[For him, multitasking mushrooms with this is a fabulous distraction. He focuses on that, at first, instead of on answering: clipping them near the base one by one, with his too-big knife, making neat and precise little cuts and then dropping each one into a basket according to type. It's soothing in its repetition. It gives him something to look at that isn't Fujimaru while she's discussing the fate of his . . .

Not friends. They hadn't really been. It'd been complicated. They probably wouldn't have mourned him, if he'd been killed in Russia the way he should've been.

But—

Anyway. Kadoc watches his hands, snipping stems.]

. . . The Lostbelts are all Lostbelts for a reason. They're all desperate. They're all dead ends. Just like this world we're in now. . . . Don't get me wrong, I didn't really care about the Yaga. Nothing I did had anything to do with them at all. But I did believe they stood a chance if they could get one. They felt like . . . a people who had what it'd take to succeed, if they hadn't had to use it all up just on surviving another day instead. It was a whole Maslow situation. You know Maslow, right?

[None of this has anything to do with Ophelia or Akuta. But what would he say that did, that felt right, needed, appropriate?]