“Of course!” Her grin was big and bright and not vague at all, and she directed it at me as if she were a third-grade teacher and I had just correctly spelled “aardvark” out loud. “You’re in the middle of green. You’ll like it.”

Much as I hesitate to admit it, she was right. For the next three hours, she placed the Ticker and me like a general places troops, while she skritched furiously away herself, filling in color with a speed and certainty that baffled me. She seemed to hold the finished work in her head; she never referred to a drawing, and she never seemed to have to think about the next step.

Wolfboy, only—how many days ago had it been? Too much had gone on between then and now—not long ago, had told us that Camphire had said, “You have to break an omelette to make eggs.” I wondered if he’d been in the middle of this when she’d said it. Camphire was a byword in Bordertown for not having the firmest grasp on reality; in fact, most of the time one could feel pretty certain that she had both hands full of something else, and reality, if she had any contact with it at all, was slipping out from where she’d tucked it under one elbow. We collected Camphire-isms as ultimate nonsense and non sequiturs, and didn’t pay a lot of attention to what she did while she uttered them.

This, all around me, was what she did, and she was very good at it. She still smiled and nodded at the Ticker and me, and in that pretty, insubstantial voice said things like, “Is negative space the space you don’t like, or the space that’s not there? And if it’s not there how can you tell?” and “I can see the light at the end of the candle. We’re almost done.” But she always knew where the next color went, and never smeared a grid line or dragged her skirt hem through the chalk.