“Cally O’Neal, I see you.” The soft voice behind her was soprano, but not nearly high enough to be Indowy. The blonde cat burglar whirled and froze in mid strike, staring at a thin girl in Indowy mentat’s robes, her brown hair pulled back in a tight bun…

“Michelle?” Cally asked, her eyes blinking rapidly in surprise.

Since Cally had been officially dead for over forty years, including as far as she had been aware to the knowledge of her only sister, seeing the mentat was, to say the least, a bit of a shock. Especially in the middle of an op.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Cally hissed. “And that Indowy greeting was in very poor taste, you know. ‘I see you’ sounds like we’re playing hide and seek.”

“Is this a bad time?” Michelle could have been slightly miffed. In all that serenity, it was hard to tell.

“Hell yes, this is a bad time!” Cally hissed. “I’m kind of in the middle of an op here. And could you please keep your voice down!” Despite feeling totally surreal from the interruption, the underdressed cat burglar couldn’t help drinking in the sight of her long-estranged sister. “Waitaminute — you knew I was alive? How the hell did you get in here, anyway?” she asked.

“The physics is… complicated. You know, Pardal is going to be very displeased when he finds those missing.”

“Fuck Pardal. Personally, I wouldn’t mind if it sent the bastard into lintatai.” The thief fitted the screwdriver into the tiny hinge.

“Fine, don’t listen to me,” Michelle sighed, “but don’t do it that way. You’ll break it. Someone put a lot of time into that drawer. Why don’t you just use the manufacturer’s override code?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because it’s a hundred random characters of Galactic Standard? What do you mean I’ll break it?”