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After Dagny tells Sveta, some things change, and some things don’t.
Dagny keeps up the language lessons, but she stops watching foreign comedies all the time. Sveta doesn’t ask, but she thinks all the TV must have been part of her four-year-old act, just a way of convincing Sveta she could keep herself entertained.
She still carries her Franklin Roosevelt doll around. Sveta assumes she’s hidden something in there. It’s probably safer if they doesn’t know exactly what.
Bjarte asks if Dagny has another name she wants them to use, and she shakes her head. “I’ve gotten used to Dagny,” she says. She doesn’t add that without knowing her old name, they can’t find out anything about her previous life. She doesn’t have to.
She watches the news with Sveta and Bjarte in the evenings (sitting beside them, instead of listening from outside the door and then being carried back to bed when they find out she’s awake). She still bursts into tears unexpectedly at times. Sveta thinks that whatever happened to her the last time around, it must have left scars.
Dagny does her fair share of the chores and more. She’s not as strong as Sveta, but she makes up for it with efficiency. She hasn’t said outright that she was a servant once, but Sveta can put two and two together. She must have done a lot of cleaning when she was paying down her debt.
She cares for Bjarte openly now, with an expertise that surprises him as much as Sveta. Dagny hasn’t said what medical problems led to her debt, but Sveta’s guessing it was either brumavirus or something a lot like it. Dagny knows more than she should.
She continues to call them Mom and Dad. They’re careful not to call attention to it. They consider her family, long-runner or not, but they don’t want to scare her off. From what they’ve seen of her real self, she doesn’t trust easily.
Inside the house, she carries herself differently, some of her four-year-old awkwardness melting away, but in public, she’s a child again, the transformation eerily complete. If things were different, she would have made a great actress — or spy. Bjarte offers to remove the parental controls on the family smartcrystal, and Dagny sheepishly tells him that she figured out his password months ago. He’s embarrassed until Sveta reminds him that until recently, he hadn’t even known that Dagny could read.
Outside their little family, no one knows that it’s Dagny who came up with Sveta’s vague excuses for emigrating, Dagny who’s calculating the cost of travel, Dagny who’s getting their documents in order and their belongings packed away. They don’t see Sveta filling out passport applications with Dagny watching over her shoulder and telling her what to write. (Dagny’s handwriting is illegible; her motor skills are still that of a four-year-old, even if her mind isn’t.) They don’t see Dagny practicing Ceanska for hours every day. They don’t see her research, conducted long before Sveta or Bjarte had any idea who she was or what she was planning.
No one knows about Dagny, and until they can get her to Ceannis, it’ll have to stay that way.