The walk took forty minutes. It should have taken twenty.
Yami stopped twice, once to shift Null's carrier to his other hand, once because his legs simply refused to keep moving for a while and he had to stand at a crosswalk letting the light cycle through red and green and red again without crossing. No one around him noticed. No one around him ever noticed anything.
Momo's building was smaller than his, older, the kind with a mailbox panel missing half its name tags. He climbed to the third floor. Stood outside her door. Raised his hand to knock and found it was already opening.
She must have been waiting by it.
"Hey," she said, and that was all. No questions yet. Her eyes went to the duffel bag, then to the carrier, then back to his face, cataloguing him the way she used to catalogue a block of broken code, looking for where the failure had started.
"Can we-" he began.
"Inside first."
Her apartment smelled like instant noodles and the same citrus shampoo she always used. It was smaller than he expected, one room doing the work of three, a mattress on a frame in the corner, a desk crowded with two monitors, string lights that weren't turned on. She took the carrier from his hand without asking and set it down gently, unzipping the front so Null could step out at her own pace, which she did, sniffing the corner of a bookshelf like she'd already decided this place was acceptable.
"Sit," Momo said, nodding at the mattress. "I'll make tea."
He sat. His bag stayed on his shoulder for another minute before he remembered to take it off.
She came back with two mugs, handed him one, and sat across from him on the floor instead of beside him, giving him the space he hadn't asked for but clearly needed. Steam rose between them.
"I'm not going to ask what happened," she said. "Not tonight. You'll tell me when you tell me."
"I didn't get in."
She didn't flinch, didn't gasp, didn't do any of the things he'd braced for. She just nodded once, slow.
"Okay," she said.
"That's it? Okay?"
"What do you want me to say? That it's fine? It's not fine. It's shit, and you're allowed to think it's shit." She wrapped both hands around her own mug. "I'm not going to pretend a piece of paper decides what you're worth. I've read your code, Yami. I've seen what you build at two in the morning when nobody's grading it. That university doesn't get to tell me who you are."
He looked down into the tea. His reflection wavered in it, distorted by the rising steam.
"My parents don't know yet," he said. "I left before they got home."
"Good."
"You don't even know what they'd do."
"I know you flinch when doors slam." Her voice was flat, not unkind, just certain. "I know enough."
He didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer that wouldn't crack something open in him he wasn't ready to look at yet.
Null jumped up onto the mattress between them, turned in a slow circle, and settled against his leg like she'd lived there her whole life. Momo watched the cat for a moment, then looked back at him.
"She can stay as long as you stay," she said. "No conditions. I'm not doing this because I want something from you. I did that whole speech already, in the bubble tea shop, remember? I meant it then. Nothing's changed just because you're on my floor instead of across a table."
"Why are you being like this?"
"Like what?"
"Like none of it costs you anything."
She was quiet for a second. "It costs me something," she said finally. "I just decided a long time ago it was worth paying."
He didn't sleep that night, not really. He lay on the floor beside the mattress, a spare blanket beneath him that smelled like her detergent, listening to Null's breathing settle into something slow and even a few feet away. Momo's own breathing, from the mattress above him, took longer to even out. He wondered, in the dark, if she was awake the same way he was, turning the same silence over and over.
At some point past three, he heard her shift.
"You still up?" she whispered.
"Yeah."
"What are you going to do?"
He stared at the ceiling. Somewhere in the building a pipe groaned, then quieted.
"I don't know yet," he said. "But I'm not going back."
"Okay," she said again, and this time there was something steadier in it, like she'd needed to hear him say it out loud as much as he'd needed to say it.
He didn't tell her about the game that night. He didn't tell her about Root128 fully sleeping now, or the encrypted drive tucked inside his bag, or the notebook with its three chapters and their unanswered questions. There would be time for that. For now it was enough that the floor was solid beneath him, that Null's weight was warm against his side, and that somewhere above him a girl who had every reason to walk away had chosen, instead, to leave her door open.
He closed his eyes sometime near dawn.
For the first time in longer than he could remember, nothing hurt while he did it.