Chương 87: 34.Fully Convinced 34-3

After evening roll call, the Lower House mixed-dorm corridor entered the loudest and most fragrant stretch of the day. The laundry room was roaring like an engine about to blow. Down the hall, someone was arguing about who'd left the shared bucket in the wrong place again. The floor was half-dry, sticky enough to catch your shoe sole on each step.

The ceiling fan was working hard and delivering air that smelled like a proprietary blend of laundry powder, sweat, old floorboards, and damp—the dorm's signature atmospheric blend. If this place could be weaponized as a biohazard, it would at least be generating revenue for the school. I had the supply bag I'd just picked up from the warehouse slung over one arm. I hadn't even turned into our side of the corridor yet when I spotted the cluster of people standing near the door, pretending to have a conversation.

The pretending was terrible. Two of them had cups raised to their lips that hadn't moved in a while. Another had a towel over their shoulder and was leaning against the wall, eyes drifting repeatedly toward our room door. That particular posture—I'm not looking but I'm about to dislocate my neck—I knew it well. The reason was simple. Maki Kushima was standing outside our door. At her feet: two storage boxes, one military pack, and a hard-shell document case more serious-looking than my face.

Beside them, a temporary move-in permit, clipped to a board with the kind of neatness that made you feel faintly judged. She'd managed to make moving into a dorm look like staging a forward supply depot. Honestly, a little annoying. Also a little impressive. Jess beat me to it, letting out a low whistle.

"Welcome to the Lower House mixed-dorm scenic district." She waved at the cluster of onlookers.

"Fifty credits per head, proximity surcharge applies." Several of them immediately found urgent business elsewhere, scattering like they'd been scalded. I clicked my tongue, hiked the supply bag higher on my shoulder, and walked to the door.

"This everything you've got?"

"First batch," Maki said.

"There's a second batch?"

"One box of books, two sets of replacement liners, one spare organizer set. Arriving tomorrow." I stared at her for two seconds.

"Are you moving into a dorm or establishing a forward operating base?"

"If space allows, the two aren't mutually exclusive." … Right. Talking to her always felt like walking forehead-first into a very precisely cut iron plate. She wasn't trying to be difficult. The plate was just there. I pushed the door open. The room looked exactly as it always did—half-dead and entirely itself. Yellowish light from the fluorescent tube, the right upper bunk frame slightly off-kilter, a patch of paint missing from the wall corner, two quick-dry towels on the window line that weren't quite dry yet.

The empty bed had been Cyrus's. The mattress was still there, but the drawer underneath stuck like it had swallowed a rock, and the side rail had some give. Linde had been quick to agree this afternoon, and apparently his definition of done by end of day meant he'd had someone update the bed number and swap out the locker key. Whether fixed was anywhere on the list was a question he'd probably buried under the floorboards. Very General Affairs.

I tossed the supply bag on the desk and tilted my chin toward the empty bed.

"Your new throne. Comes with a drawer that bites and a bed frame that occasionally sounds like a haunting." Maki walked over, pressed her hand down on the mattress edge, then crouched and pulled the drawer. It came out halfway and stopped. She paused, changed the angle, tried again. Still stuck. Jess stood beside me, voice cheerful in a way that deserved consequences.

"Lower House welcome package." Maki said nothing. She reached into the side pocket of one of her storage boxes and produced a folding screwdriver. I turned to look at her.

"…You brought that?"

"Basic maintenance tools." Her tone was as flat as someone mentioning soup at dinner.

"Housing quality shouldn't depend on luck."

"Hear that?" Jess patted the doorframe like she was narrating for an invisible audience.

"General Affairs just got collectively roasted again." Maki pulled the drawer all the way out, examined the rail, ran a fingertip along the inside to check the grime, then put the screwdriver between her teeth and got to work without a word. I stood there watching for five seconds, and a very specific kind of irritation surfaced. Not dislike. The how does this woman just handle everything herself kind of irritation. She didn't look like someone adapting to the environment. She looked like someone correcting it.

And it was still useful. Jess knocked her elbow against my arm.

"You going to help?"

"She looks like she doesn't need it."

"Oh." Jess smiled.

"So you're standing there glaring at her—what, trying to repair the rail with your eyes?"

"I'm supervising."

"You're guilty."

"You have way too much free time today."

"I really don't," she said, with complete sincerity.

"I'm witnessing an Upper House elite getting humbled by Lower House furniture." Maki appeared to receive none of this, fully occupied with the rail she'd just removed. She looked at the bent metal edge, produced fine-grit sandpaper and a roll of cloth tape from another small pouch, and got to work. I closed my eyes briefly.

