“Do you mean to say that She is lost?” Hilfa asked. I could all but hear the capital.

“Yes. What do you know about it?” Pytheas leaned forward, winecup forgotten in his hand and nearly spilling. Thetis gently took it from him and set it down on the tiles by her feet.

“I don’t remember anything before I hatched here, you understand?” Hilfa said. He seemed more confident and relaxed than normal. I thought I had been wrong to come; he didn’t need my help.

“That’s what you said at the time, but you could talk,” Marsilia said.

“I knew some things,” Hilfa said. “I don’t know how much is normal for newly hatched Saeli. I have not wanted to ask, because sometimes questions reveal too much about what you do not know, when you should.” He looked at Marsilia, with a twitch of expression that I thought meant apology. “I know that’s not the Socratic way.”

“The Socratic way regards deception very badly,” Marsilia said.

Hilfa inclined his head. “You told me not to reveal my origins.”

Marsilia sighed. “It’s true, we did.”

“Plato’s censorship and deception wars with Sokrates’s desire to question everything all the time,” Hermes said.

“We in the Cities have noticed this contradiction,” Pytheas said wearily. “Go on, Hilfa.”

Hilfa turned to Thetis, who was sitting next to me on the bed. “I remember you looking after me, and that is the first thing I remember. Before that there was no me. Let me fetch paper.”

“Paper?” Hermes asked.

“Quicker to do than to explain,” he said, and darted back into the little storeroom.

“I think he’s telling the truth,” Thetis said. The instinctive twitches of my own liver said the same thing. Saeli are hard to read, but I was used to Hilfa, and he didn’t seem to be prevaricating at all, even as he talked about dodging revelation.

Pytheas nodded. “I think so too. Hermes?”

Hermes was staring intently at the door through which Hilfa had vanished, and shook himself when he was addressed, the way Hilfa often did on the boat when I called him back from one of his reveries. “I sense no deception either,” he said.

Hilfa came back with paper, a standard sheaf of Worker-made letter paper. He set it down on the table. Hermes moved to give him room, and took up position leaning casually against the wall. Hilfa took a pen and wrote for perhaps a second. I don’t think I could have written my name in the time he spent writing. It didn’t look like he was writing, either; more like he was doodling. The pen danced over the paper, and then he was done. He walked over to hand it to Pytheas, and I could see it was covered all over in neat script, where I’d have counted on a sketch.