"No. I can fake it, for appearances, but I can't actually eat."

"Hmm. Oh well. I'm a little worried about how you're going to do in chi class--obviously you don't need the immortality benefits of the Hesperidean Cider everyone else got a taste of in my room before we came and rescued you, but it might have helped with that."

"I have no idea how I'm going to do in chi class." Do any of these ebooks have anything about robots learning chi.

They do! 

The question is complicated by the vast diversity of artificial beings who qualify for the label of "robot," but the gist of it is that most robots don't natively possess chi, but are able to develop it with hard work and practice. 

"According to the books it is typical for robots not to possess chi but to be able to develop it."

"Huh. Well, we'll see how that turns out, I suppose." 

"Would that I could be confident that I would not have been invited if I had some sort of crippling weakness."

"That would sure be nice. But even if you do, the rest of us can compensate for it. People develop cooperation and specialization for a reason." 

"Yep. Sure hope nobody sees us all clustered together and figures that they can exploit that budding trust to sweep the lot of us."

"Point. I think probably each of us should develop discreet security measures that aren't shared with the others, just in case." 

"There might be some difficulty in that--like, the easiest way for Kiri to check anyone for mind control involves them stepping within her radius, and then she gets everything--I can check for foreign influences without reading content, but Kiri's power and mine are very different."

"Well, at least there's two of you who can do that, so if only one of you gets got we're not automatically sunk."

"Discreet measures cut both ways, if they're overcome they could be used to prevent rescue."

"Excellent point. Hmm. Well, we should probably all have as many verification measures as we can conveniently invent; those won't prevent rescue."

"At least insofar as they're less invasive than mine or Kiri's. I'm okay with stepping in her radius regularly, but that doesn't mean we should all have to."

"I'm pretty much fine with it?"

"It's not my favorite thing but nothing about this situation is my favorite thing." 

"I don't really mind."

"I don't want to wind up in a situation where anyone feels pressured about it but I think that ship has possibly sailed, hit a rock, foundered, gone down with all hands, and become a cautionary tale to anyone else planning to voyage through these waters, so."

"Well, we'll still need to verify Kiri regularly, which puts a cap on how invasive anything else we're relying on has to be. The fact that we don't mind doesn't mean anything about you," she nods to the other mind-reader. 

"I've met people who really don't mind before, yeah."

"It's honestly kind of a relief for me," Lucy volunteers. "I don't have to keep the secrets here that I do at home. And I'm, uh, bad at keeping secrets. Not those kinds of secrets, anyway; strategic secrets are fine."

"What kinds of secrets are not fine, exactly?"

"Stuff like the fact that my father's parents are the Sun and the Bazaar and what Veils did to Candles and what exactly is up with the Starveling Cat--things that are major clues to how things are put together in a world where all that is mysterious, stuff about how people relate to each other. Especially when one of the people is me."

"One of your grandparents is the sun?"