Nadia & Vic early on
“Oh, very much.” In someone else those words might have sounded placating, filling it up with all the expected polite niceties. But Nadia is still so bright, genuinely charmed by everything around her, her eyes alight.
“The last two years have been… just small groups of people, you know? Random strangers, travelling. Many of them behaving terribly, although they were probably just trying to do what they could to survive too, I imagine.” There’s a darkness beneath those words, but she skirts stubbornly past them. Refuses to linger on those memories. “Even after I first came to Austin, it was just people, sleeping and eating and waiting and scavenging. I never saw an actual merry party until I went to the park. And then—well, tonight, of course.”