"It will someday be fine."

"I think I'm retroactively more confused about why you agreed to stash a problems guy in your house. It's not like I'm presently a useful problems guy and even if I get home I could easily not be a useful esper later, plenty of espers have pretty lame powers."

"I really did not predict this would happen.  Even knowing that it has,  I don't think it was especially likely.  As these things go."

"Okay. Any guesses how she - or whoever she works for, I guess - found out about me at all?"

"Mm, it's pretty standard for any security feed to have an automated process looking for things appearing or disappearing - to catch cuts and loops, you understand, not actual appearances and disappearances - so that would have been flagged, if you were in the line of sight of any cameras.  Her organization could have an in to those systems, technologically or with a mole.  They could have coerced, threatened, or otherwise gotten information from Ms. Omar.  I don't think she was working for them in the first place, or she would have delivered you to them initially instead of me.  They could have had more information than I had access to about the interdimensional transport project, and known what to look for or been able to predict specific appearances in advance.  There are a great number of possibilities."

"Is checking up on Ms. Omar," who he wouldn't call that, except, you see, he had forgotten her name, "on the itinerary? Somebody's itinerary, if not this carful of people. - there's like, cops, converging on Svetka's car, right, I'm just assuming."

"I'll see what I can find out once we're somewhere comparatively safe.  The Canadian government is aware of Ms. Ignatyeva's location; I don't know what specific actions they may choose to take about this."

"Yeah, I don't know either. Charlie's a cop, I have no idea what he'd do about an internationally famous assassin because that's not a thing we have in my universe."

"I'll be surprised if they manage to keep her very long, even if they do catch her."

"Maybe I should just try predicting more things like I'm in some kind of poorly written thriller."

"I wouldn't know."

"I suppose the poorly written thrillers are different here."

"One would expect so."

"I dunno, I watch a lot of bad movies, and they seem pretty much the same as the good stuff except worse?"

"Well, yes, but one aspect in which things can be worse, in my universe, is by taking - worldbuilding shortcuts? - like having people wake up fine again a couple hours after being knocked out via head trauma, or elevating to memetic proportions the degree to which a world famous criminal is so good at all the support skills for that profession such as escaping custody, or postulating so tiny as to be invisible spy gadgets. So I'm just considering mentally turning that dial all the way to the left even on topics I have not yet learned about, like, maybe on this planet you can buy hollow teeth full of poison at the corner store, and everybody who's anybody speaks all the languages that will ever come up in their line of work without having previously had any reason nor obvious opportunity to spend months on that, and, I don't know, I don't watch a lot of thrillers actually."

"If I had access to my lab I'd offer to make you a sedative tooth.  They aren't corner-store levels of accessible, though."

"I guess that might be good, if I don't have interdimensional drug reaction problems."

"I was still planning to try a mild one tonight.  If we can safely access, approximately, a corner store."

"Why tonight?"

"Residual plan from before this, which I think is still worth trying unless additional unexpected things happen."

"Well, I'm certainly negligible use in preventing myself from being kidnapped even when I'm awake so sure why not."

"That's the thought."

"Do you think people will try to kidnap me, Mr. Vogt?"

"I will certainly use all the resources at my disposal to prevent them from succeeding, if so."

"Where are we going?"