Arada didn’t hug me, though she bounced up and down and waved her arms. Thirteen hours later, after she had talked with the others, she said to me, “In a few months, we’re going on a small assessment survey. It’s an independent site outside the Corporation Rim, so there wouldn’t be any bond company or … We wouldn’t have to worry about that. We’d like you to come along to keep us from getting killed. I don’t know what you’d like in exchange—”

“It likes hard currency cards,” Gurathin said. I looked at him. He said, “I’ll take the obscene gesture as given.”

“You’ll have to wait to discuss it,” Pin-Lee told them. “It can’t enter into any contractual agreements until it completes its memory rebuild.”

“Why?” I asked her. “Because my owner says so?”

“No, asshole,” Pin-Lee said. “Because I’m your legal counsel.”

After that conversation, after the others had gone to sleep, Pin-Lee came back to my room and picked up my bag. (Once I remembered it existed, I’d checked it and found Wilken and Gerth’s ID markers and the currency cards I hadn’t used yet were still there.) Pin-Lee said, “This is technically illegal, so don’t tell anybody,” and put three new ID markers and currency cards into my bag. She said, “This is just some insurance if anything goes sideways. Gurathin made the IDs, and these are cards Ratthi and I got for the trip to TranRollinHyfa, but didn’t use. Preservation doesn’t have an internal currency economy and these are drawn from the citizens’ travel fund.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because I want you to know we’re serious, that you’re not some kind of prisoner or pet or whatever it is you think.” And then she stomped out.

When humans I didn’t know came to visit, I hid back in my room. I spent a lot of time there anyway, even when not hiding, because the rebuild process was taking up a lot of my resources. Just lying on the bed with local media playing on the display surface was all I could do for three to four hour periods.