Frederika's personal attendant wake her at 1:00 in the morning whispering there was an emergency. On a good day Frederika didn't feel like herself until mid-morning, so it went without saying that in the middle of the night she was a shambling, flustered mess. When the attendant couldn't contain herself any more and cried out that her daughter had been found, Frederika felt a pang of fear as her mind went to Abby, expecting next to hear that girl had been found face down in a Grudow gutter. The attendant saw her befuddled expression and clarified: her long-lost daughter Delia had come home.

"Who?" Frederika had asked, her sleepy brain steeped in fog.

They led Frederika to her youngest daughter, buried beneath a mountain of wool blankets, a flock of servants crowding around even as the physician demanded they give the poor thing air. The rabble melted into the woodwork as Frederika entered, shrouded in her heavy winter robe. Delia looked up in a daze, her long eyelashes brushing her cheeks in languid, dreamy blinks. Frederika swallwoed. Her daughter had grown into a strikingly beautiful woman.

With all eyes trained on her, Frederika stroked her daughter's forehead, kissed her cheek, said welcome home, told her to rest, and that they would talk in the morning. Then Frederika beat a hasty path back to her bedroom, thinking about their faces pressed together for that instant, her daughter's skin as cold and smooth as marble.

Dealing with that situation had been simple. Any good mother would want their child to sleep after such an ordeal so that excused her curt welcoming. In fact Frederika hoped that it had projected an aura of control over a deeply emotional situation. No gushing tears, just a logical, clinical handling of the affair. If she encouraged the story to spread, might it not inspire confidence in her ability to lead?

That hope dissolved over breakfast the next morning as a haggard and unshaven Cooley, who clearly hadn't slept a shred, delivered a report of the night's events that featured a special ops team wiped out in the Northwest Reaches, a dead officer laid out in the garden, and Commander Ellen Johnson recuperating 10 blocks away at the Tombstone. Cooley, a decent fellow who seemed to know his place, asked no questions of his own and only reported facts. Frederika sipped her tea and said little. Her dream of being seen as a detached and rational leader was replaced by a nightmare depicting her as a doddering, foolish old woman who went back to bed as the world crumbled around her.

And that had only been the debriefing. Now it was on to what she had been dreading all morning: the reunion. Frederika asked for Delia to be delivered to her sitting room while she received Cooley's report. Delia entered the room with no fanfare, shooing the guards outside and closing the doors behind her. Delia was at the window, staring out at the Lake Lawrence. She didn't turn as the door latched shut with an audible click. An air of sorrow seemed to permeate the room. Frederika shuffled to her counter and poured herself a cup of tea. She added two drops of the magic elixir, just to ease her anxiety. She glanced up to see Delia watching her, the droppper still poised over the teacup.

"Tea to warm you, sweetheart?" she asked and poured a second cup. Frederika smiled as sweetly as she knew how.

With a despondent look, Delia shook her head and resumed gazing out the window.

Frederika cleared her throat. Sixteen years apart and they fell right back into familiar routines. Pathetic.

"They tell me you refused a medical examination?" Frederika said, hoping she masked the steel in her voice.

"I don't need to be prodded by a handful of quacks."

Delia's voice had changed. It was huskier, bereft of refinement. That's what a decade and a half in the wastes will do to you, I suppose, Frederika thought, but there was something else to it. The sniveling tone of her teenage years that Frederika had remembered so well been replaced by something else, something bordering on dismissiveness. Frederika did not like that. Not at all.

"Those quacks, as you call them, represent the finest medical minds we have available. Not that says much, mind," she muttered and sipped her tea. The sooner she got the tea down, the sooner this affair would be bearable.

Delia had been well-kept, it appeared. Her skin looked luscious, smooth and supple, her hair silky. The years had not been nearly as kind to her sisters, especially Abby who had a distinctly used look about her. Too much time spent slumming with the commoners in Summerland. But Delia had always been different: the black sheep; the outsider.

"Tell me darling," Frederika said, sensing the thickness creeping into her voice. The drug acted quickly. "Tell your dear mother where you have been? Why did you not come home?"

Delia glanced back over her shoulder but faced the window as she spoke. "I lived with street people for a year or two. We eat from cans. Slept by fires. I lived like they did, among them. It's a hard life, mother. You have no idea. But then a ranger came from the wastes to scout the city. He was from a sub-lab in the Reaches. We talked. I liked him. He took my ideas seriously. He asked me to return with him. So I did."

"What in heaven's name is a ranger?"

Delia smirked. "Someone explores the world. Not that you would know anything about that."

Frederika felt a lump in her throat and a sting at the back of her eyes. Her beautiful, defiant daughter. She gripped the back of the chair to steady herself as memories came flooding back."My beautiful daughter," she said, choked. "We have all missed you so, so terribly. Your father passed while you were away..."

Frederika was caught in the heady grip of the jack but Delia was as wise as ever. She tilted her head. "Are you feeling okay, mother? You don't seem yourself."

"I... I..." The words wouldn't come, but tears were threatening.

"Excuse me," Delia said, flattening herself against the counter to slip past as Frederika reached for her. "I don't feel well. I will be retiring to my room. We can talk again later if I feel up to it."

Alone, Frederika sat on the edge of the couch and wept silently into her hands, feeling the heartbroken sorrow of a mother's love.

Later, after Frederika had woken from her impromptu nap, she discovered the servants had cleared the room while she dozed. The tea kettle was gone and, to her horror, so was the dropper. She ranted and screamed at the staff, letting them feel the full blast of her fury. She fired them all on the spot and contemplated having them whipped for their incompetence. She spent the rest of the afternoon scowling at her desk, trying to remember how many doses of jack had gone down the drain with the dishwater.