Beneath

Chapter Sixteen – Secrets

That evening after dinner Selby was good to his word. They'd joined a long table full of people Loki mostly didn't know, many of whom were leaving on the last passenger flight out in a couple of days, in the near-capacity galley. As the crowd dwindled and dinners were finished, Selby asked Jane if she felt up to going out, and she nodded enthusiastically.

"Definitely," she said. "I'm a little tired but I'm feeling so much better. And I just took my last pill so all those other symptoms will be gone soon, too."

Loki allowed the barest of smiles to pull up the corners of his lips. How happy she would've been to have known she didn't need to take that last pill. But he couldn't have told her without giving her some plausible reason. And besides, he'd come to find the sight of her flapping her hands about as though trying to shake off something firmly stuck on rather amusing. What would be the fun in ending that prematurely?

"Lucas?" Selby was asking.

"Yes?" Loki answered, startled, then shook off the sense that this bothersome mortal had somehow picked up on his thoughts.

"Want to come with us? It's a long way to walk, so you'd want to use the sled."

Loki quickly sifted his options. He had no interest in being part of a threesome – he had no interest in getting to know anyone here except Jane. He would rather return to his tiny room to continue reading his textbook. But the idea of leaving Jane alone with Selby again made him feel uneasy. Selby and Wright had begun as a package deal, but something had changed and only Wright had faded into the background as they both should have. Loki would rather they both faded into utter irrelevancy. They weren't going to build a bifrost for him; Jane was, he thought without question.

"Certainly. It sounds fun," he responded after only a moment's hesitation.

"Great! Okay, same as before, I'll meet you outside, DZ this time. Thirty minutes?"

"Sure," Jane agreed.

Loki nodded, but this time it would not take him half an hour to get into his gear. The three split up, and in his room he changed into the comfortable casual Asgardian clothes he'd worn when he left home – the almost-black violet shirt and black leather pants. He smiled and sighed from the simple pleasure of it. He touched his shirt and watched as the particles morphed and rearranged themselves; the ubiquitous red jacket with "Lucas Cane" on the pocket flap over the round Antarctica seal appeared. Tailored Asgardian comfort on the inside, garish "Big Red" on the outside. The mortals certainly lacked Asgardian creativity when it came to naming their personal effects, Loki thought with a smirk.

Certain now that this magic would cost him nothing, he transformed his pants next, then stopped at his bare feet. He tried to form the image of his favorite leather boots and found that nothing had changed. Doing something nice for Jane had also gained him nothing. There were two explanations: doing nice things simply wouldn't help, or only doing nice things with entirely pure motives would help. He laughed darkly at that, for in the end they were one and the same. He couldn't remember the last time he'd done anything with entirely pure motives.

He lifted the right foot and angled the leg, glaring down at the large swollen spot with its five pinpricks of black. He barely noticed the pain when he walked anymore, but he never forgot the wound was there. Don't think you've won, Odin. He sat down on the bed and reluctantly pulled on socks and the white boots. All in all, a successful experiment, he thought. He added the illusion of a balaclava, hat, and goggles, then sighed in relief at how much more comfortable this was than actually wearing all those layers. He would also be much colder outside, but that was a price worth paying.

He arrived first at the DZ entrance, Destination Zulu, which the people here referred to as the back door, illogically so, given that Destination Alpha was at one end of the building and DZ was located between the A-1 and A-4 berthing wings, which should make one of them the side door. It was an inconsequential detail with no bearing on his life or his goals whatsoever – they could call their doors whatever they wanted – but for some reason it annoyed him and made him long to carry out some architectural revisions on the building.

Selby arrived next, rushing past. "It'll just take me a few minutes. I have to hook up the sled," he explained as he went out.

Loki's nose twitched behind the illusion of the balaclava, picturing sleds he'd ridden in on occasion as a younger man. This evening could actually prove to be entertaining. Much more so than the previous one, which had only picked up once Jane had pretended to be able to play an instrument.

Jane arrived several minutes later. "It still takes me forever to get into all this," she mumbled, adjusting her hat. "You're apparently getting better at it," she added.

He smiled, stepping closer to the door. "Ready?"

Jane nodded and he pushed the door open.

"Wow," she said when they stood outside on the metal ledge. "That just doesn't stop feeling weird."

"What?"

"8:30 at night looking about the same as noon."

