Well I’ll be damned, I thought. The hair prickled on the back of my neck.

“Do you remember …” I replayed the event in my mind. “Right after the deer exploded into those balls, just a second later, a few more balls seemed to appear out of thin air? Each one made a little flash.”

“Yes, I do remember that.”

I sat there trying to draw my idea into words.

“Thinking in terms of the legend, it’s like the sky only needed a certain amount of itself to make a deer, but it needed more to make a person. So it reused the deer material but had to add some more, too. I mean, Justine definitely weighs more than the deer did.”

Cordus nodded. “In addition to sheer mass, she is more intelligent and has a store of existing knowledge that a deer would not have.”

I could’ve quibbled on the “more intelligent” part but let it go.

“But where did her human memories go while she was a deer? Is she really made of sky?”

“That does not seem likely, unless we think of the sky as something other than an expanse of air, clouds, and so forth.”

His face was still aimed at his tapping feet, but he was looking up at me out of the corner of his eye. I realized he was waiting for me to catch up to his conclusions. I slipped into student mode and thought about what we already knew and what we still needed to know.

“You’re thinking that there’s even more of her somewhere, right? And that part — the part that’s not in her now — it knows something. Who she is, maybe, or what she stole and where it’s hidden.”

“Exactly, Miss Ryder. Very good.”

“Then we have to find her missing parts.”

Cordus studied his feet a while before answering.

“Perhaps, but we must not move precipitously. Lord Limu presents a threat, and it is easy to assume that the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend. Unfortunately, that cliché rarely proves true. I would like to research further the legend of Eye of the Heavens before trying to trigger any changes in Mrs. Ryder.”

I nodded, but my mind had doglegged down a different track.

“We should also try to figure out what kind of weapon Limu was making,” I said. “Is there any way we can get more information about that?”

“You are certainly correct, Miss Ryder. That line of research must parallel my work on Eye of the Heavens, though we must again proceed with caution. And with absolute secrecy,” he added, shooting me a pointed look.

I quickly nodded, afraid he might brainwash me into silence. Frankly, I couldn’t quite see why he didn’t — he hardly knew me well enough to trust me.