"Plus, there's no proof he was ever a baby," Lyra said, picking up the second Rosario stopped talking, feeling no real need to hold up at all. She breezed right past point one, because semantics were boring, and point two, because they'd covered it in depth before. "No proof any of them existed before they were like, twenty? I don't know why, though," she admitted, kicking out at a bottlecap someone had left on the path, watching it skitter off in front of her. But she felt too bad about leaving it, so jogged off track for a moment to pick it up.
"I'm just saying," she said, tossing the cap into the air and catching it as she returned to Rosario's side. "Maybe there's answers to be found in places outside directories and old newspapers and stuff. So I don't think it's really clones. But what if he is..."
Something else. Something not exactly human. Something new. Something ancient.
She couldn't say it. She couldn't say it. What the hell was her problem??
"I dunnooo," she whined, tossing the bottlecap into the nearest bin (it overshot badly, but struck the tree behind her target, and ricocheted perfectly back in.) "I just think the world's maybe a bit weirder than we think."
What have Avery said before she kicked him? That sometimes all people had was strength of conviction? God, she didn't even have that, right now. Lyra was so miffed at herself.