Hans went home after the police came to the base. He found his brother there, alone.
    "Things aren't looking too good," Mitch commented, half a question. Unlike Hans, his accent was entirely American.
    "I know."
    "Does this mean that...?"
    "I have to make a few phone calls. We may have to leave again."
    "I thought that might be the case. When are we gonna tell Mom and Dad about the job offer?"
    "That's another reason I'm waiting for the phone calls. Hopefully they will call me soon. Are there any messages for me?"
    "No, no calls. Who are you waiting for calls from?"
    "Old friends." He hoped his fears would come to nothing. This "job offer" for his troubled brother might be all it appeared, and in that case all would be well. Otherwise... "Where are mother and father?"
    "Dad's at work, mom's getting groceries. I'm not at school, 'cause it's Saturday."
    "What did they say when they saw the paper?"
    Mitch shrugged. "The fact that we are currently undergoing bad times did not thrill them, but it didn't frighten them. The fact that there is going to be an inquiry..."
    "I know. No one is more cognizant of that than I." Silence fell. Hans considered his brother and wished the Hope would call to assuage his suspicions.
    "So can I ask you something?"
    "Yes."
    "Do you like doing what you do?"
    "One does not... like," Hans replied after a moment. "Liking is a thing Americans do. It is... it is my calling, it is what I must do."
    Mitch shook his head, frustrated. "You still don't make sense to me. Maybe it's just, you know, where we grew up, but... you should revel in this! I mean, look at what you can do!"
    "Look at what it did," Hans replied softly. "Not me personally, but it could have been, and that thought frightens me more than anything else."
    An angry gesture. "You're as bad as Dad sometimes. I got soccer practice, I gotta go." He slammed the door behind him; a brief, unnatural flare of light indicated a venting of the emotions the conversation had produced. He caught up with a friend on the sidewalk and the two headed off, talking.
    Hans turned on the TV and waited for his parents to return. The shows he watched still did not make any sense, but he continued to strive for understanding.

    Chandler wandered in a while later. He could always tell when she wanted to talk. Her thoughts continued to return to an inescapable theme: this was her fault. Too little, too late, and there was nothing she could do that would redeem her. She did not deserve forgiveness.
    "I've been thinking," Lucky started. "I have to resign."
    "You have to resign? What makes you say that?"
    "Um. People have done a lot less than I have and... all of it's true. I... I can't regain their trust, I can maybe make up some of this, but..."
    "Don't say what you can and can't do until you've tried," he admonished gently. "If you fold now, you'll never know how the hand was going to play out."
    "It's not folding, I'll still work with them, I'll still help them, but I don't..."
    "You can't resign right now, because you don't have a position to resign," he pointed out.
    "If I left the team, maybe they would—"
    "No. That's not how the public thinks. Trust me, I can feel it in the air. Martyring yourself is not going to do any good, it's not going to distract all the attention away from everyone else to yourself."
     "I can't stand this. I can't stand knowing that this is my fault, and there's nothing—I'm not used to this, Chandler, I'm not used to not being able to go and, I don't know, kick somebody's ass, or twist their arm and make them do whatever the hell I want."
    "Find the person whose ass you have to kick." His voice gained a measure of sternness, countering the note of desperation in hers. "This is a setup. You know this is a setup. It screams setup from word one. Somebody's yanking your chain."
    "But how do you get away from the fact that that chain is real?" she asked plaintively.
    "You tie them up with it and you throw them into the ocean. And then, once they're dead, you drag the chain back out, yank the skeleton off of it, and you keep walking around with it. People are fickle," he emphasized, paused to consider her carefully before going on. "I have done some shit in my life that I am not happy with. All right? I've been responsible for people's deaths. Now, they were not nice people, and they have been people who I certainly damn well wanted dead. And there was at least one instance where I pulled the trigger." His gaze transfixed her; she wanted to ask more about that, but kept her silence. "You pick up, you move on, you keep playing. I've wandered through a lot of towns, and not all of them did I leave under good circumstances. You try and pull that whole Dr. Richard Kimball routine, and you can't do it in every town. But if you resign now, and you don't leave, it will have been a symbolic gesture and it won't matter. If you do leave, they've won. That call's for you."
    Ring.
    "You're amazing," she sighed with a shake of her head.
    It was Needle, requesting a meeting. On her way there, she stopped at Wilson's Leather to pick up a new jacket. The clerk stared at her rigidly and picked up the phone as she approached a rack near the desk.
    "I hear that," she remarked idly, turned around. "Tell you what: one free shot, I won't even retaliate. If it'll make you feel better."
    "Get out of here," he said in a strangled voice.
    "Can I buy the jacket?"
    "Just get out."
    "I'm sorry." Very quietly. She left. The raucous laugh track of the sitcom he'd been watching seemed to follow her for several minutes.
    At the next store she left her helmet on. She got a few odd looks there, but nothing worse.

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