There is a strange woman sitting at one of the tables at the soup kitchen, writing at a desk. Both the non-volunteer adult and the expensive electronic device are very out of place.
She considers this.
"It isn't," she says. "Like I said, the nuns who raised me made it up. I don't have a mother or father who had it before me, to pass it on from. I like it, but--it's sentimentally important to give you a name you'll like, like I like mine, not one that's exactly the same as mine."
Awwwwwww poor socially maladjusted smol. She sort of wants to scoop him up and hug him forever but that would be a seriously bad idea he probably would not react well. Well...no, probably even asking is a bad idea, remember what he said about the surname, he would probably not feel secure enough to refuse. "Should I start listing last names I know?"
"Hm...Bianchi Rossi Angelo Piazza Smith Black Brown Lenz Bauer Mikhaelov...Chekhov Monroe Fraser Arbuthnott Boswell Calhoun...Murphy Kelly Carroll Buckley...Munoz Garcia Lopez Kittredge Carpenter Cooper...Summers Cassidy Darkholme Xavier Lehnsherr Logan McTaggert McCoy Quested Grey Worthington...I can come up with more if you don't like any of those much."
Well. Hopefully Martin doesn't have the social acuity to notice that enough to be offended by it.
...Books and clothes will have to be carried back to familiar territory, unfortunately, since she's staying with one of the soup kitchen volunteers in an apartment above the facility.
Carlotta has an apartment in London; it's not huge but it does have a guest room that can be converted into a not-guest room. With a door that locks from the inside. Once they arrive Carlotta gets started on the adoption/legal identity process.
"...I don't suppose you know your birthdate."
Well. Technically yes.
(Poor kid.)
She tots up the results because she's supposed to, not because there's any chance that he didn't pass.
"They're going to want you to take some physical tests, too, that I'm not qualified to administer and that require equipment I don't have here, and they'll want to check you for the X-Gene."
The other girl looks much less malnourished than a starving street urchin but not none. That combined with the wary way she assesses everything around her, not with skill but with a lurking paranoia, suggests that she might have more experience with survival as an immediate priority than most of the kids on the shuttle.
"No, but most of space is empty and boring, and most of Canada at least has, like, geographic features," he explains. "So maybe going to space is cool, but then you can't really do much there except be in space. Between being in a random part of space and being in a random part of Canada I'd pick Canada."
"Well - people can take an oath, the þainneið, and if you take it - if you take it and you're at least sixteen years old and it's properly witnessed and accepted - then you're a thane of Thule and you have to act like one. Like if there's somebody hurt in an accident and you know first aid you have to give it to them, or if somebody's homeless or starving you have to help them, or if somebody's stealing stuff or murdering people you have to stop them, if you can and nobody else is."
His name was Grey Owl but his real name was Archie Belaney and he was Scottish but he got adopted by some First Nations group and he went around telling people he was half First Nations and he used to be a trapper but then he figured out that beavers were being hunted too much and he married several different women generally without bothering to divorce the old ones first.
He had one kid, with Wife The Penultimate who helped him with a lot of his conservation stuff. And it's really nice that he's interested in hearing this story because telling stories helps you not forget them and it's not like she can go back to that national park any time soon.