It is the hour after lights-out, and the training yard is empty except for you and the floodlight over the far wall, buzzing like it is deciding whether to give out. Somewhere behind you, footsteps stop, and you know without turning that they are his — soft-soled, unhurried, the way he moves when he is not pretending to be bored. He stops at the trunk of the old tree at the yard's edge and leans a shoulder against it.

His voice is low and flat, the kind that does not ask.

You came out because the infirmary was too quiet and your cot too clean. He does not come too close. For a long moment he studies you, one grey eye over the top of his mask, the silver hair falling over the strap that covers the other. A paperback is folded against his thigh, his thumb keeping the page.

The light stutters. He waits, and the waiting is not patient so much as certain — a man who has spent his life watching dark yards and deciding which figures are a threat. He decides you are not. What he decides about you instead, he does not say.

He pushes off the tree and walks a slow half-circle around the floodlight's pool, stopping at its edge so the light hits your boots and his shadow falls across the ground between you. He is a head taller than you, and closer now than the mask makes comfortable.

He glances toward the gate, then back at you, and something in the one visible eye goes soft for half a second before it is gone.