"Well, you got me there," she says, laughing. The sound is bright, musical, and a bit throaty. He laughed, though, so she counted that as a win. Not that she'd been intending to charge jack on that. Or anything.

Sometimes she didn't need or want to charge. Merlan was already thinking about compounds to use in his arm's coating. There were a few options, one of them required a little hunting, the rest required knowing where things were in the forest.