Oh no. Is he oka- well, clearly not... 

When the mandatory group session starts, she gets a little bag of trail mix out of her backpack and puts it on his desk, then hesitantly asks him if he wants her to cover his part of the project? 

He glares at her. "No."

That does get him to start paying attention to their project, though. He's still quiet, preferring to work on his own part while she works on hers, but he's contributing. After a few minutes, he even hesitantly takes some trail mix, picking out the bits he likes (raisins, sunflower seeds, some of the nuts) rather than grabbing a handful. 

Ah.

She wilts a bit at his reproach, but once he starts working she works in parallel with him, and is happy to see him eating a bit, at least. 

As days turn into weeks, the Garrison keeps its promise to stay in contact with the relatives of the missing crewmembers. Keskel and Ami get regular updates whenever there's any progress to report, always at least a day or two before the same information hits the public newsfeeds. 

(After those first few days, there seems to be a specific junior comms officer assigned to the task. She introduces herself as Veronica; she sounds Hispanic, not much older than Kes, and genuine in her sympathy.) 

By the end of the first week or so, they can rule out that the damage was something the Kerberos crew could have easily repaired. The probabilities of various scenarios adjust themselves accordingly. The Garrison has analysts going over the last few minutes of data from the Orfeo with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, looking for any irregularities. By week three, they've redirected the orbital telescopes around Jupiter to point at Kerberos and finalised crew selections for the potential rescue mission (which some wit has named Heurodis). 

Week by week, more data trickles in: from the Orfeo's final transmissions, from relay satellites, from cutting-edge image enhancing programs run on the photos from cutting-edge telescopes. None of it is conclusive. None of it, despite Veronica's best efforts, is reassuring. 

Ami stops hiding in her room after the first day, when she gets hungry enough to remember that she needs to feed her family.

She listens anxiously when Keskel is on the calls. After the first one, they have a system - Kes on speakerphone, Ami taking notes on a laptop, a second display plugged into it and facing Kes if she wants to prompt them to ask more or clarify some specifics. It works pretty well - they've done this before, when navigating bureaucracy (But usually - Matty was on the phone -). 

Ami doesn't trust them, is what it comes down to. The more she pokes at it, the more she has this nagging feeling that they aren't telling them everything. 

She has a quiet fight with Kes about it, the night they have to leave to go back to college. They - think Veronica is being honest with them, that it's probably not some conspiracy, that the Garrison is doing its best to communicate with them and to get Matty back. Ami - can't agree. It's too shifty. Something happened, something weird, and they are lying. Maybe Veronica believes what she's saying - that just means they're lying to her, too. And that wouldn't be very surprising, really. Kes says she's thinking like a conspiracy theorist. The discussion mostly ends there. She hugs them goodbye, and gets to thinking.

She wants access to the Garrison's secure data storage. She wants to see what happened in the unedited footage that the people she's found online have proved must exist, the one that they concocted this entire story to conceal. And she's not a genius-level hacker, so her most likely path to achieving this by convincing someone to tell her. 

Except Veronica clearly has never seen the actual footage, and Nuadh's contacts don't know anything either (but some of them agree that it feels - fishy) so if Ami wants that info she is going to have to get close to someone vaguely important at the Garrison itself. And none of them spend much time socializing online, what with their busy and secretive careers, so she needs to be there.

Nuadh (seeming unsure of xirself) suggests that maybe Ami could test in as a communications specialist? Xi offers to help her study, says that the next test is next weekend, and that probably isn't enough time, but that Ami will be able to retake it next semester and doing it now will be good practice anyways. 

Ami starts studying.