He put the knife down.
Not because she'd told him to, specifically, more because standing in his own kitchen holding a utility knife at a B-rank Awakened who had just walked through his front door was a situation with no good escalation path, and he was tired enough that de-escalation felt like the pragmatic choice.
He set it on the table and looked at her.
She looked back at him with the expression of someone running a very fast internal calculation, her eyes moving across him the way her spatial sense probably moved across rooms, cataloguing, noting, filing. He was aware, in a way he hadn't been in the staging area three weeks ago, that being the subject of that kind of attention was significantly more uncomfortable than being peripheral to it.
'You're alive,' she said.
'Yes,' he sa
