"Forgive her," Raven said pleasantly, his voice carrying warm and even toward Frau Müller across the hall. "She's sensitive."
Frau Müller stood at her pillar.
Her face was turned toward the voices. The attending, full-sensory quality of it — the stillness of a woman whose entire architecture for experiencing the world was running at full capacity, cataloguing, classifying, assembling.
She had assembled enough.
Not everything. But enough that the classification was in progress and the edges of the model were already warm with the shape of what was being concluded.
"I heard that," she said. Quiet. The careful, precise quality of it. "Before. She said she was fine."
"She's always fine," Raven said. The same warm, conversational register. "She simply has strong opinions about where her body goes."
Veronica pressed her forehead into the wall.
