The basement door appeared between the low ridges, set into the sand-colored stone, the thin line of light at its threshold the only indication of anything beneath the desert floor.
Nano stopped walking.
He stopped beside her.
She looked at the door.
"What happens now?" she asked. Not vaguely — she meant something specific. The future of the arrangement. Sugar's reaction. What she was, now, relative to both of them. Whether the collar was permanent or probationary or something the word 'permanent' and 'probationary' didn't adequately describe.
"We go back in," he said.
"And then?"
He reached past her and opened the door.
Warm air breathed upward from the staircase below — the underground warmth of the basement, the specific smell of the room she'd woken up in, stone and bodies and something she didn't have a word for.
"And then we'll see," he said.
