"I can't at this time distinguish 'made it' from 'bit it,' but I can distinguish either of those from 'eaten by maw-mouth.'"

"We weren't close or anything. I don't know if I'd under normal circumstances remember to look him up later," she shrugs. "- but as long as you're keeping a list -"

Nod nod. "And I do plan to leave eventually; people who'd be good to look up when I do are helpful." 

"As long as you're keeping a list, I had a sister who died when I was three."

"That is really excellent to know! What's her name?"

"Udaya. If you can get her back, maybe get my grandfather too - but in that order -"

She'll tell the whole story while she's braiding the Kareen-hair into something that can be used to stitch her shoe leather.

Kareen writes the whole thing down. 

"Thank you for letting me know," she says softly, when Aadhya is finished.

"You're welcome." The leather's done soaking. She gets her tongs and pulls it out and starts poking awl holes in it the edges of each piece.

It's probably for the best that that leather isn't her skin but she can't help but imagine if she had in fact handed Aadhya a pile of her own duplicated skin. Aadhya would have been creeped out, is what would have happened.

"Is working with eyes at all practical? They're so squishy and perishable."

"There's spells to do stuff with them, but that's one reason to stick mostly to your corneas."

But she likes her eye color that is a deeply petty complaint. 

"Are corneas not also squishy and perishable?"

"Yes but they retain more of their nature if they're dried out and stiffened up a bit. You can petrify an eyeball but it's somewhat departing from the eyeball concept, a cornea is still basically a lens after."

"Oh, I see. That makes sense." She is absolutely going to make things with whole eyeballs but it might require some experimenting and there's nothing wrong with providing corneas as a nice reliable staple meanwhile. 

"If you could make something that was still your cornea but huge," Aadhya says, gesturing, "maybe it'd make a good scrying bowl..."

"Oooooooh. I think I could do that, since the velcro worked."

She pulls out a giant cornea. It is still squishy and easily misshapen. 

Aadhya can fix that! She gets it curing, puts it in her pocket dimension for safekeeping, and resumes shoe work.

And at dinner Kareen hands out care packages to various artificers. 

Artificers are delighted, of course.

And when El shows up, Kareen says, “feel free to tell me to bugger off if I’m overstepping, but did you ever find out what was going on with your great-grandma?”

"...she's... she's a really strong diviner.

"He decided that - if Mum didn't get out with me - he'd find his way back into the school, and make that - not worth her while. So she couldn't steer to save her grandson without saving Mum and me. And I guess she couldn't see a way to do both. So Mum got out with me and he didn't. But he won. I guess."

"Kareen, he's eighteen, I -"

“…Sounds awkward. You’re, I’m guessing seventeen?”

"Yeah. He's not exactly eighteen but he's basically eighteen and it's weird."

“It sounds so weird. My papa is closer to my age than Dad’s but that’s because Dad’s coming up on a quarter millennium so it’s never been more than mildly odd to think about.”

"He's - nice, though. He's trying to be helpful, he's giving me spells and stuff."

“It was obvious even to me that he cared about you a lot.”