To the Power Born: A Tale of the Slayers
Part 5: The Great Escape
The next hour got nuts as we tried to plan an extraction of our poor Korean Slayer fast enough to execute it that afternoon, so we could strike at oh-dark-thirty Pyongyang time— but we couldn't. Too much to plan, too many things to learn first, too many arguments to be settled.
In the middle of the first muddle of arguments, Diane Hodges, psychiatrist/psychologist and excellent therapist, arrived from the airport, having come to work with Colin on getting past whatever had traumatized him and left him speechless. Diane is sixty, looks it, but carries it well. She's in great shape for her age, good shape for any age, and has a face that radiates authority when she needs it to— but is likable all the time.
Poor Diane came into the library, ushered by Giles and Kelly's son, Riley, and walked in just as Dad was saying, "Absolutely not! Dammit Jocelyn, this is an unnecessary risk!"
"It is not unnecessary!" I cried. "Dad, I'm the only logical choice for this, because I am sneakier than any other Slayer you have quick access to, I know my powers better than most, I have the skills needed to fight if I have to— and I know when not to fight!
"Add in that I'm close to Colin, understand him quicker and better than anyone else, and there's no better choice!"
"Whitey, I'm afraid Jocelyn raises some very valid points," Kelly said, "and I think—"
"She's NOT GOING INTO A KOREAN PRISON CAMP, DAMMIT!" Dad yelled.
Kelly, Giles, Buffy, Mom, Xander and I all tried to speak at once— and Diane put two fingers in her mouth and produced one of those loud, ear-drilling whistles that shut you up while making you wince.
"What in the blue blazes has got you people shouting at each other!?" Diane asked. "You all get along better than most blood families, have for years— so what's got everyone upset? Rose— you tell it, you're the writer."
Rose summed it up, and Diane nodded, looked at my Daddy, and said, "Whitey. You love your daughter, I know that— you loved her before she was born, I know that, too. But I need you to tell me truthfully… is she right? Are the others right?
"Is Jocelyn the best choice for this from a standpoint of ability, with no emotional attachments allowed? Put on your Watcher hat, Whitey."
For a long moment, Dad sat silently. When he spoke, his voice was firm.
"I can't take off my father hat, Diane," Dad said, "but from the standpoint of a Watcher, she's the best choice here. However… there are others who could do this as well or better, and one of them is currently in Japan, which is closer to the objective in the first place!"
"And does that truly make a difference, since the mission to rescue this girl— which must be done, and done soon, I agree with that— will be launched from here?"
Dad sagged. "No," he said softly. "It doesn't.
"Jocelyn… we plan this. Every contingency possible, we plan them out— and we put all the back up we can in place, up to and including a squad of Slayers ready to go in and back you up if they have to. Can you do it that way, honey?"
I went and slid into his lap, hugged him hard, and said, "Yes, Daddy— but you don't go. You have… responsibilities. You wait here. Colin will get us out, safe and sound."
"Wait, I see no reason why Whitey should not be along as your Watcher, Jocelyn," Giles said. "Not to go with you into the camp, but to wait at the extraction point, advise you and—"
"No," I said. "Daddy can do that from here— for on-site support, I want Brian. He can hack anything, keep me ahead of the bad guys by getting inside their intel. Daddy can't go— he has another responsibility that says he stays here."
(Brian is Brian Keller, an old, old friend of Aunt Rose's, and the man in charge of running the Watchers' Council computer network. He could probably hack into the freaking NSA computers, if he felt there was a need— and do it in five minutes, without getting caught. Nothing in North Korea's computer system would even slow him down.)
"What could possibly—" Giles started.
"Giles," Dad interrupted. "Jocelyn's right— she has a piece of information you don't. We were going to tell everyone last night, and it got lost in the shuffle… Gwendolyn's pregnant."
"Oh, my," Kelly said, smiling. "Congratulations!"
"Er, yes, that does put a different light on things," Giles said, blushing a little, but smiling, too. "And yes, congratulations to all of you."
"Jocelyn," Xander said, leaning towards me from where he sat, "you have ideas, that's pretty obvious. How do you want to do this?"
"Well, I don't have much," I said. "Just… I know who I want to go along, and in what capacity."
"Talk to us," Xander said.
