Major talked without stopping from the moment we entered the building. I fell back slightly, letting him walk ahead with Mercury, whose laugh I could hear from behind him every few seconds.
Whatever he was saying, she was finding it funny, which was either genuine or the specific social intelligence of someone who understood how useful it was to make a person feel interesting.
I walked with Sherry.
"How safe are we?" she asked quietly.
"Safe for now," I said. "Worried that a certain bald member of our team might change the stats."
She grinned. "What do you mean?"
I didn't answer. We needed somewhere private before I told her what I thought about Owen. Out here in the middle of Major's people was not that place.
The building opened up around us as we entered. A hotel, pre-catastrophe, the kind that had been built for a different world and had survived into this one by becoming something else.
