"Never have I dared to assume us to be friends, Magos Stoll.", Secunda twitched the corner of her mouth as she replaced the testing glass under the megascope. "I just underlined that I should not be [i]strange[/i] to you, and, as such, 'stranger' is not an appropriate tag. After all, you yourself took some time to become something significantly different from Tiefebronn. In fact, I guess we can both agree that it would have been [i]stranger[/i] if you weren't alike at your starting point. It is less important than your current one. You even have yourself a family now, from what I can hear."

That was a redirection, yet something that could buy her a second of time. She needed to calculate her next step in some rational manner that did not include trying to override atomic dead-triggers in the vicinity of Tiefenbronn's spirelab.