"I like you. You've helped me, a lot."

"You're welcome," says Bell. "Anyway, why does having a small circle of people who'd miss you add up to not having much to you? Two people would miss you. Two people currently miss me; I don't know how I rate with you and Tony right now but even if it's negligible I don't think I suddenly became more interesting as a person recently. You don't seem to be classifying me the same way."

"I am well aware that my father loved me enough to spend all of his money on me and then die of alcohol poisoning in penniless despair, but that knowledge does not help to inflate my sense of self-worth."

"It's a silly metric. You're the one who brought it up," Bell says.

Sherlock is silent.

Bell flops onto her stomach on the bed. "I'm sorry about your dad, though. And your terrible ex-friend."

"Perhaps what I meant to say is that that is not the metric I am using at all."

"I guess I misunderstood, then. What did you mean?"

"I am not sure."

Bell rolls over and looks at the ceiling. "If Lynnis and all the other Careers in line had defected, my main accomplishment would be the same as yours. As it is I have none. Are accomplishments relevant to what you're trying to get at or do you not know why you brought that up either?" Pause. "Let me know if I'm being intrusive. My curiosity sometimes puppets my mouth and my tact is narcoleptic."

"What would you want to change?" Bell asks.

"Well, that is part of the problem," she says. "The consequences of not being this good at killing people would be worse."

"Do you wish you felt differently about it?" hazards Bell.

Bell rolls onto her side, facing Sherlock. "Sometimes?" she prompts.

"The pool of people I am attracted to," she says, "is mostly people I think could beat me in a fight. Perhaps that is why it's so small."

"That doesn't sound like many people, no," Bell says. "Is it any? That you've met?"

"That I've met? No."

"I'm surprised you've figured out what determines who makes it into the pool, then," Bell says. "How'd you do that?"

"I have watched the publicly available recordings of every Hunger Games ever broadcast."

"And you haven't run into - I don't know, Johanna Mason, in person yet?"

"I have not."

"Did I guess one correctly? I saw her Games and she certainly killed people effectively but I don't know how you evaluate people's skills."