Her daughter was smiling so widely, Donna knew there was only one thing it could be. "Did you get your PhD?" she asked, feeling her heart beat faster in anticipation of the answer.

"Yes," her daughter replied, bursting into helpless giggles.

Donna leaned back, unable to hold back her own smile. "Congratulations! How did the defense go?" she asked, echoed by the guards sitting along the wall and the director from Eight. She wished she wasn't so tired. In the middle of the night, they had all been woken up by a gunshot, sending Donna into a near-panic. After tossing and turning for hours, she finally found out that the culprit had been a sentry who had thought they had seen a ghost in their guard tower.

"Alright." Her eyes shone with joy, and even her posture spoke of immense happiness. "I'm just glad it's over and done with." She looked at Donna, looking sad all of a sudden. "Is everything alright?"

"Everything's fine," Donna said quickly, rubbing at her eyes. Was this really little Donna in front of her, a holder of a PhD in engineering? "Just a bit tired. Nothing to worry about. How did it all go?"

"Stressful, but I'm glad it's done," she said. "Grandma and Grandpa made up a silly rhyme, and now Sooyen's repeating it endlessly." She tapped the table with her fingers in a rapid rhythm. Donna noticed that she was shaking slightly from the excitement.

Donna wished she could share in the family's celebration. "How does it go?"

Her daughter laughed. "Oh, it's just some silly nonsense, really. 'Our Mommy is amazing. She defended her dissertation, and she's now the pride of the nation'. Or 'the pride of civilization'. I want to sink through the floor every time she says it, but Daeho thinks it's cute." She sighed, but the smile didn't heave her face. "Even my advisor thought it was funny!"

"I'm sure few of his PhD students have eight-year-old children cheering them on," Donna pointed out.

"It's a shame you couldn't be there." Her smile was sad now. "It was something to behold. Grandpa was there, looking like all of his dreams had come true at once. Sooyen barreled into the room, cheering. Daeho gifted me a potted cycad."

The mental image made Donna feel melancholic and happy at the same time. She wished she could have been there to support her daughter, but at least Donna had had the rest of her family. "That sounds like them," she said. "What's a cycad?"

Her daughter rolled her eyes. "I asked him that, too. It's a type of plant that can live indoors for up to several hundred years. Daeho followed up that explanation by dramatically announcing that it is as long-lived as his love for me."

"That's so sweet of him!"

"Yeah." She rubbed at her face, smiling. Donna smiled at seeing her daughter so happy, even though it was darkened by the fact that she couldn't reach over and hug her. "And Grandpa's going around calling me 'Dr. Blues' every chance he gets."

That was probably the least surprising thing she had said so far. "Does half the world know yet, or is it only a quarter?"

She laughed. "He bragged about me so much when volunteering, I've had total strangers congratulate me. It's strange, to be so loved."

Donna shook her head. "Everyone always loved you. It's just that this is such a huge milestone for you, they're expressing it differently."

"I guess." She ran her hand over her hair, which was buzzed very short on the sides and was a little bit longer at the top. The way it flattered her facial structure gave her an androgynous appearance, especially with the loose sweater she was wearing.

"I like your haircut. When did you get it?"

She paused with her hand on her head. "Oh, just yesterday. I thought I'd treat myself to a real haircut for once instead of buzzing it myself. Sooyen can't decide if she wants to get it styled like mine or grow out her hair like Daeho and wear a braid." She shook her head, smiling. "I suppose I should be glad she's trying to be like us."

Donna nodded. "Soon enough, she'll be trying to be as unlike you as possible."

"Don't remind me." She leaned forward slightly, putting her elbows on her table. Donna could have reached out and touched her cheek had she dared to. Her daughter sat in front of her like a mirror to the past, as close and yet as distant and untouchable as her actual image in the mirror. "It's like I turn around, and she's grown another ten centimetres."

"That does tend to happen when you have kids," Donna said sarcastically, trying to cover up how much those words had affected her. She had missed her daughter's entire adolescence and young adulthood. "Just...appreciate what you have," she added in a more serious tone. "You see her every day. You have that."

