The vehicle Agent Samstag used wasn’t marked as security, but it had a discreet siren system, and the metal and windows ‘read’ as denser and heavier than other vehicles on the road around them. Reinforced?

“So what do have we have in a century?” he asked. “Hovercars?”

Janni turned sharply from looking out the window, but Samstag’s expression was as amused as his voice.

He nodded towards where she’d been looking. “Something’s different, obviously.”

She considered what she could admit without contaminating anything—not that Shadow Corps would care about the distinction. She’d be arrested if caught in this somewhen, but she’d ignored legalities for years. Why fret about it now? Especially for a legal system she never consented to abide by?

“The required additions to asphalt are too expensive,” she said. “Hover devices don’t really develop until the first colonies on Venus, where they just take advantage of some of the natural features of the cloud stations. From there, they move to the most elite of the neighborhoods and domes, but hover vehicles don’t really take off until after the automation of asteroid mining and street laying. Even then…some really poor colonies or persons will still use wheels and combustion engines.”

At least, they would until the imperialistic spacefaring society imploded into an apocalypse, but that wasn’t something that warranted sharing. Samstag would be long dead before his universe hit that point.

He absorbed her words without reacting. “So where’d you grow up? Rich enough for hovercars or…”

“Vehicles only matter planetside.” Or in Dyson spheres, but those hadn’t been populated enough to warrant vehicles, by the time she was born. Most who’d survived to Janni’s generation could trace their lineage to the space gypsies…in part because the gypsies in general had been naturally stable breeding stock. That was why she and TamLin had been bonded, after all—his stability to balance out her own wobbly genetics as a merger-class jumper, for the sake of the following generation.

Not that she and TamLin ever would’ve consummated, even if they’d stayed in their native universe—and not only because they disliked each other. A dying universe wasn’t anywhere to have and raise kids.

They’d agreed on that much, at least. Might’ve been why they’d never bothered to break off their bonding. Well, that and the mental scarring. Breaking a bond always had risk, even though their respective abilities and skill levels made the risk minimal.

An emptiness caught her attention, where the bond was supposed to be. “What—?”

“Hmm?” Samstag asked.

She blinked, remembering where and when she was, and shook her head to clear it. “Um, nothing.”

TamLin must’ve had Kitten break the bond—but why would he ask her to do it? He knew the risks, and as a Nameless, Kitten wouldn’t even know how, much less have the exposure or experience to be able to break it safely.

Janni grimaced. If he’d wanted it broken, he should’ve asked her, not gotten Kitten involved.

She hoped the girl was okay.