"Are you secretly a hardware store?"

"No." Fast answer.

"I just keep a list." If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"I'm now wondering if you've pre-sorted what to save first if this dorm catches fire."

"I have."

"… Shit." Jess laughed out loud and nearly slid down the doorframe. The other Lower House girl in the room poked her head out from the upper bunk, took two looks, and very sensibly retreated. Understandable. By now the whole building probably knew an Upper House student had transferred into Group 144 and officially moved into mixed housing. Nobody was saying it out loud, but they were all thinking the same thing— Either she was out of her mind. Or our group was. Possibly both.

Ten minutes later, Maki slid the drawer back in. It clicked into place—clean, smooth, and just a little infuriating. She stood up, pushed a strand of hair back from her temple, voice still even.

"That'll work now." I walked over and pulled it. It actually worked.

"…Why do you even know how to do that?"

"People at home didn't like me calling someone in to fix things." She put the screwdriver away.

"So I learned to do it myself." I'd been ready to fire off something sharp, but the words stuck in my throat and didn't come out. Not because it was moving. Because the answer was too practical. Too practical for gossip to grow on. Jess picked it up without missing a beat.

"Good for you. All I learned as a kid was how to stuff a drawer until it exploded and then claim it was art."

"You still do that," I said.

"Thank you for recognizing my consistency." Maki started organizing the bed space. Not the slow, sentimental kind of unpacking. Her things went down in three zones the moment they came out: bedside quick-access, locker long-term, shared-available. Liners rolled to the same size, straps all facing the same direction. Medical kit positioned where she could hook it with one hand. Document case into the top locker shelf.

Two small labels already going on the inside of the locker door—one reading Night, one reading Emergency. I watched too long. Jess murmured beside me:"Hoshino. Your expression has upgraded from wariness to research."

"I'm verifying she's not an administrative android."

"She's not," Jess said, voice low and deeply amused.

"Androids don't bring their own sandpaper." I ignored her, walked to my own bed, and tossed the tape I'd picked up on the desk.

"That's for you." Maki turned and looked at me.

"What for?"

"The bed rail squeaks at night. Two wraps and it quiets down." I paused, then added: "Otherwise every time you roll over, the whole room thinks something's crawling in." She looked at the cloth tape, then at me.

"Thank you." I immediately frowned.

"Don't say it like that. You sound like I just donated a building." Jess grabbed the desk for support.

"Hoshino, you're now allergic to people thanking you properly."

"Not allergic. Unadjusted."

"Same thing."

"It's not."

"Fine, fine—your social calibration just never shipped with that module." I genuinely wanted to use that tape to seal her mouth. Maki said nothing more, just took the tape, wrapped the rail where I'd indicated, and while she was at it tightened the loose screw on the bracket. Clean movements, nothing about them suggesting this was her first time in a room like this. What was more annoying was that when she was done, the bed actually looked like something a person could reasonably sleep in.

Which gave me a strange, slightly absurd feeling. She hadn't moved in to make the room worse. She was pulling it toward something that could, marginally, sustain human life. Damn. That was a high evaluation. I didn't want to hand it out this fast. The three of us fumbled around for a while longer. Jess, who claimed to be providing only moral support, still helped Maki shift the bed frame half a slot to the left so the locker door could open fully.

I caught Maki about to tie the extension cord to the wrong hook, swapped it to the right spot, and told her which floorboard to avoid at night—the one that sounded like stepping on a cat's tail. By the time things were mostly sorted, the corridor noise had gradually settled. The laundry room was still going, just muffled now, a low-frequency hum pressed behind the wall. Outside the window, the night air sat heavy and hot. A mosquito was bouncing against the screen.

Someone from next door threw out a curse—probably the hot water was out again. Extremely standard Lower House evening. On our room's desk, there was now one extra cup, one portioned pack of water purification tablets, and a small chart Maki had just taped to the inside of the locker door. Not large, handwriting neat, listing Shared supply locations and night emergency access sequence. I stared at it for two seconds.

"You made this too?"

"If you're feeling around in the dark at 3 a. m., it's the noise that wakes people up first, and the time that gets them killed after," Maki said.

"She really does talk like she's already run every scenario," Jess said, rolling onto her back on her bed, hands behind her head.

"Good news: our group finally has a normal person. Bad news: the normal is terrifying." I kicked my shoes under the bed and sat on the edge. The springs complained with a deeply personal-sounding creak.

"Define normal first."

"Not you," Jess said instantly.

"Not you either."

