"And," Bella says, "comm devices could come in handy here. I'm happy to just live in Milliways for months now I'm not running down a supply of shells that I could get away with leaving by whichever door and the ones I can carry on my person. If I find somebody, I can stick my head out the door and call you, if we have those. And then you can try for a door-summoning, yeah? If the timeline works out. I'm not so sure how that works. I hear all kinds of stories but I've never found anyone else from Panem here before. So I haven't been able to compare."

"The most obvious question is, when are you?"

"July ninth, year 72," says Shell Bell. "It was early morning, if that matters. I found this instead of the hall when I opened my bedroom door. Tony's supposed to start his Victory Tour next week."

"Sounds about right," says Tony.

"Yes," Sherlock confirms. "This time at least, we are within a few hours of one another."

"Are our districts even in the same time zone? Actually - forget districts - Four spans two all by itself. I'm in the earlier one. And... what does this imply about us being able to contact each other again? If you leave and I stay here, even for a solid six months - when I come out it'll still be July ninth, early morning. You won't have time to find the place again. Unless you will. I've seen people enter and leave several times, when they come often enough and it's one of my longer stints, but me being here doesn't do anything to time passing in their worlds. For that matter, I'm not clear on how Sherlock appeared here when I've already been on the premises for two days. Ugh. I've been coming here for twelve years. Actually, I spend so long here that it might add up to more like thirteen by now. And I still don't get this sort of thing."

"I am not sure anyone does," says Sherlock.

"I'll be right back," says Tony, and he gets up and heads over to the bar.

"Well," says Shell Bell. "We can experiment and make tentative conclusions, provided we don't expect them to hold every time. But it would be really convenient if we had a way to communicate in Panem, too. Especially since it's otherwise going to be hard to coordinate service sales. In theory I can take down room numbers and Tony can leave whatever he makes as an inter-room package for the next time the customer reappears. I don't think assassinations can be made to work the same way. Do you do anything else?" Bell asks Sherlock. "Anything... portable."

"Solve difficult mysteries," she says. "Although I am not sure that is especially portable, either."

"It could be, if at least one of us manages to meet the person more than once and collect lots of portable evidence the second time - photos of places? Articles by unreliable reporters? What can you do with that sort of thing gathered by not-you?"

"I have never tried. It is a habit of mine to find out more than I'm meant to from whatever information is left in my path."

"Okay. Well. We can try it, advertising results-not-guaranteed and all. You're comfortable enough with the assassinations idea in the first place that I gather you aren't scared to go to other worlds."

"I am not, no. Should I be?"

"I am," says Bell. "I never have. I don't know how long it would take me to get back or what I'd do in the meantime."

"I see what you mean," Sherlock acknowledges.

"Yes. But I suppose it also matters why one might be visiting another world in the first place, and the trustworthiness of one's escort."

"Yeah. I haven't found anyone who I trusted that much yet. To also let me go back, anyway. It would probably have been easy to find an acceptable person to outright adopt me when I was little and cute. And they'd have tried to make sure I never went back to my parents, for my own good. Because Panem's no place to live." She shrugs. "It's even possible they would've been right, but I avoided going anywhere else from visit one."

"Wise."

"Maybe. What's Tony off getting?"

"Parts," says Sherlock. "It seems our conversation has inspired him somehow."

"Ooh," says Bella.

"Expect something useful to come out of it."

"I will. I'll be terribly disappointed if he just makes us celebratory hats."