Until she spoke, there was the smallest sliver of possibility that Jane was not, in fact, Jane. Nicole promptly gave up that hope when the other woman sat down beside her and her profile caught the frosty morning light and everything clicked into place.
Naomi wasn't the only Institute patient to have stayed close to home. It figured.
"Something like that," Nicole replied, her tone even, not quite emotionless. Where her fellow escapees were concerned, she couldn't quite seem to manage the equanimity with which she treated everyone else. Silence stretched between them for a beat, as taut as a tripwire. "You're up early. Couldn't sleep?" She remembered Jane back at the Institute - vaguely, through a haze of sterile walls and gleaming tile, over the sound of saws and medical jargon that she barely understood in retrospect - and tried not to look for that little girl in the woman seated beside her now. She'd seen what the Institute had done to Naomi; was Jane similarly affected?