She opened her eyes with effort, sticky as they were with sorrow and sleep, and found herself on the train, the last echo of its horn fading as it left a station. The figures around her were sparse, but she saw their faces turn back down to their cells. She wondered for a nervous moment just what they had been looking at while she slept. She blinked the remnants of the disturbing dream away, and everything still seemed far away from her, impossible to grasp. She had literally lost her roots, and for the first time was truly, utterly alone. And alone she had never been, even at her worst moments. It had robbed her even of the parents in her mind, against whom she always measured her actions and ideas. She felt afloat, a drowning person with nothing to grab hold of. Nothing? She pulled her cell from her pocket with stiff fingers and began to key Rachel's number, when she saw that her cell screen was an inert gray. She jabbed at it, keyed to switch to the secondary battery, slapped the thing hard against her knee, all to no effect.