Before he could respond they heard the noise of the snowmobile's engine from somewhere still out of sight, and headed down the stairs to meet Selby. When they reached ground level Loki's mouth fell open for just a moment. When Selby had said "sled" Loki had not pictured the thin long flat red thing trailing behind the snowmobile. This was a poor excuse for a child's toboggan, not a sled. Jane was reaching for his arm to tug him along when he paused, staring, and for a moment he was so distracted that he forgot to let her think she could move him and she stumbled and nearly fell. He grabbed for her arm instead, careful to be gentle about it, and steadied her. He sucked in a slow, steadying breath as he resigned himself to yet another indignity in this realm.

"You can hang on to the cord, Lucas. I know it looks kind of dicey but we won't be getting up too much speed, maybe some on the skiway, but that's a nice smooth ride. Beyond that the sastrugi out there can be pretty rough," Selby said over his shoulder.

Loki nodded, and as Jane settled into her spot behind Selby Loki lowered himself to the ground in the middle of the red…mat might be the best word, he thought. A cord was threaded all along the sides. Selby soon gave the machine fuel and Loki coughed at the unexpected intake of engine exhaust fumes. As they worked up speed the snowmobile sprayed up snow and ice into his face and he realized he really should have been facing the opposite direction; he turned his head to the side and pulled up his hood. The station receded and he began to understand what sastrugi were as he bounced up and down on what looked almost like frozen wave crests. Instinctively he reached out a hand to smooth the ground ahead of him and the ride became gentler.

He let his eyes drift closed – there was nothing to see but white, the black end of the snowmobile, and Jane's red back. As everything stilled around him and he felt nothing more than the cold wind assaulting his unprotected face, he slipped back through the centuries without conscious awareness.

Asgardian winters were usually mild. Snow fell in the mountains, but in the city and the surrounding towns and fields and valleys, more than a thin layer that melted by midday was rare. And so, when one evening the snow started and the temperature dropped and the layer of white grew all night and through dawn, normal life was put on hold as nearly all of Asgard came out to marvel at the transformation of their realm. The two ten-year-old princes, the elder closer to eleven, were no exception.

Both dropped their father's hand as they raced forward in the stables to touch what had been hitched behind one of the horses – a toboggan, carved from pale wood and sealed, two seats built into it as well. The brothers looked back and forth between their father and his surprise; Father smiled at their eagerness. "Go on, get in," he told them.

"I claim front seat!" Thor shouted and leapt over the side and into the seat without hesitation.

Loki frowned at him, then shrugged his shoulders and clamored into the back seat.

Father mounted the horse and they set off slowly over the straw; at his command the doors of the gate opened outward. Thor never noticed her but Mother was standing just outside. Loki called out and waved, then, startled, grabbed on to the sides of the toboggan as they ramped up onto the snow and picked up speed. Bundled in fur-lined leather, the boys blinked against snowflakes still falling and yelled out their delight as the wind whipped through their hair and the white-blanketed world flew past.

The snowmobile lurched to a halt and the sweet scent of pine trees was abruptly replaced with mechanical exhaust. Loki stood and stretched his long legs, turning around until he spotted the station far in the distance. He wasn't sure the mortals would even be able to see it. There was a certain beauty to the landscape, so brightly lit by the sun's rays reflecting off the endless flat snow-covered ground. But there was desolation and emptiness as well.

As Jane and Selby took pictures and made the occasional comment, Loki reflected on the memory he hadn't thought about since leaving his childhood behind. That night the boys had stayed up late talking by a crackling fire in the family's common sitting room. Both were convinced that Odin had blinked the toboggan into existence, while Loki was not as convinced as Thor that he had used Mjolnir – which he wielded at times before it was passed to Thor at his twentieth birthday ceremony – to make it snow. Now Loki wondered if Thor hadn't been right after all, and Odin had called down snow to test whether his little Frost Giant would react differently to it than his true son.

How deceptively simple everything had seemed then. How utterly trusting he'd been that things were what they seemed – that Father, Mother, and Brother were just that. That Asgard was as much his as it was theirs. And they label me a liar. I learned from the best.

"Hey, Lucas!" Jane called.

He twisted around toward her voice, then quickly ducked his head just in time to avoid his face – albeit mostly hidden behind illusions of protective gear – filling the frame of her camera.

