Spire was in trouble. Not the kind of trouble where laser-shooting, shape-shifting, hallucination-inducing, ice-blasting Ashrats had him in a corner. He wouldn’t really mind life-threatening trouble to spice up the day. But no, Spire was in the-principal-had-to-whack-the-disobedient-schoolboy’s-knuckles-with-a-ruler-and-make-him-stand-in-the-corner kind of trouble. Ash-dusted, grayish brush crushed under the man’s heels as he reluctantly made his way back toward the ranch, coming to the end of the long walk that had begun hours before the sun rose. He couldn’t sleep, and if he had stayed in that house, he might have found himself going to the basement, slitting Oren’s throat, and hoping he could bury her before anyone found out. ‘Wow, strange. She must have managed to escape. Pity.’ The others were angry enough with him as it was. He didn’t especially care what most of them thought, but the group was more useful to him if they didn’t want to throw him out. But Spire really, really, really, wanted to kill Oren – he had no idea Montana was planning to do the same – and at the very least he wanted to push Larke’s overly accommodating “I’ll tell you everything I know” act was hiding something more useful about Commander Green, Erubesco, and Hel. Speaking of Hel, he imagined she had awoken by now. He had walked farther than he meant to, probably subconsciously hoping he’d meet some lost Wastelander to waste, no pun intended. He hadn’t killed anyone up close for weeks. Spire could see the ranchhouse and the barn, now. Home, sweet home, and the dozens of housemates who would happily see him go before a firing squad. The Wanderers all knew that Montana and Spire weren’t treating the Erubescan prisoners to five-star room service. The softer half of the group had argued for the prisoners’ lives and had won, for now, but they knew interrogation was going on, and not the polite kind, and not even the good-cop-bad-cop kind. Montana was bad cop—disciplined cop, but bad cop nonetheless—and Spire was worse cop. The Wanderers all knew this… …So Spire didn’t know why they got in such a tizzy about pigeon boy getting a little bit of peritonitis. So he stabbed the guy. Larke’s healing factor would probably keep him from dying of wounds three times as severe. They should have been damned grateful Spire didn’t straight up eviscerate the young man, because Spire had used up all of his self-control on stopping himself from sliding his knife through Oren’s throat now that it was becoming clear they would get no information from her. They weren’t damned grateful, though. Dawn, Mina, and Toby seemed particularly upset. Granted, Toby was upset by the whole situation. His empathy Gift or something. The younger Schippers brother had been spending most of his time on the top floor in the corner of the house farthest from the makeshift holding cells. Spire…didn’t know what to do about that. So he did nothing. As he passed the barn on the way toward the house, he heard familiar voices. [color=pink]“Where’s Spire?”[/color] [color=lightgreen] "I dunno. Have you tried indoors? We don't really talk much y'know. Toby might know."[/color] [color=lightgray]“You know what they say about speaking of the devil,”[/color] said Spire, sidling inside around the corner, ducking under a dark, decaying wooden beam and pressing his hands into the pockets of his long coat. [color=lightgray]“Did Soren make you breakfast, kid, or are you out here to eat with Rei? She’s—ah—probably not the best person to ask for nutritional advice."[/color] He directed the last bit at Rei with a charming half-smile. It was almost light-hearted fun-poking. Almost. As light hearted as you can get when poking fun about cannibalism. Insecure little Rei. She made it easy for him to walk that line between insulting and bantering, keeping her in that unsteady position so that she would work to stay on his good side. Her fear of Hel didn’t hurt. --- Toby sat against the frame of the attick bed. With his tall torso, the ceiling hung too low for him to sit up in the bed itself. He held a book, an old anthology of short stories from the 1970's with one of those rough-cloth coated hardcovers. He liked that canvaslike texture in his hands as he read. It grounded him. Focusing on his own sensations drowned out the lines of pain that complained all over his body, his neck, the bad ones at the back of his legs; the especially awful boiling pain in his abdomen - but not his body, his neck, or his legs, or his abdomen. Oren's and Larke's. He was getting better at untangling his nerves from everyone else's. It didn't overwhelm him as long as he didn't think about it. But he kept thinking about it. He would probably just stay up here for a while.