"It's not hope," Howard snaps, and then he sneers slightly. "It's deduction."

He pokes at some of the meat and turns it over, wiping some of the juices on his pants. "Look, you may be real smart and all, but I was raised by a television. I know how these sorts of things pan out. If it were one, two pairs? Yeah, they'd off the less-popular half to milk some tears out of us all. But they aren't going to split up thirty pairs of people when they could be making bank off them."