She smiles, just a little, and glances around quickly, in the manner of someone accustomed to getting the sitrep in a strange place and not looking like a gawker as she does so.

"Me too," she says. "The whole place, it's like this book I read, when I was a little kid. There was this planet that was a total Stepford, white-bread American suburb like this one, where everyone did everything all creepily in sync. All the kids bounced balls with the same rhythm, that kind of thing. This place—it's not as obviously that creepy—I mean, apart from the friggin' wall—but it reminds me of that."