A guardedness rises up in his eyes as he considers Chris with a silent stare. His hands jam into his jean pockets. He's not in the mood to meet someone new, to stumble through small talk as if any of it actually matters. But the guy is right — he doesn't want to be alone either. Alone, Kell's absence jabs more sharply between the slats of his ribs. It clatters more loudly in his head.

Wilhelm's gaze drifts out over the landscape as it's slowly devoured by nothingness. I was dying. Bleeding out on the floor of a cage. Kell's voice, from one of the many nights they shared passing a bottle of wine back and forth last spring, keeps lurking in the back of his mind.

He hopes that Kell was wrong, that help was on the way in the second that he slipped from his world and landed in this one. He hopes that, somewhere in the vast expanse of the universe, Kell and Rhy are together and okay.

You have no idea what Kell would want, he wants to retort. He swallows it down.

"It's fine," he finally says.