Sam wouldn’t play with something that belonged to her. But what about Lizzy, Sarah, and Robert? The back door of the Liaison’s Office wasn’t locked when she was working. Pete Denby had an office on the second floor, and Sarah and Robert sometimes played up there when Eve Denby needed some child-free time. And Lizzy spent a lot of time around the Market Square playing with Sarah and Robert.

Unlike the terra indigene young, who alternated between being interested in everything around them and napping to rest their little brains, human children quickly became bored with what they could have and whined to have the next thing they saw. At least, it sounded like they were always pestering their parents for “this,” and if they couldn’t have “this,” then they wanted “that.” If they’d been told they weren’t supposed to do something, it seemed that was the very thing they just had to do.

And they had been told they couldn’t play with the prophecy cards.

Maybe those things were normal for a human child. Having been raised in a compound where she had lived a very regimented life, she didn’t have any experience with “normal” when it came to children. She couldn’t tell the difference between youthful exuberance and misbehavior that would make the Others angry and cause trouble for all the humans. She’d made a mistake when Lizzy first came to the Courtyard, and the consequences of that had left her feeling anxious about everything the children did.

When she wasn’t feeling so out of sorts, she would talk to Ruth, who had taught school, or Eve Denby, who was a mother, and get some guidelines so she would know when the anxiety justified a cut and when it should be dismissed as normal. She’d like to feel as easy around the children as she did around the Wolf pups, whose games were a lot more rough-and-tumble but didn’t make her afraid.

Which brought her back to the prophecy cards someone had dropped on the floor.

Meg braced her hands on the table. Had she locked the door when she’d left for her midday break? Had Jenni, who had a key to the back door of the Liaison’s Office, come in to pick up the mail for Sparkles and Junk and forgotten to lock the door on her way out? Had the children, bored with themselves and their available toys, tried the door and, finding it open, come inside to poke around? And finding the cards, had they decided to play a game, and then dropped the cards when they lost interest—or heard something that reminded them they weren’t supposed to be in the Liaison’s Office in the first place? Nathan would know. If she asked, he could sniff around the room and tell her exactly who had been there. But that would get the children in trouble.