"It's not your fault. Don't worry about it."

Meanwhile, of course, Atsinni can see into Luka's soul.

It'd be much more exciting if it were going to last. Luka is bored. Luka is always bored. Luka is constitutionally incapable of not being bored. It'd at least be something new, to see what someone else would do with his life, and this seems like a safer way to achieve that than tulpamancy and a better way to achieve that as opposed to some different thing than taking on an indenture. And realistically if he were indentured he'd get sick of it and stab his boss like he has done to three of the last fifteen bosses he's had, whereas that's not a risk here, for better or worse.

He's between times in his life when he has important secrets. Little Alexandra who asked him not to tell anyone about her crush got over being embarrassed about it after less than a century. The secret paths he used to make it out of the hell he landed in when he died have saved as many as they ever will and been discovered. The plans he and his friends worked on centuries ago have come to fruition; the codes they used to pull them off are obsolete. The backdoors he knows into important databases have probably been patched in the years since he last checked. Doubtless there are people up to very interesting things in New Jerusalem but he hasn't yet gotten them to trust him. He vaguely plans to do something more about all the hells at some point, but as long as his plans stay vague it's fine to have someone see them in his mind.

He thinks he has some idea what's up with the Yeerks. They have a humanlike-or-close-enough sense of what they should be, or they're afraid of human-scale threats, and so just existing by themselves is unacceptable. Their own society is terrible even to its own citizens; it's likely their species doesn't have empathy at all, in the sense of feeling others' pain. However scrupulously fair New Jerusalem might try to be about not taking their other options away, it doesn't help much if those other options already suck. And Luka wasn't at the top of the list. There were people ahead of him who were less volatile, who were more likable, who had lower opportunity costs, who expected to like the experience for more reasons than just that it's new and strange. He's close to the option of last resort. So whatever Jess has seen so far has made her pessimistic about the possibility of making friends with Yeerks. He expects they were probably intelligently and maliciously designed.

He's not judging them, though. Lots of humans would have an implicit next step, at this point, of being mad at Yeerks in general, or contemptuous of them, or disgusted. He doesn't. He thinks Yeerks are probably hard to get along with, and that's purely information about what he can expect other people to do and say. For his own part he's just interested and excited. (He's always excited. He's constitutionally incapable of not being excited. Seems to be of a piece with the boredom, somehow.)

It occurred to him at some point to wonder how to be polite to the other host, but getting an answer would be logistically nontrivial and anyway it seems much more important to instead get him some space to breathe and make his own decisions than to say exactly the right thing.

It would have been stupendously expensive for his whole life to have been a trick or an illusion, he's pretty sure. He's been staying in New Jerusalem for a combination of the kink scene and the altruist scene and the skyscrapers, and he's pretty confident it's a basically nice place for the sort of person who thinks it sounds like it might be a nice place; he's been to several countries on Earth, and to the Bastion (another afterlife, an objectively huge but still claustrophobic cave system home to billions of people), and to this mostly empty jungle plane, and several hells, and the Dead Republic. He's currently shaped for a vacation he was thinking of taking on Earth - maybe America, maybe China, maybe even Europe, he hadn't decided yet - so he had his wings taken off and the rest of his body stretched a bit, from the flying angel shape he had before this one; before that he tried being a woman; before that he tried being a sea creature. It's gotten much, much easier and less painful to do that kind of thing in the past century or so but he's been experimenting longer than that. He knows a lot about body modification. He knows a lot about a lot of things, really. He's not one of the really old people, the ones who remember when not a single word had ever been spoken, but in recent centuries more and more of the people he meets are surprised he's even as old as he is.

And he has a bit of magic. Not as much as Sara. They've been hoping to find out if it answers only to the soul it was granted to or if aliens can take advantage of it.

Wow.

What's the magic do?

He can go between planes but not between arbitrary pairs of them and only in one direction (there's a standard model of planes as having heights, and it's much easier to move down than up), and it's exhausting. He can shift incoming appearances away from a place he wants to protect, but not very far. He can do a little bit of healing, more than enough for a papercut but not enough to be more than a party trick in most circumstances. He has a trick for sterilizing small quantities of things but this, too, is exhausting. He has a trick for extending his senses, but not very far and not through walls or vacuum. He can make himself more silent than a living creature should be. He can in conjure things but this, too, is exhausting, and there's a weight-per-time limit such that particularly large feathers are more than he can manage in a day - so, more than enough to spark an epidemic, not even close to enough to keep people fed. It feels like he flies better than he should be able to but he can't lift things with his mind intentionally in any other context so maybe he just designed his wings very well.

Atsinni is going to try the sense-extending thing.

Nope!

Also, Luka is done being patient and quiet and waiting to see what happens. <Well? Like what you see?> This is a flirting script but only because there isn't a contextually appropriate script for talking to mind control aliens. He attempts to make an associated facial expression but not with any particular concern for whether he succeeds or not.

Atsinni is not letting him have the face at the moment. <Yeah, you're interesting. I can't use your magic.>

He starts trying more things just to see how disconcerting it feels to fail at them.

<Interesting how?>

<You're old and you've traveled a bunch and tried a lot of things, it's not more than I can sift through but it's still kind of a lot to digest.>

<Did you get the gustatory metaphor from me or from your culture or did you make it up yourself? How much would be too much? Do you have more of my memories than your own?>

<From you, and I don't know if anybody's ever found a limit, and yes I do.>

<How do you know you're you instead of me? Do your memories feel different?>

<Yeah, I access them differently. Plus the whole having a different personality thing.>

<What happens if you try showing me some of yours?>

Meanwhile Sara brings over a bottle of water for Atsinni's usual host.

<I can't just do that, I'd have to tell you about them like we're doing now.>

That is extremely disappointing. He half-consciously tries to huff about that and maybe stretch while he's at it.

<Do you come with any upside.>

<...company? I dunno how you things stand being alone in your heads all the time, frankly.>

<I like myself, and I like things that aren't people at all. Do you genuinely not know or are you just expressing that I'm alien to you?>

<I mean, I can remember you doing it, but it doesn't translate into being able to imagine putting up with it myself.>

Atsinni's usual host, meanwhile, tries to take some water to rinse his mouth and discovers that it makes him gag. Plain water never used to, before, but now he just keeps thinking of everything Atsinni's done with him, and the distant disconnected sense of not being there, not being anywhere, not being real. And now here he is in Atsinni's body and he'd give it away in a heartbeat if he could just leave.

There's no reason to think he knows how his words will relate to anyone's choice to give him back to Atsinni or not, anyway. Or maybe he just wants to think that because he can't bring himself to say either yes or no.

"If you have a plan to destroy Hell, you should do that, and if you don't, you should come up with one, and then you should decide what to do with me based on what will make it easier to destroy Hell, and if I had any preferences besides that I wouldn't tell you."

"I'm sorry." Sara looks at Luka and, more relevantly, Atsinni. "You still want this one?"

"- yes! I did tell you!"

"Well. Here he is, I guess. Can I talk you into writing down everything he remembers that might be strategically relevant?"

"What, about Hell? Sure -" He's already marching Luka over to go ear-to-ear again.