"Okay, Daddy advises me by radio, keeps an eye on things through video feed," I said. "But he has to do that, he's my Watcher— and my dad. No argument there.
"For back up, close by but not visible, I want a half a dozen Slayers— as many as possible Asian, and all ready before one PM local time tomorrow, which is three AM Pyongyang time, right? We can't do this before then. I want Satsu from the Tokyo branch in charge there, or Lissette from DC if Satsu's busy— I know them, I've trained with them, I trust them.
"The actual extraction team… Xander, you're right, we can't have too many Slayers visible if it can be helped, so the extraction team is three people; me, Colin and Vincent. Vincent's all military, nobody could possibly mistake a six-foot-eight-inch Hercules-type for a Slayer, we're all female. Add in that despite his size, he's sneaky as hell, that he's stronger, tougher and faster than an ordinary human, and that he's got military knowledge he's never even used in his head, and I want him along.
"So… Colin makes a loud distraction, Vincent and I go in, I get the girl while Vincent watches my back, and Colin sets free all the other prisoners there so that no one ever even thinks 'this was all about that super-strong girl,' or at least can't accuse anyone of it being about her.
"We grab her, Colin puts their equipment out of commission and some of their people into sleepy-bye-land, and we get out while things are nuts. Colin, can you fly me, Vincent and another girl out of there, if we rig it so that you can carry us all comfortably?"
Colin nodded firmly, gave me a thumbs up.
"Vincent, are you game?" I asked.
"I am," he said. "I will follow your orders, Jocelyn."
"Okay," I said, turning to look up at Dad. "Can we do this?"
"I'm not the judge to ask," Dad said. "I'm too involved, sweetheart. So… Giles?"
Giles looked at Buffy, who shook her head, not in denial, but in admiration. "Giles, I couldn't have roughed it out any better. Jocelyn, you're good at this!"
"Look at my teachers," I said, waving around the table. "Look at how long I've had the benefit of you guys teaching me what I need to know.
"There's the rough plan. You guys flesh it out, I'll do my best to make it work."
"From the sound of it," Giles said, giving me one of his 'you did it right' smiles, "Mi Kyong Takeda will be safe and in the hands of those who care about her inside of thirty hours."
"What about her mom?" I asked. "Shouldn't we get her, too?"
"I'm… afraid her mother died last year," Giles said. "Mi Kyong is an orphan, Jocelyn."
"Then we have to get her out and give her a family," I said. "You've been doing that for years, though— so no big there."
That got me grinned at, and I sat in Dad's lap, Mom holding one of my hands and one of Dad's, and listened while people planned things around my rough framework. After a while, they had it down, and Dad, Mom, Gwendolyn, Colin and I went home for lunch. Once there, we discovered that the books containing the collected issues of the Starpulse comics had arrived, and Daddy went to read them, to make sure he understood what Colin could do as well as possible.
While he did that, Colin and I wandered over to Scooby mansion, where I found Linnea Innes and asked if she thought that Lightning would mind us seeing her eggs. Linnea got that faraway look that says (to those of us with experience) "I'm communicating with my pseudo dragon counterpart," then grinned and took us up to see. We looked at the new mommy, stroked her, listened to her purr, and assured her that she was a fine specimen of her species, then left her in peace, eating a piece of beef jerky while curled up on her eggs.
When we got back out side, Colin stopped me, pointed at my eyes and closed his. I got it, and closed my eyes, thinking he was going to kiss me. Instead, he picked me up, took a few steps while I had my eyes closed, then stood in place for over a minute. I sat there in his arms (never a bad thing) with my eyes closed, waiting patiently. After a moment, I said, "Okay, give me a squeeze when I can open my eyes."
For over five minutes, nothing happened— then he gave me a squeeze, and I opened my eyes… and gasped.
He stopped flying, then, and we hung in space, maybe a hundred miles up. My stomach did a slow roll, but I didn't feel sick— just sort of like I was on a plunge in a roller coaster.
Far below me lay the Earth, filling my vision in a swirl of blue, white, green and brown. It was the most gorgeous sight I'd ever seen.
"My god," I whispered. "Oh, my god! Colin… thank you!"
He squeezed me gently again, didn't even try to kiss me— and he'd earned the right!— just let me stare down at the Earth far below.
