"After you got your degree in Janitorial Maintenance, right?" Kathy asked, looking at Anders with serious eyes. "I mean, that's a two-year program, so it'd be completely doable!"

She managed to last long enough to see whether or not her bought it before cracking up. Yes, she was laughing at her own joke. No, she didn't particularly seem to care.

"Maybe it's a hotbed of political activism," she hazarded a moment later. "When you're an oppressed minority looking to work against established power structures, you're not going to go hobnobbing with the elite somewhere. Whether you're forced there by circumstance or choose it deliberately, you're gonna pick a place they tend not to go, to fly under the radar as it were. And that's not necessarily something Carys would realize, either. I can't see either of us saying, 'Be good for Auntie Marian, darling, Mommy and Daddy are off to battle the kyriarchy.'"

Not at five anyway. That was more a conversation for, say, seven or eight.