The trouble was, of course, that she was lovely. He'd known what could happen from the first time he saw her face, a dim, blurred reflection on one of his screens. She was lovely and tall and lost and determined, with these big sad eyes and this wistful smile. Of course he was always going to fall for her and fall hard, though he'd done a good job of pretending to himself that he hadn't for a good six months. The truth was that there was never going to be any other way but through, and whatever kind of hard landing awaited him on the other side, when all of it was done.

He didn't expect anything from her though, he didn't even hope. In fact he hoped she never knew, or if she guessed, never embarrassed then both by bringing it up. She showed no signs of catching on, and he was glad.

He was glad also that it didn't strike him like the time he fell for Rebecca Cahill when he was 15 and turned into a blushing, stuttering wreck. That had been painful and a shock to his confidence, though short lived. Or like when he fell in love with Miranda Yao in his junior year of high school, and drifted into a dreamy haze, spurred on by the fumbling, girlish, patient way Mira returned his feelings. He had been preoccupied with the sweetness of first love in those two years they were together, and he'd had teachers and counselors shaking their heads at how he was wasting his talent, his promise letting his school work slide.

This was something different. It didn't cloud his head, it didn't leave him preoccupied or eat up his concentration. Being in love with Kiera was just something that was there. He knew it, the way he knew that the loft was hot and oven-like in high summer and that it was unfailingly cold in the fall and winter, and either way he just carried on. this love was like that, big and immovable but not over-mastering, just climate conditions.

He wasn't a love struck fool, he didn't intend to blunder about pining. If anything it sharpened his focus, burned in him like fuel. It lit him up inside and shored up his crumbling determination to accomplish anything or make something of himself. He loved Kiera and he loved her cause, and her tech and her lostness and her sweet, soft voice and the bright snap of her demands. He felt in some obscure way that he was sure to never voice, not even completely to himself, that he could devote himself to her for all his life, and be happy, so long as he could be the one to answer her calls for help. So long as he could be the one she trusted. It was all he asked.

She woke up early in the morning when the sound of the rain on the barn roof petered away to silence. A large, very plush orange cat sat beside her on the narrow bed, stared down at her with wide green eyes. She startled backward, surprised, and then stared back as she blinked herself awake. She hadn't lived in a building that allowed pets since she'd been a little girl, she'd forgotten the strange intensity of a feline stare. The cat leaned close and sniffed her face and then turn and leapt away, jostling the bed springs.

There was a wide window in the partitioned off living space of Alec's loft, she hadn't noticed it the night before. The storm had cleared, and thin, pearly daylight poured in, shrinking and solidifying the vast, distorted proportions of the place she'd remembered. She could clearly see the dark green, battered chintz couch beneath the window, a flat television standing on a large wooden crate, the dark brass frame and pile of woolen blankets on the narrow day-bed where she'd slept. She could see that the sheets and blankets that sectioned off the living room weren't just strung up, but were pinned to framed in walls that had never been finished. She imagined she could almost feel the cool grayness of the daylight on her face, but maybe that was just the pervasive chill of the loft.

There were fuzzy parts of her memory from the night before, and no recording to playback to fill in the gaps. She kept reaching for it, but the system was well and truly off, she couldn't even feel it try to activate. She tried not to feel claustrophobic in the limitations of her own mind. She'd lived without tech for 26 years of her life, surely she could go without it for a day or two.

She remembered Alec blustering and fussing around her until she got up from his chair, although she could happily have slept there for hours if left in peace. She remembered him leading her away from the workspace into the dark depths of the loft, a space that seemed to be filled with looming objects. He'd led her into a curtained off room within the loft that was almost like a tiny apartment.

She remembered being left sitting alone for a small eternity, and feeling like she didn't want to move beyond the small puddle of yellow light cast by the one lamp, a tall, gaudy brass thing standing between the sofa and the bedstead. She remembered feeling dizzy, and gripped with a chill that seemed to collapse her inwards.

Sometime later Alec had reappeared with a pile of soft, warm clothes, a bottle of pills and a bottle of sports drink. He kept apologizing. For taking so long running to the house and back, for the primitive setup, for the state of her tech, even for the cold and damp, which even in that state she knew he couldn't have helped. She'd let it all pass over her head, not arguing with him, but not accepting either.

"Alec, please," was all she'd said, and took the clothes he'd handed her. She held them to her chest for a while, feeling lost.

