She turns partway, uneasy about the prospect of exposing her back to an open expanse of water, even here. She manages an infinitesimal edge of a smile, and it feels like the painful and forced thing she knows it is, that they both probably know it is.

"We don't have to stay." She pauses to rake the water's surface with her gaze, the wind-ruffled swathe cast in variations of green and gray. "It's not much like home here."

She never assumed it would be. She never consciously assumed. She never meant to.

The Shatterdome is gone, or it may as well be. And everything else with it.