This is a test, Paul thinks - thinks, doesn't know, and that's the core of the problem, isn't it? He hadn't understood how much he had relied on knowing, the extent to which he had assumed his ability to immerse and understand would hold true anywhere he went. The stranger is an opacity to him, his face so perfectly pleasant it has to be a mask, the brief glimpse of emotion a way to draw Paul out - but does it? Is it? If it is, does it matter?

"But that's it," Paul says, flexing his right hand, the one with his teethmarks on all four fingers down to the bone under the glove, "It's all of a piece, isn't it?"

He sinks into the chair with an exhaustion he uses to mask over pain, his head dipped and his messy hair falling in front of him. He rests his fingers on his knees in raised tents, feels Sophia quivering unseen at the back of his neck.

"Simple rituals any stranger could perform, binding them together, to this place," softly, softly, "Gifts and enticements of power. Radical physical alterations to disrupt the continuity of the self, the immediate embrace of a new community. It's all the same thing, the same purpose."

He looks up from under his eyelashes, still wary, but it's not all focused on the other man, not by halves: "So. Our intended domain?"