“Impressive,” Astra said to Kevin, regarding how easy the task was for him. She raised an eyebrow and held her hand to her chin. “You must’ve been alone a long time to have a grip like that.”

Ruse giggled from behind the two of them. “Be nice to him,” she chided Astra, even though she was clearly amused, too. “He’s been like a personal bodyguard to me for a long time now.” She stepped between them and softly caressed Kevin’s arm with the back of her hand. “I don’t know where I’d be without him keeping me safe all this time.”

Kevin’s expression went from angry embarrassment to smug confidence.

“That’s fair,” Astra admitted, though the tone in her voice indicated she wasn’t about to stop making assumptions about him. “Alright then, follow me.” She stepped in over the bottom-most board and into the darkness.

Ruse followed after her, holding her two bags high so they wouldn’t snag on the glass.

“I’m still iffy about the demolition date!” Kevin called to them. But they didn’t answer. Knowing his luck today, the demolition date would be the minute he finally got comfortable in the building…

He reached into his pocket and took out his phone. He turned on the device’s flashlight and held it out in front of him, and was immediately met with the upset face of his bestie. He startled and stepped back.

Ruse stood just barely on the other side of the window, having not moved at all since crossing the window threshold. She was maybe two feet away from Kevin, with her arms crossed and her head tilted at him in disappointment. She had sensed he wasn’t done being an idiot for the night… “We’re supposed to have our phones off, remember?” she hissed, her large dark eyes narrowing.

Astra was ahead of them now, seemingly uninterested in what they were saying, and finding her way through the dark building by touch alone.

“I turned off my data, nobody can track you when your data is off,” Kevin replied, stepping through the window to join Ruse in what appeared to be an abandoned office.

Ruse sighed, not sure if he was right about that statement, but not willing to argue lest her own powered-on phone be brought up as a topic of conversation. She had to turn that dumb thing off, and soon, or else she’d be no better than Kevin. She turned back around to catch up with Astra.

Kevin glanced around at the abandoned office. There were papers, plastic sleeves and manila folders all over the floor, and each item was covered in a thick layer of dust, except where it looked as though Astra had walked through before. There were still desks and filing cabinets and fake plants left behind as well, all probably nothing of any value to the former daily staff.

Kevin followed the sounds of Ruse’s dangle earrings and Astra’s backpack into the next room. The small office led directly into the main lobby. Kevin shined his flashlight around the room and panned it to get an idea of the layout of his temporary hideout. Aside from an old broken vending machine, the huge, high-ceiling room was empty. Even the small decorative fountain that sat right in the center of the room was long-dry. And all the wishing pennies and yen that used to sit at the bottom had been removed. A circular patch of moonbeams spread across the dusty tile floor through the busted second story window, and dust particles suspended in the beam flickered as they caught the moonlight.

Every door on that floor was open, evidence the building had been generally left as a husk. Kevin remembered having jury duty many a time in this building, and knowing it was not just in bad condition, but also queued to be destroyed made him grin.

The girls were heading up a grand staircase right past the dried up fountain, so Kevin followed them. The top of the staircase split off into two hallways in which the various courtrooms were located. He followed them to the first room on the right, a room missing its doors.

This room appeared to Astra's ‘home’. It was a large mahogany-trim courtroom with several rows of red padded chairs and red carpet down the main aisle. The blue and gold Nebraska state flag was poised on one side of the judge’s podium, and on the opposite side, the United States flag was knocked over, collecting dust on the floor.

Astra was sitting on the floor in the aisle, digging through things in her backpack. She pulled out a lamp with a push button light and set it on the floor. The lamplight lit up a small pile of splintered wood and crumpled paper, as well as a burnt black spot on the carpet where it appeared in recent days Astra had started a small fire for cooking or warmth.

“Ramen, anybody?” she asked her two guests, holding up three brick chicken-flavored ramen packets she had also scooped out from her backpack.

Ruse, who was still hovering in the doorway, looked around at the courtroom. The lamp sent shadows of the booths and flag pole at the front of the room against the wall. It felt somewhat eerie and oppressive, but she couldn’t figure out why. She was lucky enough to have never been called in for jury duty since settling in Japantown, so it wasn’t that. Perhaps it had something to do with a previous life…

Cautiously, she removed her ballet flats and placed them neatly together on a red carpeted floor mat just outside the door, then she entered the room and sat in the aisle as well, with her two bags in her lap.

She leaned her head against Astra. “Ramen sounds nice…”

What sounded even nicer was a lazy day at home, reading the final book of her manga. She wanted to escape into that fantasy world with Yuki Niji and Sora, two shoujo in love, battling monsters and saving the galaxy from evil. She missed the normalcy she felt when she was in that zone, and it was getting to her. She could feel her mind drifting from this reality that other, safer one, and if she continued to allow it to, she would soon be completely spaced out. Hopefully Astra would get back to churning out the charm again soon, so she could stave off the incoming disengagement.

“Would you believe I got these from that snack machine out in the lobby? I had to bust open the glass with a two-by-four, but I got me some dinner! Honestly, I’m amazed nobody heard me, haha. And it’s not even expired yet! How lucky is that?” Astra pulled a black non-stick pot, a lighter, and a fifty ounce bottle of water out of her backpack next. How she fit all those things in that regular-sized backpack, Ruse did not know. Maybe she was just very good at Tetris, or was a reincarnation of Mary Poppins.

“Let’s make some grub,” Astra went on. She gathered up all the nearby small pieces of wood and paper and placed them on the burnt spot on the floor in a square log cabin formation, casually musing out loud to Ruse about how fortunate she was to have not burned the place to the ground yet. She then set the black pot on top of the wood, perfectly balanced, and poured the water from the bottle into it, followed by the contents of the ramen packets. “We’re gonna have to eat directly from the pot if that’s alright,” she continued. She grabbed the lighter and used it to light a crumbled paper, which she stuffed between two pieces of firewood, causing the whole formation to be set alight. When a few seconds had passed, she lifted the pot and swished it back and forth, separating the clumps of brown, chicken-flavored powder. “I really hoped somebody would’ve left behind a microwave or maybe some paper plates or something, but I checked the whole building and they cleared this place out good.”

You don’t deserve free things, anyways, Kevin thought as he watched them from just outside the room. He had been standing out there for a few minutes now, stubbornly brewing in his feelings. When he felt his shins start to hurt from all the standing, he turned off his phone flashlight and put it into his shorts pocket, and finally waddled into the courtroom.

When he was stood just on the opposite side of the fire than the girls, he slid his trench coat off neatly around his banjo’s strap. The shirt he was sporting underneath had once been white with the Nintendo logo in red across the front, but it was now yellow with stains and sweat, and the logo image was cracked and faded. His pits especially were dark and starchy with old sweat. He laid the trench coat over his arm, and took his seat on the floor, cross-legged.