She laughs again, but deeper down, something isn’t sitting easy with her. The cadence of his words is wrong. The rhythm, the syllabic choice, all of it plays like someone sight-reading a song perfectly when they’ve never heard it before. Everything he says and does could be characteristic of Siebren de Kuiper, but the tempo is wrong.

But it has to be him. No one could fake that melody.

Has Moira’s tampering just altered him that fundamentally?

“You are much too solid to be any bird that I have seen. And you smell much too nice to be a Cliff Strider,” she jokes, not wanting there to be too much dead air between them while she thinks.