do you want to know a secret?

All Melia had to go on, with respect to Linada, was the manifest confidence overflowing from all the Machina around her - as much as Machinas' anything ever overflowed, in her brief observation.

How slow they aged. How steady they walked.

Did they cry, she wondered? Did they get aggravated, sometimes to the point of having to explode?

Well, obviously some of them did, because the Bionis had been under mutual siege.

But Linada was a doctor. Melia had never liked to tell doctors such things, yet now...

She felt as if the clinical touch might be just what she needed.