"I have that," she said awkwardly. "Still, though, I feel like Daeho and I are missing so much. She's constantly going on about things I've never heard of. And her interests constantly change, so it's impossible to keep track of what I need to be an expert on this given day."

Donna tried to remember if her children had ever been like that. To her horror, she couldn't remember. "Well, she is eight," she said weakly. "What's she up to now?"

"She runs around the neighbourhood climbing things." She sighed. "It's freezing cold outside, and she hops on her bike on weekend mornings and comes back in time for dinner. Doesn't even return my calls half the time. I have no idea where she goes or what she does. Every week, I tell myself I'll stop giving her pocket money, but I just can't say no to her. She's such a good student, after all." Having finished the small rant, she looked at the guards and sighed. "I didn't come here to complain," she said self-reproachingly. "Sorry."

"It's no issue," Donna said, wishing that she could help her daughter somehow. "I want to hear everything about you." She looked at the piece of paper next to her. "Did you get that promotion you were hoping for?"

She nodded, looking a little bit happier. "I did. I'm now a researcher with the company." For someone working outside of academia, that was the only reason to get a PhD in engineering. When working on location, Donna had often been the only one with an MA - but then again, before, the only way into graduate school had been through connections, which she had painstakingly cultivated through the student organization Dad had encouraged her to join.

The silence stretched. Donna wondered how to continue the conversation. "Uh, and how's everyone else?"

Her daughter leaned back and prepared to rattle off a list of well-worn phrases. "Daeho is doing fine. Grandma and Grandpa are thinking of planting a cherry tree at the cottage. Dad's refusing to work less hours. I have no idea what Uncle Alex is up to. Lars is stressed. Aulus is appearing in court in a few days as a witness for someone, I have no idea what's going on there. Laelia just wants to move out as soon as possible. Octavius went on a date yesterday. Inky is doing great."

"Speaking of dates, how's Primus? And the rest of them?"

Donna smiled slightly. "Also fine. Lars and Primus are the cutest couple ever. Andrea and Emilia have moved out, but they rent a room together. They also have a puppy. Her name is Spot, because she has spots."

"That does not sound like them." From what Theodosius had told her, both of his sets of twins longed for the day they would have their own room. "What made them decide to live together?"

"I think they were just desperate to get out of the house. Andrea was going to move in with her boyfriend, but then they broke up."

That was also an option. "The house must feel so empty now," Donna realized. "You're gone. Lars and Primus are gone. Andrea and Emilia are gone. Laelia's going to move out within the year."

"Not just her." She clasped her hands together and dropped them to her lap. "Dad's looking to rent an apartment. Charlotte's planning to move in with a friend in a few months."

"A friend?" Donna asked dubiously.

"That's what I thought, but she told me she's already seeing someone else."

Donna wondered if even Cynthia was capable of keeping track of who Charlotte was dating. Then, she wondered what Mom and Dad were going to think of this mass exodus. "My parents must be frantic, with all this moving out." She imagined them all alone in the house, with only a geriatric cat for company. "How are they taking it?"

"I don't know. They seem fine when I talk to them. But it can't be easy on them." She rested her head on her hand. "Last year, Cynthia promised to stay with them, but now she says she wants to get her own place so that when Coll gets out, he doesn't have to coexist with Grandma and Grandpa twenty-four hours a day. That hit them hard. At this rate, only Octavius will stay with them."

"That's got to be hard on them," Donna agreed. Dad would be visiting her next. She'd need to figure out a way to reassure him.

"Yeah."

Silence. The director left the room, shutting the door behind her with a click. Donna wished she could get up and leave whenever she wanted. She observed the guards, who didn't meet her eye. Two stared at the floor, two - at books. They weren't looking at her at all. She probably could have passed a note or talked in sign language without them noticing.

"So, uh, yeah," her daughter said. "A bunch of your old friends had a reunion last week." Donna already knew that. They were the ones funding Dem's apartment. "I went there. It was nice to meet all those leaders in industry, but once the conversation shifted to who copied from whom in uni, it became the most boring party ever."

