient.

  Yi's kitchen was none of those things.

  She took down a pot, set it on the stove, and stared at it. She had no idea what came next.

  She grabbed a pot. Filled it with water. Dumped in the vegetables, all of them, because she wasn't sure which ones were supposed to go together and figured that more was probably better than less. Then she started adding seasoning. A pinch of this. A handful of that. The brown powder smelled nice, so she added extra.

  The water began to boil. The vegetables began to... transform. Whether they were softening or disintegrating was difficult to say.

  Skippy whined from the doorway.

  "It's fine," Magnolia told him, stirring with perhaps more force than was strictly necessary. "It's going to be fine."

  It was not fine.

  By the time footsteps creaked on the stairs, Magnolia had produced something that could, if one were feeling exceptionally charitable, be described as "soup." The vegetables had collapsed into an unidentifiable mush. The broth had turned a shade of greenish-brown that did not exist in nature and probably shouldn't exist anywhere.

  Yi appeared in the kitchen doorway, still rumpled from sleep, his hair staging a small rebellion against gravity. He blinked at her. Blinked at the stove. Blinked at the pot.

  "What... are you doing?"

  Magnolia felt heat crawl up her neck. "Cooking."

  "Cooking," Yi repeated, in the tone of someone who has just been told that the sky is green and grass is blue.

  "You've been..." She gestured vaguely. "You've done a lot. For me. I wanted to pay you back. Somehow."

  Yi's expression shifted into something softer. He crossed to the stove and peered into the pot with the air of a man steeling himself for bad news.

  Magnolia watched his face.

  She saw it. The exact moment he registered what he was looking at. The slight widening of his eyes. The way his mouth pressed into a thin line, fighting something. The brief, unmistakable flash of horror before he wrestled it into submission.

  Her stomach dropped somewhere in the vicinity of her knees.

  But then Yi smiled. That same gentle, easy smile from before, as though she had just presented him with something wonderful rather than something dredged from a swamp.

  He reached for a bowl.

  "Well," he said, ladling out a generous portion of the greenish sludge. "Let's give it a try."

  "You don't have to..."

  But he was already carrying the bowl to the table.

  Magnolia followed and slid into the chair across from him. She stared at the substance in his bowl. It looked even worse in proper lighting. Chunks of something unidentifiable floated in the murky broth. Was that a whole potato? Why hadn't it dissolved like everything else? The potato bobbed accusingly at the surface, as though personally offended by its circumstances.

  Yi picked up his spoon. Dipped it into the soup. Raised it to his lips.

  Magnolia held her breath.

  He took a bite.

  Chewed.

  Kept chewing.

  Swallowed.

  His expression remained perfectly, impossibly, heroically neutral.

  "It's good," he said.

  Magnolia stared at him. "What?"

  "Really good." Yi nodded with the solemnity of a food critic delivering a verdict. He took another spoonful. "You should be a chef."

  "You're lying."

  "I would never." He said it with a completely straight face, even as he forced down another mouthful of what was clearly the worst thing he had ever willingly put in his mouth. "This is culinary genius. Truly. The way you've combined the..." He glanced down at the bowl, clearly searching for something he could identify. "The various ingredients. Masterful."

  He was lying. So obviously, transparently, painfully lying that it would have been funny if it weren't so...

  But he was eating it anyway.

  "Thank you," she said quietly.

  Yi looked up, spoon suspended halfway to his mouth. His smile changed. Became real.

  "Thank you," he said. "For cooking."

  He finished the entire bowl.