“The Most Favored discovered me by reading the signs and portents attending my birth,” Dex said. “She brought me to live in her palace as a very young girl.”

“What about your family?”

Dex shrugged. “I do not remember them. The Most Favored assured me they were well compensated, as is the custom in such cases.”

“She bought you?” Alice couldn’t help but think of Vespidian, trying to make her own father an offer. “That’s awful!”

“Oh, no. It is the best thing for everyone concerned. After all, if she had not, I would never have known my power. I could have lived my whole life without ever finding my true purpose.”

“But . . .” Alice shook her head, glancing at Isaac for support.

He shrugged. “I can’t add much,” he said. “I’ve been with my master as long as I can remember.”

“None of you had a family of your own?” Alice looked at Soranna, who shook her head.

“My family . . . died,” the girl said. “When I was young. My master has been training me ever since.”

That threw a temporary pall of silence over the conversation. Dex, ever cheerful, broke the spell.

“Then, Sister Alice, you must have some familiarity with the mortal world.”

Alice blinked. “I suppose I must.”

“We hear many strange rumors,” Dex said. “Is it true that mortals can fly now? I have always discounted that one, myself. How can one fly without magic?”

“You mean fly, like with an airplane?” Alice looked from Dex to Soranna, but both girls gave her blank looks. “A machine,” she said, slowly. “You know. With engines, and propellers. It’s made of metal.”

After a moment of goggling incomprehension, both girls exploded with questions. They were, Alice discovered, astonishingly ignorant of the modern world. Dex had seen gaslight, and read about horseless carriages, but knew nothing about electricity, telephones, or radio. Soranna was even worse. She boggled at Alice’s description of Times Square in Manhattan, and flatly refused to believe in the existence of steamships.

“You can’t build a ship out of metal,” she said, after Alice repeated her description. “Metal’s heavy. It would sink.”

Dex, by gentle prodding, encouraged Soranna to tell a little bit about her own upbringing. Alice hardly knew what to expect, but the first thing the little girl said caught her completely off guard.

“I wasn’t born on Earth,” Soranna said. “My village—we always just called it the village—is on another world. You can only get there through a book that my master keeps hidden.”

“Wait a minute,” Isaac said. “I never heard of humans coming from any world but Earth.”