"Oh, come on! Don't you want pictures out here? You didn't bring a camera?"

"I don't have a camera, and if you don't mind, I don't care to have my picture taken," he said, partially turning his back to her in case she decided to try again anyway.

But she didn't, and soon they were off again, stopping at two more vantage points before finally returning to the station.

/


/

Jane shut her alarm off, then rolled onto her back and stretched languidly – arms, tingling fingers, neck, back, legs, tingling feet. She let her head loll to the side and smiled at the image of the Pacific Ocean. She was not a morning person, but she may as well have been one that day. Certainly more so than the last two mornings she'd woken up at the bottom of the world. She'd slept soundly, only waking once to go the bathroom…and as soon as she realized that, she groaned at the pressure from her bladder and eased herself carefully down from the bed to the footstool, relieved that after today she wouldn't have quite so far down to go before reaching the stool. She shoved her feet into her flip-flops and threw her blue terrycloth robe on over her peach-colored pajamas and hurried down to the restroom.

Back in her room she lifted the shade to the ever present sunlight, powered up her laptop, and sat down at the desk. She got a good laugh out of an e-mail from Darcy, and was surprised and excited to learn that Darcy had sent her a package. Even after getting other packages earlier, it hadn't occurred to her that she might get more. It reminded her of being at Space Camp, when her parents and grandparents and aunt and uncle had all sent her care packages even though she hadn't really been there long enough to need so much stuff, mostly candy. It had certainly made her popular with her fellow campers, though.

Darcy had sent a book, and couldn't wait for her to read whatever was on page 38. Jane was pretty sure whatever book Darcy had sent would be some light enjoyable fluff – Jane's version of light reading rather than Lucas's. Ancient history, philosophy. Jane rolled her eyes. He even sounded like he was telling the truth, rather than trying to impress her with his oh-so-intellectual pursuits. Whatever.

Jane dashed off a few responses, then gathered up supplies for the one thing that would get this day off on an even more spectacular foot than it already had – a shower. There wasn't much time before she was supposed to meet Lucas, but when you were only allowed two minutes of water, how long could a shower take?

By the time Lucas knocked on her door to walk down to the galley for breakfast with her, she didn't think it was possible to feel any better. She was fully acclimatized to the altitude, full of energy from a good night's sleep, and her hair was brushed out over her shoulders, healthy-shiny instead of oily-shiny. All was right with the world. A visit to Dr. Brissett right after breakfast confirmed it.

Now that Jane no longer required a chauffeur to get out to the dark sector, she and Lucas geared up and met at Destination Alpha to walk out on their own, with Selby and Wright planning to follow at around 10:00. It was an even -40 Fahrenheit.

Jane glanced up at the man walking silently beside her. "I've been meaning to ask you, what's your specialization? What are your own research interests?"

He didn't answer immediately, and the silence held long enough for her to wonder if he had any intention of answering. In the end, though, he did. "To be perfectly honest," he prefaced, "I don't know yet. I've assisted in a few of my professors' projects, but when I make my own proposals they're deemed too…unorthodox."

Jane raised her eyebrows and nodded. "I can't imagine," she deadpanned. You mention studying the formation of wormholes, and he says "Let's make one!"

"I was taking the semester off when SHIELD tracked me down in Melfort."

"Tracked you down? That's creepy." She wondered just what he'd proposed that made him interesting enough for SHIELD to want to "track him down."

He angled his head to the side for a moment, half-acknowledging her words, she interpreted. Probably he didn't want to speak ill of his benefactors. When you were down to your last dime sometimes you had to grit your teeth and…well, you did unless you had a trustfund. Lucas probably didn't need SHIELD as much as she did. And he didn't owe them the way she did, or at least felt she did, like it or not. For supporting her work when no one else did. For Phil.

Son-of-Coul, as she'd taken to jokingly calling him – following Thor's non-joking example – once they'd gotten to know each other, had a deliciously dry sense of humor, always with just the right amount of smile accompanying it so that, at least if you knew him, you easily recognized the joke. He'd spun a whole tale once about his father "Coul," Norse God of Bureaucracy – as if she really believed Phil was just a paper pusher – and ever since then nearly every time she'd spoken to him she'd inquired about Coul. Right up until the last time. Of course, she hadn't known it would be the last time. But then, you never did.

