Jewel glanced toward her as she spoke. His alarm from her sudden swerving disrupted what little progress he had made toward sleep, and he gave her that bare modicum of manners as his way of expressing his gratitude for this favor she was doing him: eye contact (or as close as possible, when she was keeping her own eyes on the road). He was lucky enough to catch the frown, ever modest and controlled; she must have read somewhere that frowning too much causes wrinkles or some-such, he thought. For all her ruthless intelligence in the office and behind the one-way mirror, she seemed much too eager sometimes to believe, strongly and sincerely, that within her cheap [i]Cosmo's[/i] and [i]Allure Women's Beauty's[/i], the secrets to eternal loveliness and great sex could be excavated. She was willing to dig through 109 pages of ads and fluff to find the one which divulged the location of the fountain of youth.

Only a vague silhouette of a man invaded Jewel's brain at mention of the name. He was not extremely sociable anyway, but less so outside of their sector and field. What interest had he in information technology, or in security? If he was interested in them then those are the jobs he would have studied in school and interviewed for at Transcomm. But then, that attitude, he understood, was why Ona would make it to the top someday and he'd be stuck here, hoping for her to toss him some scraps from the big table. He had too much pride for that, he told himself, but the company would call it a lack of ambition or worse, laziness. He thought Ona suckled their toes and licked their boots in vain, but they must have been quicker to assure her that it was getting her somewhere. Beyond the part of him that always wanted to be right and to say "I told you so," the rest of him knew she deserved that big break, and if she didn't get it, the word "justice" had been stripped of its meaning, soaked in turpentine and paint thinner until its naked bones stank.

"[color=#8d97bf]I thought those guys weren't supposed to die until they were two days from retirement,[/color]" Jewel joked tastelessly. At least he didn't laugh at his own joke like a pissant. "[color=#8d97bf]Too bad. I guess the coffee frayed his nerves.[/color]"