She prized buoyancy, but sometimes she was a bull in a chinashop. She'd been raised on the prairies; she was accustomed to expanse. Her hair got in her eyes. She did not wear trendy clothes. Sometimes she swore there were sixty cents to a dollar and a hundred minutes to the hour.

In the capital, she tried to get a gig as an investigator. "I can find people," she said. She was hired, and fired shortly thereafter on the grounds that once she found people, she didn't stop talking to them.