Every time, he greets her with that question, as he greets every player that comes through the hillside. The folk are deliberate in a way Naomi finds appealing; formulaic in the same way the stories about them are formulaic. Observing them, Naomi is touched by the same thrill that she imagines she might feel looking into the belly of an astonishingly well-constructed watch, the clockwork components numerous and intricate, but each one solid, and, with enough patience, comprehensible.

From her bag, Naomi fishes out the knife she won last time she came here. She’ll be glad to be rid of it. Though it’s supposedly enchanted, none of the tests she thought up for it have managed to reveal how exactly. And she doesn’t like taking it on the tube. Menagerie accepts her offering with a clockwork incline of his head. “Seat thyself and fare thee well.”

Naomi is a good gambler for all the usual reasons. She bets small and nothing she is unwilling to lose. She plays close and folds early. Naomi is also a good gambler because she isn’t invested in winning. She has won things down here; her favorite prize was a copy of Sophocles’s lost play Clytemnestra, perfectly preserved in the original Greek. Besides that, a small assortment of magical artifacts, and other, stranger prizes, mostly useless to her. In the third game every night, the House offers a favor, a fairy-tale-style wish, its possibilities nigh limitless, but this is not what Naomi plays for either.

For three years, the notebook in her bag has been swelling with observations on a secret people. Someday, she’ll have a treatise of publishable quality. Someday, she will have enough information for coworkers, research assistants, headlines, the dependable imprint of her name on a book cover. Naomi has not shown this notebook to anyone else yet. She keeps no copies. Her project is, for the moment, too infant and dangerous, though she couldn’t say whether she worries more about being followed or plagiarized. She is far from the first person to discover this place, but in this age of documentation, of hard evidence, chemical tests, neat rows of footnotes at the bottom of the page, Naomi is determined to be the first person to document it.