Mielikki Neith had expectations of this room. She believed she would find answers here, and she will: there is no doubt of that now. What she had not done, she realises now, is imagined it. She had not considered what it would look like, what shape her answers might take—but if she had, it would not have been this. She might have imagined a magician’s laboratory, all hung with stuffed bats and with rows of strange organs in glass jars; or she might have thought of a study full of notes and coloured strings of consequence and causation. She might have populated the room in so many different ways. But never like this.