“Nice work,” MeLaan said.

“I feel like I’m going to puke.”

“Must run in the family,” MeLaan said, leading her along the hallway. It had bare wooden walls and smelled of sawdust, and a solitary electric light hung from the ceiling. Melaan stopped at the simple door at the end, listened carefully, then tried the knob. This one was locked.

“You can open it?” Marasi said. “Like you did before?”

“Sure,” MeLaan said, kneeling by the doorknob. “No problem. I’ll try something more mundane first.” She cocked her hand, and a set of picks sprouted from the skin of her forearm. She plucked them free and started working on the door.

“Handy,” Marasi said.

“Pun intended?”

“That depends,” she said, checking over her shoulder. The hallway was still empty. Fool girl. “How many times have you heard that joke?”

MeLaan smiled, focused on her lockpicking. “I’ve been alive pushing seven hundred years now, kid. You’ll have trouble finding jokes I haven’t heard.”

“You know, I should really interview you sometime.”

MeLaan cocked an eyebrow in her direction.

“You kandra have a unique perspective on society,” Marasi explained softly. “You’ve seen trends, movements across large scales.”

“I suppose,” MeLaan said, twisting her lockpick. “What good does it do?”

“Statistics show that if we make subtle changes to our environment—the way we approach our legal system, or employment rates, maybe even our city layout—we can positively influence the people living in that environment. Your head may hold the key to what those changes should be! You’ve seen society evolve, move; you’ve watched the shifting of peoples like the tides on a beach.”

“My thigh,” MeLaan said, twisting the doorknob with a click, then pushing the door open a crack. She nodded, standing up straight.

“Your… what?” Marasi asked.

“You said my head might hold the key,” MeLaan said, striding into the chamber beyond—a small, surprisingly well-furnished room. “It’s actually my thigh, right now. A kandra stores its cognitive system through its entire body, but my memories right now are in a solid metal compartment in my thigh. Safer that way. People aim for the head.”

“So what’s in your head?”

“Eyes, sensory apparatus,” MeLaan said. “And an emergency canteen.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope,” MeLaan said, hands on hips, scanning the room. Another door on the left led farther into the system of rooms built along the side of the warehouse, but there were no windows out to the main chamber, which was good.

Though the room smelled of new sawdust, like the rest of the building, here that was mixed with a scent of wood polish and a faint odor of cigar smoke. Light from a small electric desk lamp revealed a tidy study, with rows of books in a bookcase, two plush chairs with a maroon and yellow pattern in front of the desk, and several decorative plants that probably had to be rotated outside each day to keep from wilting.

Marasi trailed through the room, noting its oddities. Every room had them—marks of individuality, clues to the life of the occupant. The desk drawers had wide, exaggerated handles on them. The stand lamp in the corner had been bolted to the wooden floor, as had the chairs, likely to keep them in place should Irich stumble into them. Marasi was not familiar with the man’s disease, but it appeared he liked his chambers to accommodate a little fumbling.