"That's nice." Donna tried to think of a question to ask. "You mentioned Aulus is a witness for someone - what's going on there?" In recent months, her son's political views had become almost bipolar. He dedicated his time to supporting various compensation claims, and also quietly fought for her release. Donna was glad her son was finally helping her, but she couldn't understand why he swung from one extreme to the next like that.

Her daughter shrugged. "No idea. It's nothing major, though."

"That's good." Donna tried to muster up some enthusiasm, but it had all disappeared by now. She stared at her daughter, wondering how she'd react if she admitted that she simply didn't care about any of that anymore.

"Of course that's how you feel," Li said, arranging the balls of yarn neatly on the floor before him. "Your sense of time is completely different."

Katz looked up from the sweater she was putting the finishing touches on. "You'll have to explain that."

Li put one knee on the bench and faced them, crocheting blindly. "Right now, you two are thinking of how there's only four more releases left and then it's your turn, right?" They nodded. It was useless to deny something so obvious. "And to us, next April is just around the corner."

"If around the corner was a different universe, yes," Williamson grumbled from the back bench. The twenty-seven of them sat on three benches, and it was a tight fit. "I feel like I'm trying to catch a moth in my hand."

"Poetic," Oldsmith said before turning back to Smith and continuing their conversation about the architecture of Snow's residences.

"Thank you, Mr. Oldsmith." Williamson blew on her hands and sighed. "One year's nothing compared to seventeen."

Li jabbed his hook in the air, nearly hitting Donna in the face with the chain dangling from it. "That's the thing! A year is nothing to someone our age. And with the way we live, even three is absolutely nothing, or five, or ten. But to our grand-children and our siblings' grandchildren-"

"You mean great-grandchildren," Koy muttered.

"-it's an eternity." He lowered his hand and looked at Donna. "Your daughter is thinking about what she's going to do tomorrow, but you don't need to care about anything that will happen within the next seven years."

Eight by three was twenty-four. Less than a third of her sentence left. Somehow, it felt like less time than the previous two thirds. Maybe that was just because it was the last one.

"I think you're reaching," Theodosius said. "It's just that they all have their own lives. We don't fit into them." He shifted around on the bench. "I'm sure they also think that it's not too long now."

That reminded Donna of something. "Did you know your wife's looking for an apartment?"

"No." Theodosius sat up straighter, putting down his crochet and looking up at Donna. "She didn't tell me."

Katz snorted. "Maybe it was supposed to be a surprise."

"But then my daughter wouldn't have told me about it. She knows we overanalyze every single word."

Theodosius clutched his crochet, looking thoughtful. "But why does she need an apartment?" he asked the sweater in his lap.

"She's already preparing for your release," Donna explained.

"Huh." Theodosius ran a hand through his hair. "Either she knows something I don't or she also has that skewed sense of time you were just talking about," he said, gesturing to Li. "I don't see why she'd want to live alone for seven years."

Donna hadn't even thought about the first option. Maybe to their family, it seemed like their release was imminent. But that simply made no sense. If there had truly been so much movement, she'd have found out about it weeks ago.

It was strange how upset that made her feel. She was feeling like her hopes had been crushed, even though she hadn't been hopeful in the first place. According to Livia, having a sympathetic president had just made everything worse. Tensions were bubbling just below the surface, and Dr. Fisher's only piece of advice was to sit tight.

"Elections are coming up," Li said, possibly reading her mind, "and the president is having issues. Maybe he'll bite the bullet and get us released."

"How?" Donna asked. "There's no way he'll convince the directors to let us listen to decent music, much less release us." At the moment, pop songs that had apparently been popular fifteen years ago were playing. They had counted, and there were fifty songs in the playlist, being shuffled over and over for the past month. Donna knew most of them by heart already.

"That's what having a decentralized government gets us," Grass muttered. "Districts do what they want."

Salperin propped his project on his knee to change colours. "If he wanted to pick one thing to demand, I'd take the music. At least he'd have a chance there."

