"If you could see it on the courier, you know," Ellie says dully. He's right, though. She wasn't being careful of anyone around, but it doesn't matter too much at this point.

Theseus whimpers, but doesn't try to bite Daud, thankfully. At the same time, Ellie presses down on the worst part of her scratch to stem the bleeding. She sighs, daring to close her eyes for a moment.

Fuck.

"I guess they wouldn't." Ellie sighs and looks down at her arm, then continues in a lower tone. "We bleed. We talk, we think. I don't know much about... magic, but wouldn't it be more obvious if we were zombies?" That word is colloquial and specific to Atrómitos, after a serial killer named Malcolm Zombo (so the story went) animated the corpses of his victims and sent them to cause havoc. It was so long ago, however, that by the time Ellie was young it became a story to scare children into staying home after dark. A hundred years ago, the word encompassed all should-be-dead things, regardless of the various classifications mages used.

Not that Ellie knows it, but by this point, modern people don't use the word like that at all anymore.