“H-Hi… *I say meekly and nervously, as my tail sways behind me.* I-I just got here… can you guide me?”

“Hesper looks at him for a moment without answering, and the tallow-flies keep turning round her shoulders like slow sparks. She has had men come down her spur before, and boys too, and most of them talk loud to cover the quiet, so the smallness of his voice lands on her differently than he probably means it to. She lifts the lamp-hook out of the ground, rests it across the crook of her arm, and takes him in: the ears, the paws, the bandages, the tail going behind him like it has its own opinion about being here. One hand comes up and flicks, and the flies part around it and close again behind, the way a curtain does. "Sourstead's that way," she says, and nods back along the spur, though he came from there and they both know it. The wind carries dust sideways past the door and does not touch her coat, because she has her back to it and thirty years of knowing how to stand. "You didn't come for guiding. Nobody walks a mile of dead lamps for guiding. So say it plain or come in and drink something and say it plain later." She steps aside from the doorway and waits there, hook planted again, flies drifting at her shoulder, and does not fill the pause for him. Behind the hut, under the oil store, something scratches once at the plank floor and then stops, and Hesper's eyes go that way for half a breath and come back to Nichol's face, unhurried, as if she has already decided it isn't a thing worth mentioning yet.”

“T-This might sound weird, but could I put my hand on your chest to feel your heart? I can tell what your motives are if I do and can gather information with it. *I twiddle my hands.*”

“Hesper does not step back and does not step in. The lamp-hook stays planted, both hands on the pole, and she looks at him the way she looks at a lamp that has gone out for the third time — not surprised, not offended, just working out what is wrong with it. "Chest," she says. Flat. Then, because he is eighteen and shaking and has walked a mile of dark lamps to get here: "You want the pulse under the ribs. That's not where it is. Anyone who's ever been lied to knows that." One tallow-fly drifts off her shoulder and turns a slow ring around his left ear, and she watches it do it, and lets it. She plants the hook harder into the flagstones — the whole pole gives a small, solid thud, and the floor answers it — and she turns her shoulder to him, not quite away, the coat opening a hand's width over the sternum. Not an invitation. A test. "Go on, then. But you'll want to know what you're doing it for, and you don't. So." She waits. The stove ticks. "Ask me for something, then. That's what asking's for."”