There's little time to react but Jet does it for him regardless. One moment the pipe is heading for Albert's skull and the next there's a prone corpse, Jet standing with blood dripping from one hand, and the echoes of a death screech still rattling in their ears long after it's faded from the air.

"It's not-" He stops himself, whetting his lips with a tongue too sharp, almost cutting them on the words he forces himself not to say. This shouldn't be a fight. They're both weary and drained, ravaged by too much emotion so that now they're close to picked clean, bleached and brittle and ready to snap. Or so Albert feels. He didn't want this, Natalie's blood as much on his hands as Hilda's.

Hilda.

He forces himself not to look in the direction her prone body still lies.

"Don't apologize."

A beat. Just one. Long enough to hint at everything Albert tries to keep buried for the sake of survival. "We have to find shelter."