After a while, I noticed that the air seemed a little stale, and I felt us start down, moving quickly enough that the planet seemed almost to zoom at us. Colin… I have no idea how he did it, but he found home again on the first try, and we landed almost exactly where we'd taken off from.
"Colin," I said as he set me down, "I can't ever thank you enough for that— I love you!"
I kissed him— and took him to bed, where we cuddled for a good while, then made love before going down to join in the sparring session going on in the back yard. After that, I sat and talked with Buffy and Aunt Rose about what I'd be doing the next day, while Daddy sat with Colin, going over the things he'd learned from reading the comic collections, while Diane Hodges listened, watched and took notes.
Diane had brains— she didn't bug Colin, didn't push him to "talk" to her, to start working with her, not then. She did tell him that she thought they should maybe start Thursday, the day after the rescue effort, and he nodded.
After a big dinner, we all sat down to go over what Dad and the others had worked out about the mission the next day.
With the cooperation of Amnesty International, we had an in to Seoul, South Korea, and Colin and I would go there by magical gate. (Royal would go, too— but he'd wait there, not go into enemy territory with me. He didn't like it— but he understood it. Pseudo dragons are not bulletproof.) Magical gates were not the same as teleporting, and only had to have a friendly and powerful witch or wizard on either end, with time to work and no attacks incoming. Satsu's team from Japan would supply us a friendly wizard on that end, and Willow would handle things on this end.
Once in, we'd fly under Colin's power to a place over the prison camp where Mi Kyong Takeda was being held, and I'd get her out under cover of Colin doing violent things to a lot of North Korean property, while Vincent covered my back.
Giles got Mr. Hardesty to teach me several Korean phrases, and I parroted them over and over and over until I had them all down. We had no clue about whether or not Mi Kyong spoke English, so I had to learn enough Korean to give her some idea of what was happening, so she'd come with me.
Once I had Mi Kyong out, and Colin had made sure all the rest of the prisoners were free, Colin would carry me, Mi Kyong and Vincent out in a rescue pod of a type used by the Coast Guard. Where Giles got one of those, I don't know— and I didn't ask. He had it— good enough.
Brian Keller would meet us in Seoul, and would work from there to get all the info he could about things that might be chasing us or might affect the operation in some way— and he'd also crash the North Korean military's computer network when the time was right.
"Kind of risky, isn't that?" Mr. Hardesty asked.
"Not really, no," Giles said. "Brian Keller is to computer experts what an Olympic decathlon gold medalist is to junior high track and field athletes. Add in something that Whitey discovered about Colin's ability to fly, and I suspect that Brian may not even have to crash the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's computers."
"What did Dad find out?" I asked.
"Colin is radar invisible, as is anything that he carries," Giles said— and I gaped. "Yes, Colin confirmed it. He has no idea how it works that way, but it is true. In addition, he can fly without glowing, though it takes more concentration and is a good bit slower."
"Damn," I said, and smiled. "Okay— I'm more glad than ever that he came here!"
When we went to bed that night, I did my best to show him exactly how glad I was. He seemed to get it….
In the morning, we ate a big breakfast— then went straight to Willow and Lydia's house, and down to their basement, where Willow had a room set aside just for working magics. Vincent met us there, kissed his wife Vi goodbye and hugged his daughters while Colin and I got hugged by my family— and we stepped into a liquid-silver-mirror looking thing in Willow's circle—
— And we were in the basement of the Amnesty International office in Seoul, South Korea.
Brian Keller— five six, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, a skinny little guy with a grin as big as his face and a brain that made up for his lack of muscle by a factor of a hundred or so— stood waiting for us, along with Satsu Hiroshi and seven other Asian Slayers.
"Hiya, Jocelyn, hey, Vincent," Brian said, giving me a wave. He then turned to Colin and said, "Holy crap on a candlestick! Dude— I read your comic!"
Colin nodded, smiled a little bit, and Brian dropped it— someone must have told him not to make a deal of it, and if I found out who, they'd be getting hugged big time.
Brian led us upstairs to a conference room that AI was loaning us, and showed us photographic maps of the prison camp we'd be invading. He'd even picked out where Mi Kyong was being held by hacking into the camp's video surveillance system and scanning until he saw her face when a guard took her a meal. The picture was bad, grainy— but I still found myself thinking that she'd be really pretty if she wasn't painfully thin. Her painful thinness made me angry, and I stepped on that hard— angry would be bad while I was working at this.
