“Reyes. Reyes Vidal,” he said with a flash of a smile, shaking her hand. If he was going to be living with Hawke, she deserved his surname. He was realising quickly that the woman was cheerfully brusque and to-the-point, without pomp and ceremony — and he found himself appreciating it. In a world gone mad, this kind of straightforward pragmatism and good humour was absolutely essential, and similar to his own.

The tour of the space showed that it was actually cozier than the cold steel and starvation that he’d experienced back home; clearly, there were benefits to housing up. Her unfamiliarity with electricity gave him pause, however. Electricity was a given for Reyes — even on the edge of a new galaxy, a hardscrabble life on a barely-terraformed planet that wanted to kill them at any moment, they’d had power. It was a piece of logistics that he hadn’t had to consider in a while. He knew how to work the machinery, but the Initiative had provided all the generators on his last jaunt. How would one do it from scratch?

“I’ll take the second-largest,” he said. “Might as well. And that gives you some privacy, at least until if/when we get another roommate.” Their bedroom doors faced each other across the hall, with the empty third between them. He supposed it could be used for storage space, if necessary. Not that he owned much—

“So, alas, my confession: I’m dreadfully spoiled and used to electricity, so I could tinker with it, see how much I can figure out about the systems, if you don’t mind. I’ll need some way of earning my keep, anyway. And did I hear correctly that you offer daily archery training?”

Perhaps his reasons for answering Hawke’s ad hadn’t just been seizing on the first available opportunity to crop up.