5
The rest of the night was a blur.
Michiko only had three drinks. Or four. It was hard to tell.
But after eating dinner in the cafeteria, mum among the displaced survivors of Refugio, they migrated upstairs into a conference room that the other volunteers had converted into a bar. The only rule was that you could drink all you want, but you couldn’t get drunk.
Michiko sat on a leather couch nursing a glass of plum wine, listening and laughing to the others tell their stories.
Hassan’s family roots stretched back to Earth, to a little country in Central Asia called Azerbaijan. Michiko, Ashley and Rudy couldn't pronounce it no matter how many times Hassan said the name, and after the fifth try, they gave up. He was a recovering engineering student thinking about making a left turn into
