As the shutters lifted for the night, Cormia was very busy.

Sitting cross-legged on the Oriental rug in her bedroom, she was fishing around in a crystal bowl of water, chasing peas. The legumes were hard as pebbles when Fritz brought them to her, but after they soaked for a while, they became soft enough to use.

When she’d captured one, she reached to the left and took a toothpick from a little white box that read, in red English letters, SIMMONS’S TOOTHPICKS, 500 COUNT.

She took the pea and pushed it onto the end of the pick, then took another pea and another pick, and did the same until a right angle was formed. She kept going, creating first a square, and then a three-dimensional box. Satisfied, she bent forward and attached it to one of its brethren, capping off the final corner in a four-sided base structure about five feet in diameter. Now she would go upward, building floors of the latticework.

The picks were all the same, identical slices of wood, and the peas were all alike, round and green. Both reminded her of where she was from. Sameness mattered in the Chosen ’s nontemporal Sanctuary. Sameness was the most important thing.

Very little was alike here on this side.

She’d first seen the toothpicks downstairs after the meals, when the Brother Rhage and the Brother Butch would take them out of a slender sliver box as they left the dining room. For no good reason, one evening she’d taken a number of them on her way back to her room. She’d tried putting one in her mouth, but hadn’t liked the dry, woody taste. Not sure what else to do with them, she’d laid out the picks on the bedside table and arranged them together so that they formed shapes.