"Why Melfort?" she asked. She'd wondered about that, but now she mostly wanted to distract herself from a fresh wave of grief.

"I wanted some peace and quiet. A place where I could think. And enjoy nature. Melfort has beautiful auroras, and pristine forests. Good ice fishing. And good semi-professional hockey."

Jane laughed, every stereotype she'd ever heard about Canada flashing through her mind. "Well, of course they have good semi-professional hockey."

"Do you enjoy the sport?"

"I went to a few Kings games when I was at Caltech, when friends wanted to go. I was never really much of a sports fan, though. For me it was mostly just something I did to hang out with my dad when I was younger."

"You attended sporting matches together?"

"Um, yeah. Well, sometimes, when he could get tickets. But mostly we watched on TV. Oakland Raiders, Oakland A's. We lived in that area; he was teaching at Stanford. Or sometimes we watched the Denver teams he grew up with."

Lucas nodded but said nothing further.

"So, anyway, you went to Melfort to think, because you were challenging assumptions," she said with a pointed look at him, "and not everyone appreciates that. And then SHIELD shows up…and next thing you know you're getting your head and your gall bladder examined for a half-dozen flights down to the South Pole."

He looked down at her, and she could tell he was smiling even underneath his gear. "Essentially."

"You didn't have much time for thinking in Melfort. So you'll be looking for answers about what to do with the rest of your life while you're here?"

"You could say that," he answered after a short pause. She was pretty sure the smile was still there, but something she couldn't put her finger on made her a little uncomfortable. She shook it off, chalking it up to a combination of the height difference and his continued enigmatic answers.

"I guess you could say I am, too, in a way. This is a major opportunity for me, and if I can really make something of it, then hopefully some new doors will open. Maybe I could get back into academia, or a position at a research institute."

"So long as you don't begin your application with 'This is going to sound crazy.'"

He was steadfastly looking forward, but she could definitely see the outline of a smile in his profile now.

"I won't have to, because I'll have the data to back it up by then."

They reached the door of the Dark Sector Lab and Jane opened it up; it seemed a little strange since this space still felt like Selby's and Wright's and not hers, but as Wright had pointed out on the day of their arrival, nothing was locked. They shed their gear and picked up where they'd left off the previous day, and by the time they finished the diagnostics on each piece of equipment Selby and Wright had arrived.

To prepare for linking up her own creations with the equipment already in place, she and Lucas began lugging the devices out to the area underneath the telescope. They made quick progress given that the two largest devices, which she'd assumed would require both of them to awkwardly carry, he was able to carry instead on his own. They were setting down their last load, and Jane collapsing on top of a cleared work table while Lucas stood just to her left partly facing her, when she caught sight of his wrist.

The left sleeve of his dark green shirt had gotten hiked up over his forearm, and a pale red something was peeking out from underneath his watchband. Her first thought was that he'd gotten a piece of red fuzz caught in the clasp. She leaned forward and down and reached for his hand, but just before she touched him he turned further toward her and she realized it was not fuzz. He jerked his hand away and glared down at her with a look that would have made her wither away right then and there if she hadn't already been dying inside of embarrassment.

"I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to…I just thought you had caught something in your watchband. I didn't realize-"

"Okay, ready to start getting all this stuff cabled in?" Selby asked, Wright trailing behind him.

Jane could have kissed him. In a platonic, brotherly, married guy kind of way.

Lucas turned away from all of them, and Jane smiled and nodded at Selby, dragging her attention away from her insensitive attempt to reach out and grab what was clearly some kind of burn scar on Lucas's wrist.

/


/

The day had started off well enough. Jane was reaping the benefits of his treatment in the form of high spirits and an abundance of energy, and just as he'd intended he was, too, in the form of efficient and rapid progress preparing her inventions for use here. She'd been more open, more talkative than yesterday, and for the first time he'd found it less a chore, a task to be undertaken and performed well, and more a…pleasure was much too strong a word, but he'd enjoyed conversing with her.

And then a stupid mistake. He'd been careful to keep his wrist covered with fitted cuffs or slightly overlong sleeves – he didn't want anyone else to see Odin's mark anymore than he wanted to see it himself – but this particular overlong sleeve must have gotten caught on one of her contraptions as he carried it out like her servant. Now he would have to explain it. Or not, and know she was wondering about it. For once he was glad for the Scientist Two's presence; it gave him time to consider his response. He would look at this as an opportunity rather than an inconvenience and capitalize on it, as he always did.

