Karmen moved to the side table and lifted the cloth covering the object that had been sitting there since they entered the room. Lucid had noticed it when they came in and had been deciding whether to ask about it. It was the size of a child, roughly, dressed in a fitted dark garment, its surface somewhere between ceramic and metal, its face constructed with a precision that was uncomfortable to look at directly.
"It is from Everlight," Karmen said. "A research team, originally. The lead researcher fled to us after the Everlight authorities decided her work was more dangerous than useful. She has been operating out of Tyriana for eight months."
"What does it do?" Lucid asked.
"A better question is what it is," Karmen said. "It mimics the human psyche. Not appearance. Not movement. The psyche itself. The patterning, the response architecture, the way a person builds associations and shifts between registers. It is the first successful attempt at replicating that structure in a constructed form."
Lucid looked at the doll. The doll's eyes were closed. Or appeared to be.
"It is groundbreaking," Karmen continued. "The implications for medicine alone are significant. For governance. For education. The researcher has been working on the second iteration for the past three months and has solved most of the problems she encountered in the first."
"Turn it on," Lucid said.
Karmen pressed something at the back of its neck.
The doll's eyes opened. They were a flat grey that caught the room's light without reflecting it. It turned its head toward Lucid with a movement that was smooth and slightly too fast.
"Hello," Lucid said.
The doll regarded him for a moment. "You are shorter than I expected," it said.
Lucid's expression did not change. "I was not expecting anything from you."
"That is statistically unusual for someone who asked to have me activated," the doll said. "Most people have expectations. You may simply not be aware of yours."
"Can you stop doing that?"
"Doing what, specifically?"
"Talking like that."
"I am talking like this because this is how I process and convey information," the doll said. "If the delivery is uncomfortable, that discomfort is informative. You might consider what it is telling you."
Lucid looked at Karmen. Karmen was watching with an expression that was entirely too neutral to be accidental.
The doll turned its head toward Karmen. "He is about to say something dismissive," it said.
"I was not," Lucid said.
"You were leaning toward it."
"I do not lean."
"Physically, no. Rhetorically, frequently."
Lucid took one step toward the doll and the doll did not move, did not flinch, did not do anything except continue looking at him with those flat grey eyes, and he stopped himself because there was genuinely no outcome here that made sense, and the doll was right about that too, probably, and he was not going to give it the satisfaction of confirming it.
Karmen stepped forward and placed himself between Lucid and the construct with the calm efficiency of someone who had anticipated this specific moment. "That doll," he said, his voice carrying a quiet precision, "is worth enough to purchase your family. Extended family. The house they live in and the land around it. Do you understand what I am saying to you?"
Lucid stepped back.
He sat down.
Gerald appeared in the doorway carrying a tray with two cups on it. He set the tray on the table, placed a cup in front of Lucid, placed one in front of Karmen, and looked briefly at the doll.
"Nothing for you," Gerald said to the construct.
"I do not require anything," the doll said.
"Wonderful," Gerald said, and left.
Karmen looked at the doorway for a moment after Gerald disappeared through it, then turned back to the table. He reached out and pressed the back of the doll's neck again. The grey eyes closed. The room settled.
Karmen sat across from Lucid and set both hands flat on the table. The gesture was not aggressive. It was the gesture of someone establishing that they were going to say something and wanted the frame set before they said it.
Lucid waited.
"The mission," Lucid said.
Karmen shook his head once. "No."
"No new mission."
"No. That is not why I wanted you here." He paused. "The Starlight engine. You seem to have recovered it. Not just the engine. The entire train. The Lyle Dreams."
Lucid nodded slowly.
"That carriage has been lost for eleven years," Karmen said. "It was assumed destroyed. Its recovery is significant."
"How much," Lucid said.
Karmen tilted his head. "For what?"
"The train. Obviously. You think I am going to hand it back to you for free?"
Karmen's expression did not shift. "Walk me through your reasoning."
"I will walk you through everything I went through," Lucid said, leaning forward. "The red mountains. Freezing. S grade cold, which I did not know was a classification until I was already in it. My companion was in danger the entire time. Then Vex. The academy. Two separate attacks. Then the void. The narwhal."
"The narwhal," Karmen repeated.
"A narwhal. In the void. It came through the hull."
"That is not a standard void encounter."
"No. It was not. Then the epidemic. The social collapse in the south of Vex. The domain. All of it." He sat back. "I am calculating damages. That comes to approximately five diamond coins."
He muttered it quietly, running the numbers again with his eyes slightly unfocused.
"Five," he said again. "With a generous rounding. Actually." He stopped. His mouth closed. Then it opened again. "Six. Six diamond coins. I am on my way to being wealthy. Praise everything."
He stood up from the chair and drove his fist into the air.
'You do know that none of that money is yours,' Alice said inside him, her voice carrying the dry flatness of someone reporting a fact they had mentioned before and expected to mention again.
Karmen cleared his throat.
Lucid's fist came down. He sat back in the chair.
"There is a provision," Karmen said, "under the Reclamation Statutes of the Scattered Realms, specifically section twelve of the asset recovery framework, which establishes that any individual who recovers property belonging to a registered administrative body does so on behalf of that body. The individual is entitled to a finder's consideration, which is assessed and approved by the body in question."
"The body being you," Lucid said.
"The body being the office," Karmen said. "Not me personally."
"The office being under your authority."
"Procedurally, yes."
"So you."
Karmen did not respond to that directly. "The train belongs to the Tyriana administrative estate. It was commissioned, funded, and registered under that authority. Your recovery of it does not transfer ownership. It restores it."
"Fine," Lucid said. "Then what about my companions. Their suffering. Their injury. We never agreed to any of this. I did not sign a contract authorizing any of those encounters. You did not sign anything either. So by your own argument, you are not entitled to a thing."
Alice laughed.
It was a short sound, internal, carrying the warmth of someone who had genuinely not expected to be entertained. She said nothing else.
Lucid remembered the contract. The one he had drafted at some point during the early period, the one with the clauses that had seemed very precise at the time and that he had now described out loud as his contract, and he was aware that it had never been signed by anyone, including himself, and that mentioning it in this context was possibly the worst legal argument that had ever been made in this territory or any other.
"You are an actual," he started.
Karmen's eyes changed. Not his expression. The eyes themselves went from neutral to something that had nothing neutral in it.
Lucid stopped.
The room was quiet enough that the market sounds from outside came through faintly again.
"Lucid," Karmen said. His voice was the same volume it had been. It was not louder or slower or any of the things voices did when someone was trying to convey something. It was exactly the same, which made it worse somehow. "You seem to be forgetting something."
Lucid waited.
"Intruder of the Sacred Age," Karmen said.
The words landed the way they were meant to, which was clean and flat and without any particular drama, because they did not need drama to carry what they carried.
"You are entitled to nothing," Karmen said.
The teacup was in front of Lucid on the table. He had not touched it since Gerald put it there. The steam had stopped rising from it, which meant it had been there long enough for that to happen, which meant this conversation had been running longer than it felt like.