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"Yeah, ask anyone," Noah replied, and did not stick out his tongue, because he was mature.

He fought the urge to flinch at the snarl. This guy was being an a*****e, so what if maybe he'd got offended? Noah didn't have to care, it wasn't like they were friends or anything and they hadn't been going to be. "No thanks," he said snidely, "but feel free to help with the job we're assigned," and stomped off to get the next piece of debris.

Noah rolled his eyes. "I have a girlfriend," he said, and hauled his end of what might once have been a bedframe toward the road. "I'm not gonna hit on you or anything. What's your name, anyway, so I don't have to call you hey, you."

The fact that Leslie was indeed helping and not flouncing off in a huff had earned him points and a degree of grudging respect. He was still an a*****e, Noah thought, but he was an a*****e who was working instead of slacking.

Laz chuckled and made a sound that vaguely suggested lazy panting, and Noah got the distinct image of the zombie dog flopped loosely on his side, pointedly relaxing. You're an a*****e too, Noah snapped.

"It does," Noah said, offended. "It means I'm dating someone and I'm not looking." He glared at Leslie. "Nice to meet you," he said, about half sarcastically. The frame was dropped into the pile. "Are we gonna have to move all this s**t again?"

"Do we have, like, a forklift? I bet not. I bet it's all trainee grunt work," Noah griped, back on familiar territory with endless complaining. "I mean, the weapons make us stronger, so why waste money on machines, what's the point, jesus, I don't even know." He dropped the bedframe on the pile. "How much of this do we have to clean up? Or can we just stop when our time is up?"

Noah ripped the vines off the frame of the bookshelf, and once the shelves were out, pulled the rest of it out of the nest of neglected vegetation in which it had rested for who knew how many years. He got a shoulder under the corner of the frame and hefted it up and out. "She lives in town?" he asked, a little incredulously. "I always thought she sounded smart."

"Maybe they're like, reinforcing their houses," Noah speculated, because if more than one person was doing it there must be some reason and some precautions being taken. If it was just one, he would have put it down to individual crazy, but more than that suggested a line of reasoning of some sort.

"I don't like eating when I'm on infirmary duty," he confessed. "Smells too much like hospital. My appetite goes away." The vines gave, and Noah staggered slightly and then caught his balance with the frame hoisted up. "Thanks."

Noah paused to take a good look around, frowning with the beginnings of interest. He'd sort of been taking the abandoned ruin of the town for granted; it'd been like this when he got here, and aside from starting to learn the layout from patrols and cleanup work, he hadn't put a whole lot of thought into the whats, whens, or whys. "It can't always have been dangerous though," he replied. "I mean, it must've been okay sometime, or they wouldn't've built it. If they expected it all to get knocked down, you know. It's pretty big, too, so it must've been safe enough to build to this size for a while. Like, there's a school and stuff, so it must've been more like a real town long enough to need one."

He pulled the remnants of what had once been an upholstered chair out of a damp hollow near the house, making a face at the smell of mold. "If there's a school, were there kids?" Unexpectedly, a memory presented itself: New Year's, and the hallucination or dream everyone had shared, a world in which many of them had been preparing to be Hunters since childhood, some even born and raised on the island. The details were hazy, but he knew that much. Had the town once been alive like that? "I wonder when it got abandoned. And why. It must've been something pretty big to make everyone move up to the dorms."

He stopped again, blinking. "Wait, it really must've been big. These buildings aren't that old, but the town's got space for a lot of people. So what happened to them?"

Noah had been working up into an enthusiastic curiosity, but Leslie's disgruntled response and lack of interest took him aback, and he wilted a little. How could Leslie not be curious? That anyone could know that there was information available and be just uninterested to the point of no shits given was alien and baffling to Noah. "Yeah, I'll, I guess I'll look it up," he said, and fell into an uneasy quiet as he hauled the chair over to the pile they were gathering.