/


/

Keeping things all business was easy; there was plenty of work to be done. You couldn't just plug things into multi-million dollar pieces of technology, turn on the power, and be done with it. So while Wright and Selby opened up the SPT detector array and inspected it piece by piece to perform a minor calibration, Jane and Lucas worked in tandem to calibrate each piece of her own equipment. He had less experience with this than she expected, but he was a quick learner and was soon able to monitor the results on the computer for the acceptable range of performance variation in the sensors and receivers while she tinkered with the hardware when the results fell outside the acceptable range. The quarters were somewhat tight with all four of them working in the same area, but having the SPT techs nearby was helpful when Jane was ready to link up the next device or ran into some obstacle in the communication between devices.

At lunch Lucas had stayed behind again while Jane, Selby, and Wright walked back to the station, pausing to watch a cargo plane being unloaded along the way, and at around 2:45 all four headed out to watch Su-Ji land an airplane, as Jane thought of it, along with a few other people waiting in the "Arrivals and Departures Lounge," a patch of snow near the end of the runway. Sue herself was clutching two ski poles each topped with a red and black pompom in one gloved hand and talking with one of the fuelies Jane hadn't yet met.

The plane came in a few minutes early, and Sue put her pompoms to use directing it forward on the skiway. Jane laughed at the surreal scene before her. At least it was clear why anyone could direct the plane – all you really had to do was signal it when to stop. And if you somehow messed that up, it wasn't like the pilots were going to crash into the station.

Sue took a bow, and Selby waved Jane back further from the noise of the plane.

"Guess what I found?" he said when they could talk at something approaching a normal volume.

"Do I want to know?"

"A fine piece of scrap wood."

"How nice for you."

"I'm going to tell Carlo to start practicing."

Jane couldn't maintain her straight face anymore and started to laugh.

"And you should tell Lucas to start practicing on that sax," Selby continued. "Wright brought it up again this morning. He's convinced."

"Yeah, good luck with that."

"He's a quiet one, huh?"

Jane shrugged. "He talks to me. Sometimes. Maybe he's just kind of shy." And yet as soon as she'd said that, she knew it wasn't quite right. He wasn't shy. He could be assertive when he wanted to be. He grew quiet in groups, but even that didn't seem exactly like shyness.

"Does he really not know who he works for?"

"SISI?" she asked, wrinkling her brow though Selby probably couldn't see it. "He knows."

"I mean SHIELD. SISI's Tony Stark, you said. And Stark's a big part of SHIELD. So it's more or less the same, right?"

"No," she said immediately. And then her spine returned to its normal posture. "Well, maybe," she allowed. After all, it wasn't SISI's hidden facility she'd been at in Tromso, and it wasn't SISI who Lucas said had come knocking on his door. The Stark Institute for Scientific Innovation made a more palatable public face than the shadowy Strategic Homeland…whatever it stood for. "But anyway, he knows about SHIELD. Just not those other things."

"I don't know how you deal with all the secrecy. It was really getting to me, and when you asked about Caltech…"

"Yeah, I get it. For me the only really hard part is not being able to use all their data. I don't even have access to all their data. Although a lot of it's still being processed. Hopefully I'll get access before long." They wanted Erik to help with that, but he was having difficulty sleeping and in turn difficulty making it through the workday. There were others, of course, but no one knew the tesseract data better than Erik.

"The only hard part? Seriously? Not the Norse god stuff? So-called?"

Jane shook her head. She could talk to those who'd been there about that. But they were dwindling. Darcy was really the only one at this point. Her resolve to follow SHIELD's rules faltered. For better or for worse, though, there wasn't time for it to dissolve; Sue was calling to her. Jane excused herself and slow-jogged over to Sue, who led her out to one of the arched-roof jamesway huts in Summer Camp, which housed the much larger summer population that couldn't all fit in the elevated station.

Sue gave her a quick tour of the unheated building – basically a narrow corridor with small private bedrooms on either side, "private" in the sense that makeshift walls of thin plywood had been put up around each bunk. There was no bathroom; Sue told her that Summer Camp residents had to leave their building and trudge through the snow to a separate outbuilding to reach a bathroom. Jane realized her scramble down from her bed to a bathroom down the hall was the lap of luxury.

