She knocked. A muffled voice from within said, “Come in!”

Of course, instead of a doorknob, another palm indentation. She sighed in frustration and knocked again. Her hand hurt. Plasteel-reinforced doors weren’t designed to accommodate knuckles. After a moment, the door slid open. She stepped inside.

The office was small and completely uncluttered except for two red chairs. One was empty, the other occupied by a thin woman in vintage holo-clothing: flared blue jeans and a tight, floral-patterned long-sleeved shirt. The air was filled with externalized blueprints of some sort, close-up schematics full of intersecting lines and tiny white text. One of the blueprints extended upward from her palm. The woman slid a block of text from one side of the image to the other, then plucked it intact from her palm and gave it a gentle nudge. It glided over the empty chair to join a dozen more flat schematics gathered against the wall. She turned and smiled blankly at Mistletoe.

“Forgive me if I don’t recognize you from any of my classes here—are you a Unison-only student?”

“You’re Deirdre O’Hanlon?”

Her eyes scanned Mistletoe’s face and clothing. She kept her smile. “If you need to discuss financial aid, you’ll have to shimmer into the administration complex.”

Mistletoe pulled the half-burned ESCU database from her pocket and held it out silently.

Deirdre gave a delighted chuckle. “I haven’t seen one of those in years! Where on earth did you get it?”

“Listen to me. Jiri’s dead. I think Aunt Dita is too.” Mistletoe fought sudden, uncontrollable tears. “I don’t want”—her eyes blurred—“I don’t want anyone else to die because of who I am.”

Deirdre sat stunned, mouth open. All of her externalized plans vapored away. The two of them stared at each other across the empty room.

“And who are you?” Deirdre whispered, pale and hesitant, like someone who knew what was coming and yet couldn’t quite believe it.

“Fifteen years ago, you and Jiri and Dita and whoever else came and snatched me out of some UniCorp lab. I dream about it. There were gunshots.”

“Ma buh.…” Deirdre swallowed and gestured to the empty chair. “Please, have a seat.”

“I’ll stand.” Mistletoe felt a surprising surge of hostility toward this stranger, simply for being alive and comfortable while other people fought and died below the canopy.

“You have to understand,” Deirdre said slowly and carefully. “It’s been so long since I’ve been part of that world. These are names I haven’t heard in a long time. Jiri…” She shook her head as if amazed by the two syllables of his name.

“He died right in front of me,” Mistletoe said coldly.

“Then we’re still paying in blood.” Deirdre looked past Mistletoe at the wall. “There was another one of us who never made it out of the lab.”

“P.”