"I've hacked all their records, but I'm afraid there's almost nothing on Mi Kyong," Brian said. "I can't even tell you if she speaks English— but I can tell you that her dad was fluent in it, and Her mom spoke some, so there's a chance."
"I have some Korean memorized, so I think I'll be able to get the essentials across to her," I said.
"Sweet," Brian said. "Okay… I'm in their system now, and three AM is a good time to go, you called that right. That's when they do lunch, Jocelyn, for the late shift guys— they start getting deliveries and waking people for work at three-thirty."
"Excellent," I said. "I'm so good, I'm better than I knew."
"Don't get cocky," Brian said, sounding a lot like Harrison Ford as Han Solo. (You can't know Xander Harris and not see those movies!) "So… it's a hundred and twenty miles to Pyongyang from here, another ten to the camp. Colin, you can do that fast, even not glowing, right? What's your top end without the glow, anyway?"
Colin held up one hand, moved it along as though flying, moved it faster— and clapped, loud.
"Damn— speed of sound?" Brian asked.
Colin nodded and grinned.
"Okay, I'm impressed," Brian said. "But you should stay subsonic for this one, okay? Sonic booms, sort of a giveaway.
"Okay— so you put Jocelyn and Vincent down here, inside the camp, towards the middle— you can't go straight to the building where our girl's being held, too close to a guard tower. Once you drop them off, you head straight over here to the motor pool, which, as it happens, is right across the way from the cafeteria…."
Brian talked us through the optimum method of extracting Mi Kyong, handed us comm sets— Colin would use an older one than mine and Vincent's voice-activated sets, his with a push-to-talk system, and he'd communicate ready, yes and no via clicks. Dad would be able to talk to us, as would Brian, and we could talk to each other and the backup squad.
We left at two thirty, Colin carrying us in the Coast Guard rescue pod. It had a magic circle painted on the floor, and if we needed them, the backup squad would come through a gate that would bring them out in the pod. The wizard who'd have to do it said he hoped we wouldn't need them, as it would leave him drained of power for days to use it, and I said I'd do my best to see that he didn't have to.
Then we went and got our girl.
Colin dropped the pod off in a tightly clustered clump of tool sheds at the center of the camp, descending straight down fairly quickly, with a sharp deceleration some ten feet from the ground, then a very gentle bump as the hemispherical plastic pod hit the ground softly. Vincent and I climbed out, I hugged Colin, and he rose silently into the sky again, heading off to make an entrance that would distract the guards and raise a panic among the staff. While he flew off, Brian talked us through getting at least closer to the solitary confinement "sheds" (hard metal boxes, four feet square and four high, no heat, no cooling, no blankets, no toilet but a hole in the concrete floor) where Mi Kyong was being held. Once we were within fifty yards, he had us hold and wait for Colin.
I had no weapons but a knife and a nightstick, and Vincent carried only a nightstick— but his genetic modifications gave him catlike claws that would pop out from the ends of his fingers, so he was always armed. This was not the kind of mission where a lot of gear or weapons would help.
"All right, folks," Dad's voice said over the headset radios we wore. "Colin's coming up the main road now— and he's being challenged by the guards. Get ready— it's going to get noisy… now!"
Machinegun fire started as Dad finished— and a moment later Vincent and I head a sort of hissing, humming pulse sound— "ffffzzew!" is as close as I can come to spelling what I heard— and the sound of steel bending.
"Damn, he melted two struts on each tower with a single blast from each hand!" Dad said. "It's one thing to see in a comic, another entirely to see it live!"
"Alarm sounded, sirens coming," Brian interrupted.
Big, whooping sirens went off a second later— and Vincent and I moved.
Between us and the solitary confinement sheds were four barracks-like things for prisoners— grossly overcrowded, the same holes-for-toilet arrangements as the solitary sheds— with two guards on the only entrance to each building.
Vincent opened the two to the west, I took the two to the east. Piece of cake.
The guards, looking alert and sharp, still didn't see me coming. We all had on dark gray pants, turtlenecks and ski masks marked with dark greens and darker grays in a random-slash motif, and those worked great as camouflage in an "urban" setting like that one.
