"Did you ever look in on the 'you' that you were?" Lodi asks.

Orin threads syllables and concepts together, tilts her head at him while she thinks.

They meet like this sometimes—at restaurants, on rusty rooftops—for, fool as he is, she feels some duty yet to try to give him what she can. He's here because she quit, after all, his bosons poured into the gap she left in the Nine's universe. The least she can do is share what remains of her molting.

"I know who I was," Orin tells him. "I know what I lost. That alone outpaces many Guardians. But that isn't what you mean."

Lodi shakes his head. He's desert-reverent. "When the wind is right, when the cosmic dust is in my lungs, I'm still the 'me' that I was five years ago, ten years ago. The past isn't gone."

Atemporality. Orin tastes it blueberry-and-resin, swallows it bitter. The strain of comprehension, let alone the length of arm to reach it, comes Nine-given. Inhuman.

"It's not much," Lodi says. "And I'm not lost. It's just—"

"Sometimes," says Orin, her tongue like lead, "you thread the holes in the paper."

"Yes." Lodi tilts his head back. All Orin can see is his glowing eye, cyan the color of the holes in four-dimensionality. Softly he says, "It's all still there."

And Orin does not tell him that this is never how it was for her.