Slowly, I stepped into the room.  The woman watched me, and I could tell that she too had recognized our common heritage.  "Mikha," I said carefully, "I'd like to speak to Ms. Paquin alone for a moment, if I may."
He half turned to frown at me.  "May I remind you-?"

"It'll be all right," I cut him off.  My knees were beginning to tremble with a tangle of contradictory emotions.  "Please."

Kutzko looked at Calandra, back at me.  "All right.  But just for a minute."  Slipping past me, he left the room.  The door slid halfway closed, and I heard him move to the opposite side of the corridor, where he could see but not really hear us.

I took a deep breath.  "Gilead Raca Benedar," I introduced myself.  "Cana settlement, Outbound."

Her face might have flickered at the mention of Outbound.  "Calandra Mara Paquin," she nodded in return.

"From...?"

"I was raised in the Bethel settlement on Bridgeway.  If it's any of your business."

I felt cold.  Bridgeway: Aaron Balaam darMaupine's world.  For a brief, unnerving second I wondered if she might actually have been involved in that perversion... but another second and I realized how unlikely that was.  Calandra was only about thirty-eight - five years older than me - which meant she'd have been barely sixteen when darMaupine's grab for temporal power was finally overthrown.  "We're both Watchers," I reminded her.  "Committed to God and to each other.  That makes our lives each other's business."

She snorted gently.  "Sorry, but I gave up commitments like that a long time ago."

I felt a vague stirring of anger.  I was trying as hard as I could to forget her crime and accept her as an equal, and all she was doing was rubbing salt on my patience.  "Maybe the rest of us haven't given up on you," I gritted.  "Just because you ran out on your people when they needed you - "

"Oh, you think I ran out because of what Aaron Balaam darMaupine did to us with his insane vision?"

"You wouldn't have been the first," I told her, fighting doggedly to give her the benefit of the doubt.  "With all the animosity that mess generated -"

"Animosity?" she cut me off.  "Is that what you got on Outbound?  Animosity?"

I pursed my lips.  Others fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them...  "I'm sure it was a lot worse on Bridgeway.  Especially for a teenager."