"Well, listen," he'd said after a polite pause, "Those aren't going to do you much good just holding them. Don't take this the wrong way, but you've got this kind of drowned look going on that cannot be fun."

She changed in the large but strange and rather haphazard bathroom attached to the loft, tucked into the eaves. It was better lit than the sitting area had been, but she still tripped twice on the odd half-step up to the sink and vanity. The pipes squealed and sputtered as she ran water to wash up, and it came out bone-aching cold. Her reflection in the mirror was not particularly encouraging, like a ghostly stranger's face, though she looked pink and clean after getting rid of her remaining makeup.

She'd almost kept the suit on, feeling vulnerable in the quiet wake of the malfunction, but Alec said he'd need it to work on. She'd never slept in it anyway, no matter how tempted she'd been in the early days. She wasn't a child, she'd reasoned, she didn't need a security blanket. She folded it up and set it aside, and changed as quickly as she was able, shivering badly.

When she'd come back out, she saw that Alec had turned the TV on and was sitting on the lumpy looking couch. He'd jumped up when he noticed her. She'd wanted to ask what was wrong with him, why he was so wound up, but that wasn't the kind of thing they usually talked about. Instead she just asked if he'd made any progress on the malfunction yet

"I wanted to make sure you were all set before I disappeared into the data," Alec had said, not sounding nervous at all, but soft and kind, the way he often did when he knew she'd been having a hard day.

He'd peeled back the blankets and sheet on the daybed, added some more pillows, obviously trying to make it seem more like a place to sleep than a place to sit. It looked cozier than her bunk at the Academy, anyway, and the patter of rain on the metal roof with the quiet television made a bland, friendly white noise. Alec explained how to set the thermostat of the bulky metal space heater he'd rolled out from the corner, handed her the bottle of fever reducers and the gatorade again, firmly suggesting she actually take some.

Alec did so much for her, she realized, so much. She'd be so lost in this green and primitive land without his brilliance and his generosity and his endless curiosity about her and her life. It was so much to demand of a young man, a stranger. And he always came through for her, with good humor and winsome pride. She looked up at him, all pale and angular and awkward, meeting her intent gaze with a confused smile, and wondered how he did it.

She wanted to ask him, or at least say something about it to show that she noticed. Or that she noticed sometimes anyway, when she wasn't entirely distracted by a case or the current Liberate plot. Instead she took her pills, and then made a face at the taste of the sports drink, peering at the bottle with sudden suspicion.

"What, they don't have gatorade in your time?"

"Of course they do, but it doesn't taste like this. This is just like fruit flavored sugar water."

"Oh come on, it's not that sweet," he yelped, "And with the electrolytes it's practically a health drink."

"Ugh. You're such a child," she said, and then realized that might have been a dumb thing to say.

"Says the woman who buys that syrupy peach lemonade every time she goes to the Summer Market," he said, "And anyway, I'm not that young anymore. If I'd gone to college I probably would have graduated and then some, by now."

She made a vague sound and didn't point out how such protestations don't exactly help his case. She'd already been through the Academy at his age, and been deployed for a few years. It was really strange to think about that time, when she was young but tough and believed so completely that she was fighting for what was right. It felt more like a dream than anything, a brutal kind of fairy tale she'd told herself.

"You should get some rest, Kiera. Do you want me to leave the TV on for company?"

"Okay."

She'd dozed for a long time before she truly slept. She'd listened to the rain, to the tv turned down so low that all she could hear was the studio audience laughter of the sitcoms and not the jokes that preceded it so that it sounded almost like waves lapping at the shore. Beyond that she'd listened for the faint clacking of keys and rolling of casters as Alec worked away beyond the cloth partition wall.

In the morning her head felt clearer. As she lay still in the thin, glaring dawn, she thought she was well again, her fever cleared. Then she sat up, and by the way her perception of the motion lagged muzzily behind, she knew that was not so.

"Alec?" she called, trying to see through to the work space.

There was no reply. She tried again to access her comm channel and failed. She considered getting up and investigating, but it was early and the air out from under the covers was chilly despite the efforts of the slowly ticking space heater.

She pulled up the hood of her borrowed sweatshirt and turned away from the window, burrowing back down under the covers. She'd figure it all out later.

