"And we may not ever," she answers in a voice that goes hard like the flick of a switch; she doesn't expect a good answer out of it, obviously. "The SIN guards took all the prisoners. If I'd been thinking straight I would've kept one, but I ran out of arms."

And no one was listening to her anyway. "When this is healed, if we still haven't heard anything, I'm going to figure out if LIERs can become guards." She'll have answers one way or another.

This is how long it takes her to put together the vague bits and pieces Jacob's given her, about things not being the same, about contract partners, about going back to the Down.

"Wait - how different are things now? Like awkward silence different, or I never want to see you again different, or something in between?"