Maelle doesn't go out of her way to avoid Verso, but it's easy to not run into someone now that you don't spend every day together. Verso's absence in the apartment makes her quietly, privately sad--he never lived there, and Maelle doesn't know what this configuration of herself, Gustave, Sciel, and Verso even looks like when there's not tension, but she still would like to see it, some day. He should be with them now. Gustave should have been with them then.

He just can’t tell the difference between an offered hand and a raised one. Sciel's words have been bouncing around her head since she heard them. They've eased away some of Maelle's embarrassment, replacing it with sympathy, but she's still sixteen and she's still feeling burned. Yet she's also a sixteen year old that has lost family over and over again--and this first mission they'll go on together always has the potential of going terribly wrong, and Maelle doesn't ever wish to sit and speak to someone no longer there when she could have said the words where they could hear her.

So, she heads to Verso's door one morning and knocks, waiting with her hands behind her back.