“Ben, I’m Naecia. Nice to meet you again.”

“She tried to kill you once,” said Patton, like it was no more than a bit of interesting trivia.

Naecia threw her arms out, helpless against Patton’s unfiltered candor. “Really?” she said.

“Really?” I asked.

“It was justified at the time,” said Patton. “You got past it.”

Naecia rolled her eyes. “Patton: we’re going to take Mom and Aeshua out to see some more investors. Do you want me to wait for you?”

Patton dismissed the notion with the wave of an empanada. “No, no, you and Izairis got this. She and those nuns are top schmoozers. I’m not great with corporate types.”

“We agree on that,” she said.

“Plus, I need to go look at sprinters so I can get my racing team put together – oh, Ben, you can help me pick out color schemes. I was thinking–”

“So we’re off, then,” interrupted Naecia.

“Right,” said Patton. “See you guys at dinner.”

“Dinner,” she said, clicking away in the elaborate armor. “Ben, maybe you’ll remember me tomorrow.”

“Bye,” I said.

“You will remember, dude,” Patton said, taking my hand. “I believe in you.”

“I forget things even when you tell them to me? I can’t learn?”

“Well, you have a tender brain right now, but last week your coherence was half what it is today.”

“A twentieth of a percent?”

“Exactly! Promising!”

Didn’t sound promising.

Nevertheless, Patton went on to retell the whole story of the Shopkeeper and the Pipefitter. I’m the Shopkeeper because I used to work in a tiny shop that sold items that caused something called “fish” to snag themselves and become food; and Naecia is the Pipefitter because she was a person who fit pipe together. He started from before our abduction all the way up until he found the Chime in the beans. Afterward, some Aszerat gangsters had come for their piece of the Switch Drive, but Naecia politely explained that the person who had sold it to them – a no-good, scheming, meat-robot opportunist called Aptat – had never been the rightful owner. When the gangsters didn’t like that explanation and tried to take it by force, she converted them into ex-gangsters. She was already building quite the reputation for herself on Aszerat.