Kiera's life had been shaped largely by the ways she had to plot and pit herself against some larger force. When she was a child it was the haphazardness of her mother's approach to life and her steady favouritism of bold, creative, lively Hannah over her own pallid, cautious, staid self. When she was a teen looking to enter the Academy it was her father's reserve and skepticism, his attitude towards her always falling shy of either approval or disapproval. When she was a young woman there had been the dependable, implacable surety of of her unit commander in the Peacekeeper Service and the kindly, paternalistic dismissal of her lieutenant at the CPS.

Even Greg had been a hard man to convince when her plans didn't line up with his. He tried to reason with her gently but with insistence. If that didn't convince her, he tried to wait her out with this patient, unmalicious scorn as though she was a stubborn child who didn't know what was best. It was something that she hadn't noticed in him until they were married, and Sam was on the way.

Now there was no one to answer to. There were no orders to follow. All she had was her own intuition and her memories of the history that was still to come. She didn't feel equipped to deal with the responsibility that had fallen on her shoulders. She'd never lived her life without the hand of some respected and intimidating person or organization heavy on her shoulder, guiding her. Without that opposition to maneuver around, without a resistance against which to press her resolve, she found herself at a loss.

Her decisions were becoming reactive, impulsive. Without that structure, that restriction, she didn't feel freed. She was terrified. She didn't plan her resistance or swallow her objections and go along, she just acted, and then looked at those actions later and wondered if they were justified.

She'd always thought herself a strong, independent, pragmatic person. But here in the past, cut off from the strictures and customs upon which she'd always leaned without realizing it, she was beginning to see how sheltered and dependent she'd always been. Here there was no one's approval to seek. Here there was no one to obey.

Hannah had berated her towards the end, when her sister still lived in reality some of the time but had been running from it, for not having any spirit. For not thinking for herself.

You're like this good, perfect robot, Hanna had accused on the last leave home Kiera'd had before the end of her time with the PKS, I used to think you had a true self hidden deep down and if I looked hard enough I could find it and bring it out. But I just don't know anymore, Kiera.

Her mother had tried to break up the argument, trying not to back one daughter over the other, begging them to have some compassion for each other. Hannah had drunk too much with dinner, was young and angry and couldn't seem to find her start in life and Kiera had dismissed her accusations as old resentment warmed by wine. The words had stuck with her for years.

In the bleakness, the nascency and unprotected clamour of 2012, Kiera found that there was unbending iron in her. She found that in times of danger and crisis there an inborn voice in her that told her to fight and keep fighting, an instinct that seemed to know, on the brink of momentous events, what the right thing was. She also found that she had no idea how to consult that instinct without the press of imminent disaster, in her day to day life.

The people native to this past seemed to know how, though. They were more like Hannah, more like her mother. The lived darting, vibrant, selfish lives. They shared their close-held opinions as easily as breathing. She envied them. With an honesty and fierceness she'd never allowed herself to feel over Hannah, she envied them.

Sometime later she woke for real. It was brighter and warmer and Alec was making coffee with his bare bones kitchenette in the corner of the living space. There was a small fridge, an electric kettle and a toaster oven on a small table next to it in the midst of a clutter of mugs and odds and ends. She got the feeling that he was mostly living out of the loft, and she could understand why given the tensions with his step-father and Julian.

She got up, feeling strange lying around now that she wasn't alone. She came over and watched him go through a lengthy process with a bulbous carafe, grounds, a filter and water slowly poured over the top. People in 2012 had such elaborate rituals for their caffeine. She found it endearing.

Coffee was prohibitively expensive in her time, some growing regions badly affected by climate change and others made largely inaccessible by political instability in the region. Back home she'd drunk the powdered lab-grown stuff, drowned with sugar and soy-creamer, but only for the caffeine boost not for the joy of it.

"I didn't know you had a cat," she said, as they waited for the coffee, for something to say.

"Oh, did you meet Seamus? He's supposed to be the barn cat but he mostly hangs out here in the loft. He's good company. He keeps the mice away from the wires, anyway."

"Mice?" she said, ever so slightly alarmed. She'd thought of farm pests as being from even longer ago then when she was stranded.

Alec gave her an askance look. "Yes, mice. You know, little furry skittery things, apocryphally thought to eat cheese? I'm sure mice are still around in 60 years."

