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pockets of her bag, but she knew they’d just laugh it off as another of her oddities. “I sent most of my stuff on ahead.”
    “You mailed it? You should’ve just carried it. Shipping is a pain. Besides it’s just a government scam to get a look at our private possessions,” Grace quipped.   She was the one Yllera would miss the most. Grace was a big sci-fi fan, of the three she was the only one who might even half believe the truth.
    “I trust the post office more than airline baggage handlers,” Dawn scoffed from the corner. Dawn was the antisocial one. She was the biggest mystery to Yllera.
    Yllera felt like she was on the verge of tears. They’d been her friends for a year now and now she was headed home to Sanctuary, and would probably not see or hear from them again. Yllera pulled herself together. She knew she would have to move now that she’d graduated. She just hadn’t thought she’d be recalled to Sanctuary. That wasn’t true, she’d been dreading the possibility since she filed her last report.
    “I’m gonna miss you guys,” Heather said finally breaking into tears. Yllera rolled her eyes, although she felt the same way.
    “It’s okay, we can write each other, and the world isn’t as wide as it used to be, what with air travel and trains and cars. I mean we can visit each other in practically no time,” Grace said joining in on the waterworks.
    Dawn scoffed and went into her room muttering, “Saps.”
    “We love you too,” Heather and Grace, cried in unison, mocking their own tears.
    Yllera felt her pop-pad vibrating in her hip pocket. That meant her transportation had arrived, “Gotta go, I can’t leave my ride waiting for forever.”
    “Yeah whatever!” Dawn hollered back, over a fresh round of sobs from Heather and grace. Yllera knew she heard the raw tones of someone trying not to cry, in Dawn’s voice.
    With a smile and a shake of the head Yllera darted out the door and down the hall to the elevator.   She was having an unusually hard time shielding out the raw emotions all around her, but a sudden creeping feeling of dread brought her suddenly, fully alert.   She tapped the elevator button and adjusted her hold on her armful of books. Yllera used the motion as an excuse to glance around herself. Three college age men, all dressed to blend with the dorm’s normal inhabitants, were approaching Yllera’s position from the three converging halls. There was nothing casual or collegiate in their manner, other than their clothes. They were dark.
    Somehow, Yllera wasn’t afraid. All emotion had just drained out of her leaving her with a clear mind. She adjusted her grip on the books and leaned against the wall next to the elevator, affecting the unconcerned pose of someone impatiently waiting for an elevator. The men continued to converge on her position. Just as the two coming from both sides reached textbook range they turned down the hall towards the third, who had slowed further down that corridor.   Yllera let out a sigh of relief, finally seeing they weren’t after her, but that dropped out of her thought as she realized they wouldn’t be there without a target in mind.
    Yllera ran through her memories of the other people living on her floor. She wasn’t aware of anyone particularly important, but saying who might do something important in the future was difficult. She watched casually as the men converged on a door three doors down from her own dorm room. Who lived there? Yllera racked her mind, three geeks, into sci-fi. Their pasty zit filled faces all ran together, but their majors sprang to mind. One was into the computer sciences, the tallest was into astronomy or was it astrophysics, and the shortest was a bio-chem major.   Any one of them or perhaps the combination of all three had potential for future greatness. Yllera heard the elevator on final approach. It was decision time, again. Yllera plucked her still vibrating pop-pad from her pocket and tapped a call