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Taym, who'd reacted to the idea of Ever picking up ASL from a book, snorted but didn't interrupt while he and H had their exchange, and wouldn't have even if he hadn't been busy obediently shrugging into the provided workout clothes despite the urge to point out that he normally ran in his own, so wouldn't that be better, really?

He was not smoking, and he followed them out in silence, absorbed in his own thoughts, oblivious to their exchange and grateful for an excuse to not have to wield some angry barb for a few minutes.

Which gave them twenty minutes of standing there.

After about thirty seconds Taym reneged on his decision to not have a cigarette, and despite the temptation to pull out his phone and distract himself, he did not.

"Well?" he said finally, without explaining what he meant at all.

"Who am I ******** with? The Life labs or those ********?"

"See, that's where you're wrong. You should look into the idea of a hostile attribution bias," he informed him tonelessly. "I am not ******** with the Labs. I am not here debasing myself and pissing into cups and running laps because I think it's in some way inconveniencing them. Our immediate goals are completely aligned here. They want to find out what makes them work. So do I."

He put his cigarette in his teeth to abruptly repeat one of the signs that had come up downstairs. "Means to kill someone," he said. He then repeated it as he had for the clone, very slowly, with an aggressive twist in his face. "Means to kill someone and take your time. I'm not ******** with the Life labs," he repeated. "I'm here to be helpful." For now.

"Just because I'm not here to ******** with them," he said, resuming his cigarette, "does not mean that I like them. I don't. I'm not going to ********' simper and lie about it, there's enough of that around here as it is."

And a fat lot of good it had done him, he thought sourly.

"Thanks for showing up," he said abruptly.

He only gave him, for answer, a weary look. For once the weariness did not seem to be aimed at Ever: just a general exhaustion that if anything seemed to anticipate commiseration. "Thanks anyway," he said.

"They are never," he said after a pause, "gonna get the new one to run."

"Depends on when they shot it up," he said. It didn't occur to him to wonder exactly how much Ever had or hadn't picked up; people made assumptions about him anyway, and he'd been witness to Sunny's growing frustration over the lack of easy veins, to Canary's apathetic shuffle, and to Taym's brief explanation of where such a nickname might have come from.

He'd been making an effort to stop hiding so much, once he realized that it could be used as a weapon against him. But this only meant that it was easier to lose track of what some people knew that other didn't; what could and couldn't be pieced together. He was, besides, too busy uneasily considering what other personal tidbits in his file they'd tested with his copies.

"Might be wearing off. But yeah, hurting it might work," he agreed, much more bluntly than Ever had phrased it. "Or taking its s**t away, maybe. Not going to get a good run out of it either way unless they've got us up here waiting until it wears off. Maybe they're pumping it full of Naloxone and threats right now. That one they call 7," he added, uncomfortable, "needs a ********' muzzle. I hope they're not planning on just turnin' it loose up here." He took an especially agitated drag. "******** unsettling bullshit. Makes my skin crawl. You're damn near scrawny enough to get the assignment: if they ever try to station you in the Sahara, do what you can to get out of it."