"And here we are, ta-da!" Sue said when they stopped at the back of the building and peered into the last room on the right.

Jane grinned at the wide, sturdy-looking two-step footstools. Life here was getting better all the time.

/


/

Loki watched as Jane and Selby separated themselves from the gathering and drew further away from the plane. He concentrated, amplifying the sound waves coming from their direction, and listened, all while watching the unloading and prepping of the airplane with feigned interest. He considered breaking or transforming the saxophone in the music room so Wright would cease his insistence that he was a "sax man" and should join the little band of entertainers. His eyes narrowed when he heard there were "other things" he didn't know – Jane and Selby were keeping secrets now? But no, the "Norse god stuff" was the secret. Loki smiled at that. He was rather well informed about that supposed secret, and he did so enjoy being referred to as a god.

The smile faded. A god forced to wear the cloak of a mortal. Forced to forego most of his use of magic. Forced to deny all of those things that had made the mortals proclaim his people gods in the first place. His jaw and fists clenched in anger, and his face – had anyone been able to see it – warned of danger. The mortals had proclaimed the Aesir gods. Not his people. His people had tried to subjugate Midgard. And he had followed right in their footsteps, he realized, attempting to succeed with an army of Chitauri and the scepter where his real father with an army of Frost Giants and the Ice Casket had failed so long ago. He'd said it while in prison only to spite Odin, but truly he was Loki Laufeyson.

He bitterly cursed this realm as emotions like bile rose up inside him threatening to spill out and wash him over an edge he'd clung to more times than he cared to count. Only once had he let go, and though he'd seen no other choice at the time, that had not worked out well for him in the end. So he dug in and forced the emotions back down.

With some effort he focused his attention back on the conversation. But there was silence where Jane had been; he feared he may have missed something important while he'd wallowed in a moment of weakness. He turned to look; she had disappeared and Selby stood there alone. Selby saw him looking, and started walking toward him.

Loki stared at him for a moment before looking at the plane again. He knew why Jane knew about Asgard…but how did Selby know? And what exactly did he know? Selby was almost at his side. Is he connected to SHIELD? Does he know who I am? Loki asked himself, something inside him hardening, readying for action.

"Hey, Lucas, I'm freezing. I'm going in the station for some coffee. Wanna join me? Jane's going to be a while, she'll have to take that footstool up to her room," the scientist said.

Loki watched him intently, looking at him with serious interest for the first time. He recalled toying with the man two days ago at lunch, recognizing his insecurity and false bravado. But there had been no guile. Nor was there any now. Whatever Selby thought he knew, he didn't know who he was talking to at this very moment.

"I would love to," Loki said. Selby – and Selby alone on this continent, it seemed – knew what Jane knew, at least some of it. That was why they had formed a quick bond. The afternoon he'd left them alone they'd somehow discovered that connection. If Selby was tied to SHIELD…if he caused Jane to doubt or question Lucas…then Selby was a problem.


/

I have mentioned to a few of you that I've written some extensive flashback scenes - just wanted to mention that actually the toboggan one above is not part of that, it was written just for this chapter.

A word about music: I happened to have bought Kansas's "Dust in the Wind" while writing this chapter, and it occurred to me that there are a couple places in the chapter where that song feels fairly relevant. Although I don't believe that "all" we are is "dust in the wind," the lyrics are about the impermanence of everything on Earth (Midgard!), and can speak to sadness and loss. Here's how it starts if you don't know it already: "I close my eyes / Only for a moment and the moment's gone / All my dreams / Pass before my eyes with curiosity..."

Thanks as always for your reviews, they are so much appreciated. And I must give a shout-out to my favorite reviewer of all time, Sarah, a budding writer herself! ;-)

And here we go, a couple of teasers for "Chapter 17: Lies": Loki addresses the problem; Jane guesses Lucas has a story or two he doesn't want to tell; Jane gets a few more things in the mail, including one she's not sure she really wants; Jane's world begins to shrink as the station closes for winter.

And excerpt:

She looked around her, at the jamesways and other Summer Camp buildings, the berms, Cryogenics, all the other buildings out there she still had no idea about, and then in the distance, the Ice Cube Lab and South Pole Telescope and MAPO…for the next nine months this was the extent of her world. A one-mile radius, she thought as an unexpected wave of trepidation passed over her.