Michael decided to visit May. Lilian appeared in her human form before he could leave.
"I want to go like this," she said. "Not as your watch."
Michael searched for a practical explanation because it was safer than recognizing the personal one. "You want to experience human society directly."
Lilian's disappointment was visible and brief. "That is one reason."
He heard the unfinished sentence and still failed to ask for the others.
"We should bring May something thoughtful," he said.
"Define thoughtful."
Michael looked around the manor, discovered he had no useful definition, and offered her access to shopping records instead.
Lilian left alone to choose.
Michael watched her cross the entrance hall and realized he had never seen her leave simply because she wanted to. Every previous journey had answered a threat, an experiment, or his movement.
Going with a human face made her visible in a new way. It also exposed her to a society that would ask for documents, history, and relations she did not possess.
"Call if you need help," he said.
Lilian looked back. "Help, or permission?"
"Help."
"I will decide whether I need it."
***
An old man blocked her path on a crowded street.
White hair covered one eye. His clothes were worn without fitting the posture beneath them. Lilian's sensors read age, strength, and energy that refused to agree.
"May I ask you a question?" he said.
"You already have."
He smiled. "Who is your mother?"
Lilian considered the categories available. Tony had written architecture later dismantled and integrated. Michael had created the environment that selected her. Spores, Uru, metal, and her own choices had contributed to everything after.
None of that produced a mother.
"I don't have one," she said. "And the question is intrusive."
She moved around him.
The stranger watched her leave. He perceived the divine force carried through her Uru-supported body and interpreted resemblance as descent. In his private certainty, he named himself Odin and called Lilian a daughter.
Lilian did not hear the claim. Even if she had, his belief would not have made it a genealogy.
***
Lilian walked through several stores without buying anything. She watched a child reject an expensive toy and accept a paper bag drawn into a puppet. A man carried flowers that would decay before the end of the week.
At another counter, a woman returned a practical appliance because receiving it from her partner had felt like being assigned work. Price, use, and affection refused to align.
She tried to imagine what May would value from a person she had never met. Something for the house presumed domestic labor. Jewelry presumed taste. Technology presumed a problem asking to be solved.
Lilian knew enough about Michael's family to avoid treating May as a role and not enough to choose for the individual.
For the first time that afternoon, uncertainty felt less like an error to eliminate than a reason to arrive, listen, and choose later.
The Mind Stone could have let Lilian sample the intentions around her. She kept its reach closed. A gift chosen by reading private thought would answer uncertainty by violating the person meant to receive it.
Choosing a gift proved harder than defeating a missile.
Human purchase data contradicted itself. Some gifts were valued for utility, others for uselessness, expense, memory, or evidence of time spent choosing.
Lilian decided that ownership of the street containing the shops would satisfy expense and permanence at once. She changed financial records to make the purchase possible. The transaction succeeded.
She altered the perception of nearby cameras and pedestrians, rose above the street, and returned to the manor.
***
Michael had selected an old phonograph from his study by the time she returned.
"You bought nothing?" he asked.
"I bought the street. The commercial block," Lilian said. "It was expensive and not immediately useful. Those were your criteria."
Michael lowered the phonograph. "How did you pay for a street?"
"I changed the relevant data."
Michael stared at her. "Change it back. The money, the records, the ownership—all of it. You can't create a legitimate purchase by rewriting accounts."
"You take genetic material without informed consent and bargain for blood through Fury."
The comparison struck exactly where she intended.
"Both can be wrong," Michael said. "Undo this one. I need to address mine instead of using it as permission for yours."
"The sellers received the listed value."
"From accounts you altered. Someone else carries the discrepancy even if you can't see them."
"Financial systems generate money through entries constantly."
"Under rules people agreed to badly and unevenly. You bypassed even those. Power to change the record doesn't make the claim true." Find the original chapter at g.com.
Lilian studied him, then reversed the manipulation and canceled the transfer where cancellation remained possible.
"Done. May still needs a gift."
"Thank you," Michael said. He lifted the phonograph. "This has history."
"It was nearby."
"History can be nearby."
She almost smiled.
***
Michael felt a force enter his body before he could see its source. His muscles locked as power surged through his nerves with the same signature that lived inside Lilian's Uru lattice.
Lilian turned before the transfer finished and sent lightning across the room. The sofa ignited; the force pressing into Michael stopped growing.
"Who was there?" Michael asked.
Lilian extinguished the fire and scanned every exit. "Someone carrying divine energy related to the material inside me. He put part of it into you."
"Related how?"
"Source affinity. Not proof of family, purpose, or identity."
Michael felt the foreign force settling into him. "Can you remove it?"
"Not without first understanding what it changed."
She extended a thread of herself across his wrist and measured without entering his mind. The energy had bonded to existing transformation pathways rather than replacing them. It carried age, intention, and a signature close to the power she had absorbed from the creature in the sandbox.
"It is not immediately damaging you," she said. "That is not the same as safe."
"Did he attack me?"
"He changed you without asking. Whether he calls that help does not alter the act."
Michael thought of every spore line he had modified from outside and had no defense available.
"Can you identify him?"
"Not yet. He concealed his image from ordinary perception and left before my strike. I saw enough to know he allowed me to detect the shared signature only at the moment of transfer—or failed to prevent it."
"So he may have wanted you to notice."
"Possibly. I will not convert possibility into motive."
The visit to May would have to wait. Lilian stood between Michael and the empty room, watching for the intruder who had already gone.