"Of course. Just not inside where people live." She assumed that was so anyway. She'd lived in high rise buildings most of her life, and those had to be well sealed because of smog and energy conservation concerns. No one worried about rodents anymore.

Alec just smiled at her wryly. She could tell he wanted to tease, but restrained himself. He went to get rid of the filter and coffee grounds instead. So much bother, she thought again, but it sure tasted better in this time than the bitter black powder she'd dissolved with hot water every morning back home.

After handing her a mug, done up with milk from a glass bottle and no sugar, just like his, Alec jumped right in, as though they were in the middle of the conversation they'd left off the night before.

"Have you ever heard of a bootstrap paradox? Also known as a causal loop or a retrocausality. The simplest example i've seen to explain it involves a time traveler with questions about a certain field-revolutionizationizing math proof. He takes the proof in his time machine to visit the author at the time that he published it, and the mathematician is confused, says he's given up on ever publishing it because he can't solve it. The time traveler lets him look at the finished proof, and the mathematician says, 'that's easy, I solved it after all.' But did he really solve it?" Alec said and shrugged, "All he did was read the answer. The answer had his name on it, sure, but that's not really the same thing. So where did the information really come from? How did it get into the timeline, and did the mathematician really understand it or did he just take what was in front of him."

"I'm tired, and still a little feverish i think, so forgive me if I don't get it, but what does that have to do with…" she shrugged, at a loss, "Anything?"

"The point is that you, Kiera, have dropped us in the middle of a bootstrap paradox. You didn't mean to, but just by landing here, that's we're rattling around in. You came back in time and told me I invented this system- and I know that because here it is," he said, gesturing in her direction, at the workspace beyond the doorway where she knew the suit was hooked up, "And it's really cool, you have to admit. But it's technology that's built on things I haven't done yet, and might not even do in this timeline. It's here in front of me, but that doesn't mean I understand it. Do you see what I'm saying?"

"What does that mean, functionally, for fixing my CMR?"

"I'm sure can do it. It's going to take a little time, but that's mainly a matter of me just physically reading the data I've got and seeing where the problem is. All the code is pretty intuitive, which makes sense. What worries me is problems down the line. The longer you're away from the support this system was meant to have, the more bugs it will develop, and there's a difference between learning how to fix issues once they show up and actually understanding how the system works from the ground up," he said, and ran his hands back through his hair and sighed. "I'm not saying don't use it, or that I can't fix it right now. But all I can do is crisis-manage. You might have to be more careful to turn it off and reset it at regular intervals, maybe using it less. I don't know."

"That's a lot to think about. I don't know. I rely on that tech, Alec. It's how I do my job."

"It's not all of how you do your job, though. The tech is just a tool, a really, mind-blowingly awesome tool, yeah, but it's just there to help you. And on the other hand, it's a pretty shitty tool if it's making you actively miserable, the way it was yesterday," he said, "It's also not there, I'm pretty sure, to enable you to pull days on end of vigilante super-hero lurking."

"Is this actually a really weird version of the 'you should take better care of yourself' speech?," asked Kiera, defensive, "Because I've heard that speech plenty of times, from people with far more right to comment than you, and my answer is always the same. I know my limits, I know what I'm doing. I'm fine."

"I know that you're on this mission, okay. I get that. I think it's actually this really amazing thing. But pushing yourself literally to the brink of collapse is… You didn't see yourself yesterday, Kiera," he said, staring at her with serious, wide eyes that told her just how much he had worried. Then he shook his head and moved on. "But that isn't really what I mean. I'm saying that I haven't caught up to where I could even think of inventing something like that chip. Even my abilities here have some limits, so some care should be taken because there probably is a limit to what I can fix, and I'd rather not find it. I'm not judging, okay? I'm just trying to help."

Her tech had been integrated into her training. It was instinctive to use it, and what's more it seemed to be the only thing enabling her effectiveness as a lone agent here in this time. She didn't want to think of it as fallible or breakable.

"Okay, Alec," was all she said, but she didn't mean it as an agreement to change her habits and she was sure by the way he frowned at her her before dropping her gaze that he'd been able to figure that out.

"Right, well," he said, his tone changing from serious to sheepish, "Sorry about this but I have to go do chores or someone will come looking for me, and find you here, raising all sorts of interesting questions."

