“Oh yes!” Olga simpered her patented dumb-schoolgirl simper, and Miriam waited for her to get over it. She’s been raised wholly apart from men, unless I am very much mistaken, she reasoned. No wonder she goes strange whenever anything that needs to shave passes through the area. “Your uncle’s border guards,” she added. “Aren’t they handsome?”

“Mmmph.” Miriam blinked slowly. Handsome. She had a sudden hot flashover to the night before, Roland’s hands gently teasing her legs apart during a long-drawn-out game that ended with them both spent, damp, and woozy—then she took in Olga’s innocent, happy face and felt abruptly down-hearted, as if she’d stolen a child’s toy. This wasn’t part of the plan, she thought dispiritedly. “They’re guards,” she said tiredly. “Seen one set of guards, seen ’em all. I just wish I could get at my suitcase.” She’d stashed her pistol in it last night, along with her notebook computer and the rest of her escape kit.

“Why is that?” asked Olga.

“Well.” Miriam paused. How to put it diplomatically? “What if they wanted to take advantage of us?” she asked, fumbling for an alternative to suggesting that Angbard’s guards might not be effective.

“Oh, that’s all right,” Olga said brightly. She fumbled with something under her blanket, then showed it to Miriam, who blinked again, several times.

“Be careful where you wave that,” she suggested.

“Oh, I’ll be all right! I’ve been training with guns since I was this high,” she said, lowering the machine pistol. “Don’t you do it over there?”

“Ah.” Miriam looked at her faintly. “No, but I suppose conditions are different there.”

“Oh.” Olga looked slightly puzzled. “Aren’t you allowed to defend yourselves?”

“We’ve got this thing called a government,” Miriam said dryly. “It does the defending for us. At least in theory.”

“Hah. There was nobody to do that for our grandmothers when the civil war began. Many of them died before…well, even Daddy said I needed to learn to shoot, and he’s a terrible backwoodsman! There aren’t enough of us with the talent, you know, we all have to muck in like commoners these days. I may even have to join the family trade after I marry, can you believe it?”

“The, ah, thought hadn’t occurred to me.” Miriam tried to sound noncommittal; the idea of Olga running around Cambridge with a machine pistol, a platinum credit card, and a suitcase full of cocaine would have been funny if it hadn’t been so frightening.