Are you here with an escort?" There is paternal concern in his tone as he glances at the two men in the hall. "No. Well, I mean, yes of course. I'm to...meet him here." She falters at the open disapproval in his eyes, then startles violently at the warm touch of a mans hand on her shoulder. "It is fine, Jacques. We will introduce her around." The low, resonant voice belongs one of the two men, the rolling r's of his speech, the cadence, magnificently French. Glancing behind her, she takes in the. Now come get their crap out of my car, or I'll just keep it. You can explain to them that you just didn't want to do your job." Linda said but was a little louder than she needed to be and now all the people in the room were looking at her."Bruce, take the lady's keys, and get the Harper boys' things," said a deeper voice."But, Chief, she..." Bruce started to complain."She what? I've told you before to stop sticking up for those two. I don't care if they're your kin. One more thing like this,. We’d accomplished a lot in the five years I’d been there. Almost all the old inventory was sold, with a few odds and ends given away or sent to the landfill. My investments were also doing well, so I was financially in good shape. I’d traded the Impala in on a new 2011 Ford Explorer. It was plenty big enough and had all the options I could ever want, and many that I probably would never use.I visited my grandparents at least twice a month in their new home in Petaluma. It was new, very nice,. First there were the shifts to move the ship out of the system. I began the therapy in groups of five. Each got two liters of blood removed and three liters of artificial perpetual essence put back in.There was one shift where everyone connected neural nets and used an AI interface to access a super comp game world. It covered and taught unarmed fighting, weapons training and new comp skills. Finally there was training with the constable response armored suit from New Sidney, that had not been.