She realized he was dressed differently, in a thick sweater and battered jeans and tall, muddy rubber boots. He looked youthful and strong, yet somehow older than she usually pictured him. He looked like he could have stepped out of any time since the second World War, even more foreign to her than usual. It was a working farm, she remembered, yet she still couldn't actually picture Alec, with his milky pallor and elegant hands, doing farm labour.

"So you didn't try and explain my presence here at all, I take it," she said, relieved and disappointed.

"I was going to. I wanted to be able to show you around. I thought you might like to meet the horses. But I couldn't think of an explanation that made any kind of sense."

"It's just as well."

"Anyway, there's food in the fridge, and I won't be long. After that I want to try a couple fixes, if you're up to it. If my hunches are right, you could be back to your regularly scheduled programming by this afternoon."

She she followed him out into the main area of the loft and watched as he put on a battered looking checked barn coat from the back of a chair. She'd seen Alec wear that coat before, and in town it had seemed the kind of ironic statement that many of the fashionable 20-somethings of the era liked to make. But out there, in that huge old barn with its perpetual damp and on that wide and rolling farm which she'd glimpsed from the loft window, she could see that he was in earnest and at ease. The future greatest tech mogul of all time was grown on country soil, and he was going off to do chores.

"I get the feeling that you're laughing at me right now, Kiera," Alec said wryly.

"It's just ironic, isn't? Under all that computer genius bluster you're really a farm boy a heart," she said and grinned.

"Yeah, yeah, very funny," he said, but he seemed pleased. "Won't be long. Feel free to poke around."

The fixes he tried did not work.

Alec took on a look more and more pinched and uncertain as his attempts fell through, but she never doubted that he would think of something before long. She tried saying something along those lines and all she got in return was a dismissive noise of annoyance. At himself, she was sure, for not solving the problem the first try, but it didn't do a lot for her mood either.

"Do you really think it's stupid of me to get the CMR?" she asked into the heavy silence in the loft.

She had changed back into her own mostly dry clothes and washed up while he'd been gone, so she felt a bit more human. When he came back she'd followed him to the work space and stolen his chair again. The cord connecting her port to the computer rig tugged and itched at the back of her neck but not so much that she couldn't sit still and ignore it. She remembered his previous warning and kept her feet firmly planted.

"Well… I wouldn't personally want one."

"They're standard issue, you know. Like your badge and your gun, you can't be CPS without the chip and the lens implants. Problems are very rare. I don't think even that you would have shipped them out to the Service if they were dangerous."

"I don't think you personally were stupid to get your tech, Kiera, that isn't what I meant at all. I'm sure it's different in your time. And the tech is really, really impressive, plus it's a good idea in theory, especially for cops. It's just that after seeing the chip give you so much grief like now, or with the hack…" he said, and stopped what he was doing, she heard the clicking and typing go silent. She was tempted to crane around and look at him, but didn't want to dislodge the cable. "I guess I think someone somewhere up the line outsmarted themselves a little in pushing tech like this to the public," he explained at last, "When my mother's new laptop wound up in that nasty Win 8 disk cleaning loop of death a couple weeks ago, it was a hassle and and a massive annoyance but everyone was fine, you know? When your chip crashes, it's not just a hunk of plastic that's on the line, it's you, Kiera. And that's why I'm not going to stop thinking he is an idiot for putting you in this position."

She didn't know what to say to that. She couldn't even turn around to look at him because of the cable, and wasn't sure she wanted to anyway. She went still instead. She didn't want to understand what drove the hardness to his voice, the anger and protectiveness on her behalf, but she had a sinking suspicion that she did.

He'll get over it, she thought, he's so young. It's just the novelty of it all. She decided to pretend very hard that the thought had never occurred to her. She would probably forget about it in the midst of the next emergency, whatever that would turn out to be. Maybe she wouldn't be in this time long enough for it become a problem, though a quick return was looking less and less likely.

Alec would grow up and move on and everything would be fine.

In the end he decided to unhook her and regroup.

The short November day was already fading beyond the cavern of the loft but the weather remained relatively clear, a thin scrim of clouds stretched across the sky glowing bright as white gold as the setting sun shone across them. She'd wanted to see a little of the farm before she went back to the city and Alec had said that Julian and Roland would be away at one of their meetings most of the evening so they'd ventured out.

