"One of the Sisters told me once Kindness is Never a Waste," she says pensively. "And we carved it into the walls of the Citadel with their other words. But they don't always see things the way I do. It may never be a waste, but it's usually a gamble."

"It's funny, how even within the same world, living can make you harder or softer than you ought to be, and how much work it is to meet in the middle of the two. Even more so in the Nexus."

She gives a casual nod as his assumption. "It doesn't snow where I'm from. Almost never rains. We get cold--it's a desert, so temperatures plunge at night--but it's dry as old bones, except where we can pump water up from the aquifer or collect it from the air."

"Seeing all this, it's a little like a dark fairy tale," she says, gesturing at the snow drifts. "Water everywhere, clean and not radioactive, so pure it's the whitest thing you ever saw--but you can't drink it, and it'll kill you if you let it. I thought I was ready for anything this place could throw at me, but I sure as fuck wasn't ready for this."

Granted, she's doing better with it this year, but there's less of it right now. "It's pretty, but is it a privilege or a curse? That's what I ask myself about the Nexus itself, too."