"There's nothing wrong with the music," said one of the guards, a young man from Thirteen who had probably danced to these songs as a teen.

Theodosius tapped his fingers to the beat of the song. "Are you reading anything interesting right now?" he asked Donna in a whisper. If Koy heard, he would probably go on a monologue about The Rise and Fall of the European Economic Community or whatever else he was reading.

"No." The two of them had finished reading Zohrabi's diary a few weeks ago, and since then, they had stuck to the library books. "You?"

"Not really." He crocheted a few stitches. "I'm re-reading a novel I read once before, but in the original Spanish." Reading books in Spanish they had already read in English allowed them to tackle more challenging works. "I'm still waiting for something interesting."

Katz shuddered. "I hope there are no more interesting books," she said, holding up her sweater. It was a sort of orangish red, and Katz had used a stitch that made it look like a chain of seashells. "The last one was bad enough. You yourself admitted it."

In his diary, Zohrabi hadn't written a word about her specifically, but his scathing indictment of the professionals who had worked on the Games still rang in her ears, and had been endlessly discussed by Dr. Chu until Donna had approached breakdown.

"That's a great sweater," Donna replied. "I like the stitch. It's simple and fancy at the same time."

"Thank you," Katz said, and put on the sweater. It was a bit too small for her, and it was strange to see Katz wearing something not grey. "What do you think?"

"Excellent," Li praised her. The others echoed his words.

Donna focused on her own sweater, which was beige and covered with cables. The complicated braids weren't too hard, as long as she counted carefully. After finishing a particularly tricky section, she exhaled with relief, put down her hook, and stretched out her fingers. She was only halfway done with the first sleeve, and she was already exhausted. "Are you reading anything interesting?" she asked Katz, who was staring at her sweater as if unable to believe she had made it.

"Nothing you'd be interested in," Katz shrugged. "A memoir of a general who performed counter-insurgency operations in Italy."

"What war?" Theodosius wanted to know. There were many options to choose from.

"Civil war something like thirty years back." She folded her sweater neatly and set it on the bench next to her. "Turns out they used the exact same methods as us. And nobody tried to put them on trial."

Donna doubted that in Italy, ten hostages had been executed for a defection and fifty - for a killed soldier. On the other hand, civil wars were always nasty, and she was confident that the Italians had managed to think of something that even Snow hadn't been able to come up with.

"What's the name of the general?" Salperin asked.

Katz scratched her head. "I don't remember, but the book is called Crisis Manager in the Italian Alps."

"I read that!" Fourrer said. "I especially liked the stories from Raucci's time in military school. Reminded me of my own days." He sighed wistfully.

"Raucci, that's her name." Katz clapped a hand to her face. "Can't believe I forgot it."

"Stories?" Gold sounded interested.

Fourrer shook his head. "Not first-person. She was that one who doesn't do anything crazy but knows all the gossip somehow."

"That was me," Netter sighed, weaving in an end. "Those were the days. I remember how once, we were doing a training exercise in the mountains. We were probably fourteen, fifteen, something like that. Some genius - I don't remember who exactly - decided that what our instructors would really love is having us sneak into the town and get trashed at the bar." Donna suspected that would end as well as the other stories the former Peacekeepers had told about sneaking into town to go to the bar.

"I know how this is going to end," Stone muttered quietly.

Netter realized that everyone was looking at him and sat up straighter, hands lying still in his lap. "I was a bit of a scaredy-cat back then, so I stayed back and tried to complete it alone as best as I could - the task was to navigate around and get to places in time, so it was doable."

Salperin nodded appreciatively. "I think I'd have died of stress if I had had to take initiative back then."

"Oh, it was stressful," Netter chuckled. "I've never been a leader in my life." He had, however, been an excellent follower. "So there I am, in the middle of the forest with a map and compass, trying to find some creek on my own. The point of that bit was that we have no water and need to find a creek." He looked around at them in an anticipatory way. "To make things even better, this was the middle of a drought, and the creek was completely dry." The former Peacekeepers all laughed. "I get to the place I'm supposed to be, and there's nothing. I was too scared to call for the instructors, though, so I kept on going without water."