There was so much space, so much rolling land, dotted with tall old maples and crossed with fences. The fenced pasture was steep and shaggy and rolling until it sloped away into dense forest land bordered the farm. The planting fields were higher and flatter and shorn to a muddy stubble for the winter, stretching off away until they met the fences and fields of the neighbor's property. Between the horse pasture and the growing land was a large, pretty blue and white farm house, it's windows lighted against the evening gloom and it's chimney sending up a thin curl of pale smoke. The whole picture was like something out of a fairy tale, or those novels about the pioneers her mother read to her when she was little and Hannah was a baby.

Kiera was still worn, and it was chilly, and getting dark so they didn't go far, just along the pasture and up to an ancient and half-dead stand of fruit trees on a hill that overlooked most of the property. The grass was overgrown but not so wild that they had to wade through it, and silvered with rainwater and dew. The earth was soft and spongy beneath her feet. The air was so clean and rich with the scents of the wide countryside and fresh rain. Even the faint sweet, fermented smell of the windfall apples withering among the fallen leaves seemed wholesome and right. It was like nothing she had known.

"It's so green," she said softly, with reverence, "Sam would've…"

They had stopped walking and leaned against one of the twisted, bulbous trunks. Across the fields, the wooded hills in the distance rose up like black-green shadows filmed with mist. She looked out into that hazy vista rather than meet Alec's sympathetic gaze.

"Yeah," he said, surprising her, "It was a good place to grow up. When I was little the farm seemed like a whole country. Or sometimes like a whole alien planet, depending on the game day."

"Was it a working farm then, too?"

"Oh yeah, it was a bigger operation then, actually. When my dad died, it seemed like too much to keep up with. Not that he was ever that involved in the farm side of things, but my mom didn't want to deal with anything for a while, and I was only nine. Too young to help out."

They were quiet for a while, watching the smoke rise from the farmhouse chimney and the landscape slowly desaturate with dusk. The last of the grey afternoon faded away into deep, thick blue twilight, the air sticky with the approaching frost. She could almost taste the creeping coldness of the oncoming night. She rubbed at her fingers, stuffed deep in her pockets, trying to get the blood flowing.

"Why don't you stick around for a while, come in and have dinner with us," said Alec suddenly, "Julian always stays over at the Campbell's after the meetings so it'll be quiet. My mom's a good cook, and Roland's got intense beliefs but he's good with company and doesn't proselytize unless you're family. It's also actually warm in the house, which would be a nice change."

"And tell your parents what exactly about who I am?" she asked, deeply skeptical. It was tempting, she did want to meet Alec's family, size up the mysterious stepfather for herself. She wanted to because Alec really did seem to want her to be there, his face luminous and hopeful. But she was sometimes unsettled about how much she, a grown woman with a family of her own, leaned on this young man, and had no easily plausible explanation for her presence in his life. Though there was nothing inappropriate between them, she still sometimes felt that she was crossing some moral line just by being there, presenting him with what his future could be, and she wasn't sure that she wanted to look his mother in the eye.

"That you're my friend. That you're new to the area and out here alone. That we met online and came out to see a project I'm working on. I've thought about it and really, a non-answer answer is best. It's all pretty much the truth anyway," he said with a shrug. "I don't think Roland needs to know that either of us are consulting with the police. It wouldn't do a lot to improve the atmosphere of the evening."

"You aren't consulting with the police. I am consulting with them, and you are my consultant. I've been very careful to keep you from getting too involved," she protested.

"Uh huh. That's exactly the line to take if the subject ever comes up."

"Alec, I'm serious."

"And I'm serious about my invitation," he said, speaking urgently and turning to face her, "I think you're too isolated, Kiera, and I think you haven't had a real meal in too long. I also think that you and my mother with get along, although keeping her from trying to adopt you when she hears even the sanitized version of your story could be a challenge. She heard Roland's story and married him after all."

She watched his face fill with exasperation and affection and realized that, no matter how separately he held himself from his family, his relationship with his mother was better than hers had ever been with either of her parents. She was curious. She wanted to see it. But still, she was tired and vulnerable and underprepared.

"Thank you. I know you mean it. But not tonight, Alec, okay?"

"Right. I understand."

"Maybe when I come back," she said, feeling suddenly that it was an invitation that she shouldn't let slip entirely through her fingers, "When you fix the CMR glitch. That will be soon right?"

"Yes, Kiera," he said patiently, "That will be soon. Come on, it's getting dark. I'll go grab the keys and take you back into town."