There was, literally, no response for that. So Sam fell back on her favorite standby. "Well," she said, "that blows."

While she was an artist with a beaker or with a brush, Sam's language skills tended to fail to impress. But she figured the sentiment was there. And Scrapper--she'd come up with some kind of nickname for her later...Scrappy? Scrappy Doo?--didn't seem like the weepy type, anyway.

Worked for her.

"I'm from Los Angeles," she said with a shrug, turning down the heat on her mash, on the stove. "Which is kind of like a trash heap without an escape. Except we had pay-per-view."