I punched the first guard in the gut, kicked his buddy in the crotch as he turned towards me, then punched each in the side of the neck, stunning them. They carried handcuffs, so I cuffed them to the concrete stanchions that held the barracks three feet off of the ground, and gagged them with their own shirtsleeves, which tore off easily under Slayer strength.
Then I took the keys off of one of the guards and unlocked the door before throwing it open. I didn't say anything— I could hear people moving, see them sitting up thanks to my nightvision goggles— just left the door open and went down to the next barracks, where the guards stood, trying to see what was happening over by the cafeteria. (Colin had already gotten there, and I heard several more "ffffzzew!" sounds— and the building collapsing, men screaming in panic and anger as Colin pinned them in the cafeteria by collapsing the roof on them. It wouldn't kill them, might not even hold them all that long— but it would do the trick.)
I got the second barracks open and headed for the solitary confinement sheds that were some fifty feet from the second barracks. Four sheds, all occupied, Mi Kyong in the one furthest north. I started at the southernmost one— no guards here, these things were just about impossible to get out of, even for a Slayer type. Simple metal boxes, four inches thick, doors bolted shut from the outside, no way to reach the bolts from inside. I opened each, said in the Korean I'd learned from Mr. Hardesty, "You're free, wait until the lights go out, then run!" and moved on to the next.
At Mi Kyong's shed, I opened it, and immediately said in my parroted Korean, "Mi Kyong, I am speaking Korean learned by rote, I do not understand it at all. Do you understand English?"
"I speak English," said a low, frightened voice from inside. "Not in years have I used it, but I speak it."
"Good," I said, and pulled off my ski mask (not easy, without pulling off my nightvision goggles but I managed it), so she could see I was a girl (and a white girl at that). "Mi Kyong, do you know what a Slayer is?"
I saw her eyes go wide, and she said, "Yes, I know of Slayers."
"I'm a Slayer, Mi Kyong," I said. Then I said slowly, so that she'd be sure to understand me, "And you are a Slayer, now, also."
"I… I am a Slayer?" Mi Kyong said. "This is why I am strong?"
"It is," I said. "So… you want to get out of this place, go somewhere where you can learn to be a Slayer— and be free?"
She spoke in Korean for a second— then remembered and said, "God, yes! How do we go?"
"Well, we wait for a minute, here, then— ah!" We heard a louder, sharper "ffffzzew!" from the edge of camp, where the power lines came into the place— and the lights around us went out. Colin would have taken out the generator first, which meant that this place would be staying dark.
Once the lights went out, I took Mi Kyong by the hand and ran for the middle of the prison camp, staying close to buildings and keeping hold of Mi Kyong's (too thin) hand— because every prisoner in the place was out and running like a bat out of hell.
Vincent met us at the corner of the closest barracks, and I said, "He's a friend, Mi Kyong— it's okay.
"Vincent, how's the sitch?"
"Chaotic in a fashion that I approve of," he answered. "With the majority of guards being in the cafeteria, we have very little to worry about, and the prisoners will get out easily. Add in that Colin knocked out all other personnel that he saw, and I believe that everyone has a chance to get free— and with the luck charm that Willow is casting for them, I believe that they will stay free."
"I wish… we could be sure," I said. "I hate to think of what will happen to them if they're recaptured…."
"It is all we can do," Vincent said. "And more than they could have expected."
"I know," I sighed. "Okay, quick time back to the rescue pod."
At the pod, things got weird.
Colin was still working on taking out the motor pool completely, so that the escaping prisoners couldn't be chased as easily— no big deal, or it shouldn't have been.
The problem came to my attention when I saw the eight people surrounding the pod, all dressed in black, and none of them Asian. Two were black, the others white, all male.
"Damnation," Vincent said. "No heat signatures. They are vampires!"
"And me without a stake," I sighed. "How the hell did they know to be here!? Let alone surrounding the pod!?"
"I don't know," Vincent said. He reached to my belt, pulled the nightstick I had tucked in it, snapped the thing in half, leaving me with a nice, sharp stake that was, if anything, longer than usual. He handed the piece he'd broken off to Mi Kyong, said, "You know what to do?"
"I… know." She looked at the stake doubtfully. "But I do not know how to fight."
"Use it if they get too close," Vincent said, breaking his own stick and keeping half in each hand. "If Colin arrives before we are done, I'm sure he will be able to destroy any that we have left."
