The club conversation happens first. It's a pretty easy one because there's what turns out to be a homemade drone disassembled across her table, and "hey, what's up with that" turns into excited chatter about the unofficial robotics club and said homemade drone. The official club, she goes on to learn, is run in cooperation with Hexabots!. Sasha spends a good two minutes on a scathing complaint about the exclamation point alone. The company has a death-grip on educational kits for learning small electronics and drone construction. They are, in turn, very rigid about making sure that Hexabloc! A-17 slots neatly into Hexabloc! U-4 during step 48d. The company Education Resource Liason did not take kindly to Sasha improvising a crawler drone in the back of the room while he was going over step 4a.

So after the ERL attempted a parental phone call to Matilda, which backfired on him, Sasha'd found out about a different group interested in using... honestly, junk, and seeing what they could make of it. Started as something out of the history department of all places. They'd been trying to find the fault in the circuitry when she showed up, and that was a pleasant half-hour of work with a multimeter.

And while they were working on that they talked. She explained, bluntly, what was coming. Media frenzy and it's all going to be her, pretty quickly and not very pretty. Mattie'd never changed her name afterwards, even in the divorce, so Sasha Au Clair was likely to get attention for this. How Elodie would be okay with however they wanted to deal with that, including lying about it. Especially lying about it: she never wanted any of this for them, not unless Sasha chooses it. How the news always has an agenda (yes, even when she's reporting it) and how few people watch for it. A fumbling, careful explanation of why the news reacted this way, not just to her, but to anything that would threaten the existing power structure. Several book recommendations, for further reading. And a big hug. The follow-through, the actual hit pieces, mercifully only start getting churned out late, after they're asleep.

Matilda, meanwhile, calls around dinner. She knows enough people higher up in OESN to know what's coming ahead of the articles dropping, even from her lowly position in the accounting mines. The following conversation is chilly and brief, two fencers warming up for the coming prolonged match. They didn't dislike each other. That would have been easier. An agreement is reached, with Sasha's input, of their return the next day and staying at Mattie's the next weekend, in exchange for a visit (if it's safe, Matilda stressed) during said weekend and a future, longer stay when there is not quite the focus on Elodie, details to be hammered out later. Bloodless, agreeable, exhausting.

The cap on the shitshow of the day, though, was the one NBN piece that York forwarded her, warning attached. Sasha was asleep on the couch and she was on her phone in her room, winding down, when the message popped up. "Ugliest One Yet. Non-actionable.". Joy. The article itself starts off with the usual allusions. Same social circles, activism groups, and background as the confirmed bomber. It has a copy of her resume, somehow, with police experts from the bomb squad helpfully explaining that somebody with her skills could absolutely make bombs. The real painful point, though, was an old essay of hers, "The Last Elephant". It was mediocre, a teenager flailing to make her point, how we'd used up Earth. The last rocket off planet, from the perspective of the last, aging elephant standing in the bones of Africa. Clip a sentence or two here, a paragraph here, and the message changes. "Fuck the factories" becomes "fuck the factory workers", "make less trash" becomes "have less people". Death of the author as the author watches.

She cries herself to sleep, silent to not wake Sasha.