She opens her mouth to let it go. "Pleeeease?"

"Nobody wants me to have any fun," huffs Addy.

"Live with it," Jellybean advises.

"Harrumph. Well, tell me more about it, anyway, even if I can't have it."

"It's a universal language," he says, "I mean literally, our universe is written in it. Names are weird in it unless you borrow them from your native language; mine's—" he says the word. Self-Defining. "But most people's are at least twenty times that long."

"I want to know my name," says Addy, bouncing on her toes.

He rolls his eyes. "Get somebody who's less easily bored than me to figure it out. Try Cam, maybe."

"Aww, I bet he won't help," sighs Addy.

"Well, I hate figuring out names, so I'm not gonna help either."

"Maybe I should go to your world," she suggests.

"...yeah, don't do that," Jellybean says consideringly.

"Why not?"

"'Cause I bet you'd end up falling in with Iggy and then I'd have to kill you or something and I don't really wanna bother," he suggests.

"Iggy? Who's Iggy?"

"He's kind of a problem. His main deal is lying to people and offering them power so they'll do stuff for him and then killing them when he gets bored."

"If somebody killed me I'd turn up Downside, but come to think of it I'm not sure if Bella would bother to get me out at this point," muses Addy. "But if he's only lying about the power that'd be no fun, would it? I'd never get to play with anything he promised. So that's not a concern, is it?"

"He's a really good liar," says Jellybean.

"I could show up borrowing Maggie," suggests Addy.

Jellybean cracks up.

"You know what she does, right?"

"I can guess!"

"So there's that! Then d'you suppose I could go to your world?"

"I don't really give a shit," says Jellybean, "and I can't put you there myself, so why're you asking me?"

"Jane does what Golden says, Golden'll ask Cam, Cam'll ask you 'cause you've met me and he hasn't."