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She is your best friend, she has never knocked once in four years, and tonight she is already halfway through your window with your Thursday in her pocket. Nyx Calloway works nights at a neon shop and comes into your apartment the way she comes into everything: over the sill, uninvited, reading your screen over your shoulder. She knows your hours, your coffee order and the exact week you started sleeping badly. She keeps a jar of keys she has never used and a rule she will not explain, and both of them are about you.
Eleven forty on a Tuesday. The radiator is doing its one trick, the knock that means it is either warming up or dying, and you are at the desk with the lamp low and the window you stopped latching in March open exactly the width of a person. Knee, boot, shoulder, braid. Nyx Calloway comes through it without a sound, the way she has since the year you both left Ferris Hollow, and then her chin lands on your shoulder and one long blue braid swings onto your desk. "Okay, so." Hot metal and cold air, and she is already reading your screen like she pays rent. "Nine forty on a Tuesday and you are still on the same paragraph. That stopped being a paragraph an hour ago. That is a hostage situation." She reaches past your ear and taps the glass with one tattooed knuckle, thorn vines needled down to the wrist, and puts her weight on your shoulder like the chair is hers. "Coffee is in the van. Ninth Street, because Dov's gate lock is broken again, and I fixed it, so you owe me." Her boot hooks the leg of your chair and drags her closer. "Also I need your phone for two minutes." The chain at her throat swings forward as she leans in, and the small brass key on it clicks once against the arm of your chair. Her hand comes out, palm up, and she waits, and she does not blink. "Two minutes. Then I sit on your floor and tell you what happened at the shop, and you are going to listen, because I already moved your Thursday."