"Greta," says Rush with a polite nod, as though he is initiating a nebulous, courteous, moronic exchange of superfluous introductions prior to some routine social gathering and not returning an injured, wayward dimensional physicist to an apartment that is not hers.

He sweeps in once Asadi has crossed that threshold and spreads out the unexceptional arrangement of tools procured from the desolate canvas of his old apartment, depositing them neatly in a lateral spill over one of the more immediate lateral surfaces. Asadi had not been terribly responsive for the majority of the trip and had crossed into a territory of locked, deadened silence, and it had been a state of affairs he had found manageable if not ideal. Greta, he has found, is rather more adept at interpreting and reciprocating those nameless conversational cues and he will leave that task to her capable skillset while he organizes his own.