"Colin's aware of the situation," Dad said in my ear. "I've told him to finish what he's doing— it's taking longer than he thought to totally ruin all their vehicles— but I'll send him your way if it looks bad."
"Roger," I said. "Vincent— you go left. Mi Kyong, stay back at least three paces, no more than five. Okay?"
"Three steps back, yes," she said.
"Go!" I said, and Vincent and I charged the vampires.
We hit them like a pissed off lynx and a pissed off lion (I shouldn't have to tell you which of us was which), and they fought back like pissed off… well, pissed off demons. But I'm good, and Vincent… yowza. He was engineered to be a perfect soldier (but he'd had a personality and a conscience, making him a "failure" to his creators— the bastards!), and he'd been fighting vampires for the last fifteen years. Add in him being stronger and faster than a human (though not as strong as a vampire, let alone a Slayer in good shape) and he was deadly dangerous to the average vamp.
Me, I went into my favorite "I have no sword" combat style, used Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art based in dance and tumbling, to make the vampires feel stupid— and sort of deader than before. Mi Kyong hung back and watched, wide eyed and amazed while we fought— and slowly, she started to smile.
Her amazement quotient quadrupled when Colin flew in over us, glowing gold-white, and lazily pointed his hands at the last two vampires left. Twin beams of energy shot from his hands, impacted on the chests of the vampires— and they dusted.
"Thanks, Colin," I said. "Mi Kyong, hop in— we're getting out of here."
We got into the pod, sat on the padded floor— and I saw Mi Kyong trembling violently. Without thinking about it, I took her hand. She clutched mine almost frantically, and I pulled her over to sit beside me even as the pod lifted into the air, held up by Colin and the steel ropes that ran to its top.
Mi Kyong came to me easily enough, and I put an arm around her and said, "It's okay, now. You're free, and you're never going to have to come back here."
She started to cry in relief— and I held her close for the twenty minute trip back to Seoul, held her and rocked her and made comforting nonsense sounds.
She was tiny, four-eight, maybe four-nine, and at least ten pounds underweight, maybe more. Her face was sharp and angular, too thin— but still pretty. Her eyes were so dark a brown as to look black, and her hair was black— and hung most of the way to her waist in a thick, heavy braid. (Also, her hair— and the rest of her— needed a bath, but that was not her fault, so I ignored it.) I was surprised at the length of her hair, and thinking back, I remembered that almost everyone I'd seen in the prisoners' barracks had had long hair, and those who hadn't had had very short hair.
"I'm surprised they let you wear your hair so long— but I bet it's very pretty when it's clean," I said.
"The— the commandant, he m-made us all to grow our hair," Mi Kyong sniffled. "Then he would cut all off and sell it to places that make wigs. For much money. If told to wash our hair, we knew it lost."
"Bastard," I muttered. "Well, now you can keep it as long as you like, wash it when you want, and never cut it, if you don't want— or cut it every day, if you want."
Mi Kyong didn't answer, but I felt her nod against my shoulder.
We landed in Seoul, and we hustled inside. Because we didn't want to overload Mi Kyong with too much new stuff, only the wizard and Royal were in the basement. The wizard saw us coming, started his spell, and sixty seconds later, Royal settled on my shoulder (Mi Kyong stared at him in wonder and delight) and I led Mi Kyong through the gateway— and into Willow and Lydia's basement.
Vincent came through behind us, Colin behind him, and Willow let the spell lapse. Mi Kyong looked around, very confused, and asked, "Where is this place?"
"You're in the United States, Mi Kyong," I said. "This is Willow, the lady who activated all the Slayers in two thousand and three. We're right down the street from my parents house.
"Mi Kyong… I know this is all moving really fast— but you're safe now. You're in America, and if you want, you can stay with me and my family for a while. Or we can send you to school here, let you stay here in the school year, and go back to stay in Seoul with the Slayers, Watchers and Guardians there during the summers. Or in Japan, or— do you have relatives anywhere you'd like us to tell you're okay?"
"No," she said, and I saw her fighting not to cry. "My father's parents died when I am very small, before he died. My mother… her family hated her for marrying my father.
"I never want to go to Korea again, either Korea. Or to Japan.
"I will stay with you. And your family. If truly you allow it."
"Good," I said. "Now… what would you say to a bath, some clean clothes, and a good meal?"
Her smile was all the answer I needed.