Hope crocheted while keeping her eyes on Netter. "So many of these exercises made no sense," she said. "I don't recall ever being in an actual wilderness survival situation in my life."

"They were fun, though," Fourrer pointed out.

"Especially when you're dehydrated, alone in the middle of the forest, and your entire squad just ditched to sneak into town." Netter shook his head, in awe at his youthful stupidity. "I made it to the end just in time. An older cadet was recording results, so it was easy enough to get them to write down the number of our squad. I was about average. Nobody had been stopped by the lack of water, though two ended up passing out from heatstroke."

Even as teenage cadets, they had been completely incapable of critical thinking. If the orders said to trek around the forest in the middle of a drought with no water, then they'd do it.

"And then what?" Katz wanted to know.

Netter leaned backward slightly, trying to see everyone at once. "And then things got interesting. I managed to make my way back to the Academy, though I was feeling woozy by then. I go to check in - and there's the rest of my squad, doing laps."

"Classic." Hope clearly hadn't expected anything else, and neither had Donna. She was very familiar by now with how these stories tended to end. "Did they make you join in?"

"Of course," Netter said cheerfully. "They thought I had deliberately stayed behind to buy them time, and I wasn't going to talk back to the instructors. I was bitter about it for months, though." He turned serious. "I'd spend hours fuming about how I had been unfairly treated." He hadn't changed since then. "Just sat on my bunk during free time and glared at everyone."

Donna tried to imagine a teenage Netter sulking because he had been unfairly punished. It was impossible. She could only picture him as he was now, white-haired and with wrinkled skin.

"Hours?" Hope asked incredulously.

"Yes," Smith said. "At that age, silent glaring is actually the most welcomed option." She adjusted her grip on her yarn. "More peaceful that way. My daughter was telling me the other week that her son's becoming distant. I told her - where do you think he gets it from?"

Donna thought of her daughter's parenting struggles. "I think my granddaughter gets her oddities from her father," she said. "My daughter spent her time lying on the couch with a book, but her daughter's running around climbing buildings."

"What did you expect?" Oldsmith asked. "He's lower-class, of course he'll teach his child to do such nonsense."

"He's a successful chemist," Donna pointed out, "how is he lower-class?"

Oldsmith waved his hand dismissively. "Trash remains trash, no matter what job it does."

Several of the former Peacekeepers glared at him in unison. They appreciated such comments as much as Daeho would have. "Trash?" Katz asked. "You think I'm trash because I grew up in a shack with no running water?"

"You rose above your circumstances," Oldsmith said, giving the most backhanded compliment Donna had ever heard.

Katz waved a hand at the gym. "Very much so. And you're in here with us."

Theodosius looked uncomfortable at the back-and-forth, but Donna laughed. Unlike him, she had worked together with people of various backgrounds who had managed to claw their way into prestigious jobs thanks to hard work and taking out crippling loans to pay for state school and university.

If Theodosius looked uncomfortable, Oldsmith looked like he was sitting in boiling water. Still every millimetre the haughty functionary who had hoped to be Snow's right hand, he hated being reminded that they were nothing more and nothing less than a bunch of convicts.

Donna went back to crocheting, waiting for someone else to break the silence. She finished the row with a slip stitch, chained two, and began a new row. She paused to untwist the sweater before continuing.

"I read two very interesting articles yesterday," Salperin said.

"Do tell," Gold prompted.

Donna turned around to face him just in time to see him nod. "The first one was supposed to be an article about a veterans' get-together in my hometown but it ended up a fluff piece about how a woman with no limbs and a man with no face fell in love and started a family."

"That's how it goes," Metteren sighed. "We should all consider ourselves lucky we're intact in body and mind." He bent down to pick up a ball of yarn from the floor.

Vartha's mind was on something else. "How does a woman with no limbs have kids? Or did they adopt?"

"There was actually a photo of her while heavily pregnant in the article. I guess her limbs may have been blown off, but the important bits were still intact."

"How did she even survive losing all four limbs?" Hope asked. "Wouldn't she have bled out in seconds?"

