"...wow," says Liu. "I guess I... don't have a lot of space to judge?"

"--You absolutely have the space to judge my dad, he is way past the point where El's spell could do anything for him." 

Liu fidgets.

"Are you, like, concealing some other dark secret and worried we'll judge? I don't think we'll judge!"

"- no, just the one, but you've saved a lot of people and I was just trying to - lay groundwork for my little cousins, there's only a couple of them."

"--Liu, my powers are complete bullshit, of course I was saving more people with them! I could afford to! Mals recognize me as scarier than I am and don't attack me at all! I get mana from killing them! If you tried to sneak down to the lab after curfew and brew healing ointment to hand out like Christmas presents you would just die." 

"Yes, but I mean - if your dad knew you'd happen."

"Even if my dad knew how my powers would come out I don't think he could possibly have anticipated my personality. I mean, you're right that you shouldn't judge him in the unlikely fertility clinic scenario, but like, if he did, in fact, do something super evil to make me, that's bad."

Liu pets Xiao Xing quietly.

"You treat your mice well. I'm not, like, a vegetarian on the outside? And I can appreciate an ethical difference between, like, free-range meat and not that?"

"Mm."

"El, Aadhya, when do you guys want to try replacing the wall?" 

"Ugh, I don't know. When are the fewest seniors down in that area, since you're worried about them?"

"We should practice the steel thing in the shop first."

"We could practice in the shop and then once you've got it down we move on the wall when there aren't a lot of seniors around?"

"All right."

"Cool." 

Lucia goes down with them to the shop; she doesn't have a role in the actual wall-making, but she alternates prowling for mals (and seniors) with flipping through her Sanskrit flashcards. 

Plan A is that once the wall comes down she'll try to harvest as much argonet as she can; plan B, if it comes to it, is to fend off any seniors who would like for the new wall not to go up. 

El and Aadhya take several tries to get into the rhythm of the steel manufacture but then are giggling and doing it really smoothly.

Aaaaaaa the phase-change spell is so cool. Lucia bounces in enthusiasm. 

When the wall comes down, the argonet's head is even more gruesome than it was in life. Scavenger mals scurry away and out of sight when the light of the corridor illuminates their feast, but the ragged holes they left in the flesh of the dead creature give it an extra layer of the macabre. 

Also it smells bad. 

Aadhya wants bones, eyeballs, horns, claws, this one gland, scales...

"...Does it need to be a whole eyeball, or will vitreous fluid do?" she asks, inspecting the collapsed ruin of one of the argonet's eyes that some scavenger had been at. 

"It has plenty of eyes, I only want the intact ones."

"Yeah, fair enough." She starts cutting out intact eyes. "What I'm planning to do is to harvest as much as I can reach from here, and then try to see if it's possible to drag this any farther out--it's possible dislodging it at all will make it fall back down, so I'm not going to do that straight off, but I can't get at any claws from here."

"Yeah, I know we might not be able to get everything. It's a great haul even if all we get is stuff off the head. Ooh, teeth, I want teeth."

She sets the eyes she's cut out so far in a pile of orbs and trailing nerve and muscle, and then starts prying out teeth. "Man, these things are sharp," she says appreciatively, scoring one across a bit of flesh they don't need.