The behaviour was a marked difference to what Solomon had come to expect from someone wearing that face. It was amusing and faintly baffling at once.

"It's something of a complicated circumstance," he said, holding out a hand toward a short wall between two stalls, one with enough room for the bicycle so they weren't in the way of the crowd. "I presume people have explained Asti and the planes of Life, Death and Dreaming to you," he continued as he sat, "but the metaphysical waters in which Asti swims are a river which runs between planes and universes. That means anyone can be drawn into it, from any point in time. I have a colleague from my universe who is four years ahead of my present day, and therefore remembers things I haven't yet experienced."

He inclined his head toward the youth. "I've known someone here who looks like you. I took a chance that you might be a version of him from a different time." And mentality, and power, and ... everything else, but even so.