"[color=8d97bf]Volunteer experience? Clubs at school?[/color]" Jules smiled but he could feel that it was bittersweet like sugared tea. On one hand he felt the warmth and compassion radiating from this person; hers was a smile which could heat the drab chrome walls of a cubicle on the forty-fifth floor. She sported that tiniest tinge in her features, revealing her desire to admire, to be admired, to succeed. Only the most talented saboteurs could artificially reproduce such hopeless sincerity, and a talented saboteur a fifteen year old girl very likely was not.

On the other, behind Jules' jealousy and his resentful realization that he could learn a thing or two from this girl's plucky smile and from the eagerness in her eyes the size of dinner plates, he harbored a desire to reach across the table and slap her, convinced that such an action would be to her benefit. He wanted to warn her that working here was not something she wanted; that she had only a few years of freedom until she signed her ankles and wrists over to the shackles in a lifelong binding contract. She would live and die here, damn it, if this could really be called "living" at all. Then, then! Then he needed to warn her that even if she passed this interview, she still had to win the position from more qualified, more charismatic applicants, with smiles which gleamed brighter and warmer and with posture straighter and with more experience and references and witty anecdotes; why should she ever bother, when she did not know what this company wanted in its slaves, or if she did, when she could not supply them with these traits?

In short, Ona's fear was well-founded; if she spotted anything sheisty about the little critter's story, its wide, glossy eyes and its thigh-baring skirt blinded Jules.