Hopefully he'd able to travel with somebody. At least he'd be trying to find someone, which was more than Claude had done that night he'd gone off to the greenhouse. The fact Ashton had shown up had been a fluke, really. And a lucky one, at that.

And there he went, thinking about Ashton again.

Claude wasn't allowed to dwell on those thoughts for too long, though. For a moment, he hesitated -- should he go ahead and come clean? Dias was right about not being able to keep the lie up, but how would he explain it? And what if it somehow screwed up his name in the future or something?

"There's, uh, just been a lot going on," he finally explained. "With the new captives that come in and all. It's too easy to run into a familiar face sometimes." He scratched his cheek and looked over at his father. "But what about you? How've you been adjusting?"

He hoped he'd been able to meet a few reliable people. Normally he might have asked as much, but Claude didn't want to come across as nosy. To him, this man was father, but to Ronixis, he was more or less a stranger.

This was so weird.