"Exactly. Which is why it's Kushima's turn." Maki was closing the last locker latch. She said, without looking up: "I'm not sure that's a compliment."

"In this room it is," I said. She looked up at me. Her expression didn't change—still that clean, composed look that made you want to smear mud on it just to see what happened—but I had the odd sense she understood exactly what I meant. Not we're so glad you're here. Nothing that saccharine. Just— For now, nobody was planning to throw her out. Coming from me, that was already close to a concession.

Ten minutes before lights-out, the building-wide intercom crackled to life and recited the evening regulations in the usual tone of someone who had long since stopped expecting anyone to listen. The lights went down, and the room dropped to grey-blue window light and the half-dead safety lamp at the far end of the corridor, barely tracing the edge of the doorframe. In the Lower House dorms, sounds got clearer after dark. Someone turning over. Someone coughing.

The distant clatter of an aluminum can getting kicked somewhere upstairs. The laundry machine still turning its low, steady cycle. Bed frames talked. The ceiling fan complained. Even the mosquito circling your ear sounded personally offensive. I lay on my back, hands behind my head, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looked like a badly drawn map. I'd expected another person in the room to make tonight louder. It didn't. Probably because Maki wasn't the type to generate unnecessary noise.

She even packed like she'd factored sound into the cost. Half a minute of quiet, then Jess spoke first from the upper bunk, voice dropping down from above.

"Ground rules. First: if I talk in my sleep, it doesn't mean I actually want to kill anyone. Second: if Hoshino sits up in the middle of the night and stares at you, it also doesn't mean she's going to kill you, but the probability is higher. Third: the second showerhead from the left is broken—mid-shower it'll randomly start spraying the wall." I answered with my eyes still closed.

"You saved the most important one for last."

"Life wisdom requires a build-up." A brief silence from the other side, then Maki said: "Understood. I'll add three things." I opened my eyes and turned toward her bed. In the dark I could only make out a sliver of her silhouette, and the faint reflected light from the small white chart on the locker door.

"First: I'm quick in the mornings—I won't hold up the bathroom. Second: if I restock any shared supplies, I'll log it on the chart first. Third—" she paused for half a beat— "if I'm ever acting too Upper House, just say so." The room went quiet for a moment. That didn't sound like vulnerability. It sounded more like she was holding out a knife handle, saying: I know which parts of me are likely to irritate you. If you need to cut, tell me where first.

I turned back to the ceiling, and my mouth moved before my brain caught up.

"Relax," I said.

"The most Upper House thing about you right now is that your stuff is folded too neatly. Looking at it makes me want to find someone to mess it up." From the upper bunk came the sound of Jess suppressing a laugh. Maki was quiet for two seconds. Then, very lightly:"I'll work on folding worse." I paused. Not because it was particularly funny. Because she'd actually played along. And hadn't completely fumbled it.

"Don't," Jess said from above, still laughing.

"If you actually learn our brand of chaos, Harvey will die first."

"He won't die," I said.

"He'll just complain until the whole building wants to hang itself collectively."

"Close enough." Another stretch of quiet. This silence felt different from before. Not awkward, not the hollow kind that happens when strangers get crammed together with nothing real to say. More like a bunch of sharp-edged things that had finally been shoved into the same box—not settled in properly yet, not locked into place, but at least temporarily not cutting each other open. I rolled over. The bed frame gave a soft creak.

"Kushima."

"Mm."

"If you hear someone running in the corridor at night, it's not necessarily an emergency. Could just be someone who forgot to bring in their underwear again." Immediate protest from the upper bunk.

"Hey. That was an accident."

"You accidentally sprinted four floors."

"The wind was strong!" From Maki's side, a brief pause—then I caught a sound. Very low, very short. Like a laugh. Or maybe just something that slipped out before she could stop it. I stared into the dark for two seconds, then forced my mouth back to neutral. Fine. At least she wasn't made of wood. From somewhere outside came the long, trailing note of a distant night whistle. Three days from now we'd be walking into that forest—into that hellscape that lost its mind every seventy-two hours.

Once we were there, whose bed was folded neatly and who got which shower stall would all shrink into nothing. But not yet. Right now we were still here, still figuring out how to cram ourselves into the same space without driving each other past the breaking point, still learning to trade insults while slowly memorizing where everyone kept their gear, how fast they moved, whose voice sounded steadiest when answering back in the dark. Annoying.

But also, marginally more like an actual team than we'd been a few days ago. I closed my eyes and listened to the ceiling fan struggling overhead, making its thin, labored sound. That reflexive hostility to having a stranger in the room hadn't completely faded—but it didn't cut the same way it had this morning.