Salperin shook his head. "During the attack, her limbs were badly lacerated. It was in the middle of nowhere in Seven, still early on in the fighting. Loggers stole explosives, buried them, and scaled trees to get away. The blast was mild enough to not affect the trees, but most of the Peacekeepers died."

Donna remembered seeing a blurry video of either that incident or a similar one at the trial. It had been used as evidence by Lux's lawyer in an attempt to prove that the Rebels had also used antipersonnel mines. The attempted use of the 'you did it, too' defense had not gone over well with the tribunal.

"So how did she lose her limbs?" Li asked.

"Her and a couple of others were taken to a makeshift field hospital. Conditions there were terrible, and her wounds got infected. End result - a bunch of scars on her back, two leg stumps less than ten centimetres long, and one arm stump long enough to attach a prosthetic directly to. It's the fancy kind you control with your mind." Salperin shook his head, looking awestruck. "I don't know about you, but if I woke up one day with no limbs, I'd probably have died of horror."

"At least she could get a good prosthetic," Katz said. "I remember growing up, there was a Dark Days veteran in my village with no legs. She pushed herself around on a board with wheels. The one thing I can say for this government is that it supports the veterans." She paused. "And what happened to the man with no face?"

"He was in the Capitol. Stepped wrong and a pod filled his face with shrapnel. He spent years getting reconstructive surgeries. He was actually eligible for a face transplant, but he didn't want to be on medication for the rest of his life, so no nose and ears it is." Salperin picked up his sweater and turned it over, beginning a new row. "His eyes are intact and he can breathe and eat, and that's good enough for him. Plus, he's got a wife who thinks he's the handsomest man in the world, that's got to help, too."

"Of course she does," Xu muttered good-naturedly. Being an aromantic asexual, she was often amused by what she saw as the incomprehensible parts of intimate relationships. "And I bet he thinks she's the most beautiful woman ever and the height of femininity, and that limbs are overrated in any case."

Salperin chuckled. "Of course. There was an entire paragraph at the end about them being all cutesy with each other. I must admit, it brought a smile to my face. It's nice that Two's not forgetting its own."

"That explains a lot," said Best, who was from the Capitol.

"We'll make you an honorary citizen when you get out," Verdant said seriously. Best clearly didn't know how to respond to that and merely nodded.

"While we're on this topic," Salperin spoke up, "I think you might be interested in the other article I read. It was considered too insignificant for The World." He took a deep breath. "One of the generals sentenced by the European tribunal died in prison. He got buried with honours, and tens of thousands crowded the streets to say goodbye to him. The casket was carried by veterans in their old uniforms, and it was draped with the national flag."

Silence ensued as all of the former Peacekeepers imagined being taken to their final resting place in a casket draped with the red and gold as crowds watched respectfully with doffed hats and military people saluted.

"That would be nice," Li said.

"People there really know how to show some gratitude," Best said appreciatively. "Not like here, where you'll be buried by relatives who hadn't seen you since you enlisted." He paused. "Though I think I've outlived all of those on my end."

Best was probably right. He was ninety-five years old; his enlistment had been over seventy years ago. He had often told them about growing up in the shadow of the First Rebellion, and it was strange to imagine him as old as Sooyen, asking aunts and uncles for stories about crushing the Rebels.

For some reason, Donna imagined a boy running around a working-class area just like Sooyen must have been doing at the moment. He couldn't have known back then that the rebellion his relatives had helped put down would come back, and this time, he himself would be on the losing side.

Donna thought about Sooyen. If she lived to ninety-five, what sort of world would she live in?

A/N: That rhyme Sooyen came up with is the translation of an actual rhyme my grandparents and I made up when my mother got her PhD. I was six years old at the time. My poor mother began working on her dissertation around when she got pregnant and finished it when I was already in school - we joke that the reason I hate math is because in utero, I picked up on the stress it caused her and learned to associate math with suffering. When I was a toddler, I'd run around the apartment dodging the various papers lying on every available surface. So poor Donna Jr. had a hell of a past few years, that's for sure.