“Yes, it’s on. Thank you for asking. Why don’t you pick out the piece of bone you like best, and tell me about it?”

She looked at them all: there were long treelike pieces with branches coming off them, and little wedged pieces and a long smooth piece with a jaggedy end. Nona picked the jaggedy piece and ran her thumb over the prickly splintered end, liking the bright itch. “Am I not allowed to love Crown?” she said.

“I could never stop you from loving anything. I don’t have the right. Nobody has the right to tell you who to love or who not to love, and equally nobody’s obliged to love you. If you were forced into loving them, it wouldn’t be love…”

Nona liked that.

“That’s why I love Hot Sauce and Honesty and my friends so much. They don’t have to like me, and it was a huge surprise when they liked me, but they do.”

“Being unexpectedly loved is so wonderful or terrible, isn’t it?”

“Wonderful, I think,” she said. Then she said, “Well, I still love Crown, anyway.”

“She’s used to people loving her anyway,” said Palamedes, with the air of someone not wholly paying a compliment.

“Do we still like the Captain?” (Even Nona couldn’t quite love the Captain.)

“I pity the Captain to the very depths of my heart, and never did like her much,” said Palamedes. “I pity Crown not at all, and like her terribly; that’s the problem. Why don’t you try to make that end smooth?”

Nona pressed her thumb down hard on the jagged end of the bone piece. The pad of her thumb began to feel warm. The tiny splinters of bone broke her skin, and a pinprick of red blood bubbled up. Nona stuck her thumb in her mouth. Palamedes carefully drew it away—“Good thinking, that’s antiseptic, but I can do better,” he said—and, with fine lines appearing at the side of Camilla’s mouth, the minutest fragment of bone popped out from the blood. Then the wound was gone, and the warm feeling with it.

Nona said curiously, “Does that hurt Camilla?”

“No, thank God. I’d never do it if it did.”

“Why is it that the blue light in the sky hurts—other people,” said Nona, “but not you and Cam?”

She had asked this upward of a dozen times, especially lately, but Palamedes always answered unhesitatingly no matter how many times he had been asked before. “She’s got the wrong kind of body. She and I can cheat … for now … draw on me, not her, for the unusual kinds of things that I do, with the downside being that our time is very limited. If I was in her body for too long, I’d hurt her and the blue light would start to hurt me. But in summary, nothing will hurt Camilla so long as I stick to the time limit. Make sense?”

“I think so,” said Nona, and deciding: “Yes. That’s a relief … I wouldn’t want anything to hurt Camilla. I love Camilla.”