I bent lower over the manikin, beaming my flashlight into her face. She was hairless, without even the very fine, colorless body hair that even the most hairless of humans had. She didn’t even have eyelashes. Her skin was utterly without pigment; not the pinkish-pale of a light-skinned person, but chalk-white. I could trace the intertwined veins and capillaries across the narrow width of her back. I wondered how else she might be different from a human; what was she made of inside, where heart and lungs and liver lived.

Metal gleamed in the beam of my flashlight, and I carefully turned her hand over. Scraps of metal, old scalpels, had been tied and wired together to make something like a set of brass knuckles, but bladed. She wore those old, mismatched blades on both hands, and both feet. I thought of birds weaving nests from strands of hair and yarn and pieces of newspaper.

I caught myself on that thought like a hook. The manikin was not a bird. Her ancestors had been human. The creature in front of me now—how human was she? Human enough to make tools; human enough to use them. She and I were cousins, so to speak. Why had she attacked me? Had it been because I was a stranger? If I’d lived someplace for a thousand years and then a bunch of noisy strangers had burst in and started cutting up the walls, I’d be annoyed, too.

I wondered if she could speak Ameng.

There was only one way to find out, of course. I hesitated over the unconscious manikin. These creatures had attacked me—attacked the Ministers, too, but that was just common sense. Ministers were intelligent: they could be reasoned with. Weren’t the manikins just Ministers that hadn’t committed genocide? If I could convince this manikin that I was an ally, then perhaps she could lead me to the Philosopher Stone.

My imp stirred in me. What was I going to do, leave without ever knowing for sure?

I sat down beside the unconscious manikin, cross-legged, and waited for her to wake up.

She woke slowly. Whatever was in that metallic-smelling gas wasn’t lethal, but it was potent. The manikin’s fingers started to twitch, first, little restless sleeping-animal trembles. I turned my flashlight at an angle so that it wouldn’t shine directly in her eyes, and was rewarded with her lids slitting open, irises glassy behind. She had, I marveled to see, grey eyes. As monochrome as the rest of her.

Slowly, those eyes focused on me.

“Hello,” I said in Ameng.

She snarled, heaving herself up and at me. She was still too deeply drugged to do more than flop on the ground, but the motion was unmistakable; if she’d been just a little more awake, I would’ve had her claws in my jugular.

I retreated to a more prudent distance. “Sorry,” I said in Ameng, and again she snarled, bloody spittle flying between her slackened lips. Her manufactured claws scraped against the ground like nails on slate, clenching and clawing like she imagined my skin beneath her talons.