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“I’m not brown. I wonder what dictates our colours,” Malcolm muses.

"I never thought about that." Huh.

"Let me get something to spread below the door and catch things." With the water lowered, most of her blankets and towels are down in the grotto instead of needing to stay safely dry on the balcony, so Ulla heads down the slope of sand.

"...Are we going to drop things?" Malcolm asks curiously, turning to see where she goes.

"Some of what I scrape off the door, we can reuse," she calls softly over her shoulder, and she'll be back with a cotton blanket to spread below the door to catch pearls and shells and stones.

He looks at the mural with wide eyes, then looks at her almost disbelieving.

“We’re scraping it off?”

"I told you, there's no room left for anything new. I have to redesign it to add Will." She purses her lips. "It's alright. I leave most of my art alone. But people aren't static. Our lives change. And if I want the most personal piece of art I have here to reflect that, sometimes that means remaking it. I'll pull it apart, and then put it back together."

"But... didn't it take you a long time?" Malcolm asks.

"Is time a scarce commodity on the Barge?" Ulla counters. "I need projects, especially with Taylor down again."

"I guess not." He pauses, looks at the mural again. "Do you have a picture of this version?"

The question surprises her, and Ulla tilts her head. "It's never occurred to me to take pictures of anything. We don't have those, where I come from. Sildroher don't have technology, or even written language. I have a good memory and I visualize things well. That's always had to suffice."

Malcolm takes out his phone, snaps a picture and then puts his phone back in his pocket.

"There you go." He smiles. "How do we take the pieces down?"

"I'll sing them down. You can help me and Hjerte sort them, if you'd like." Speaking of Hjerte, he's going to emerge from Ulla's satchel, where he's been chilling since she set it down on the sand, and help her spread the blanket.

"Hello, Malcolm," says the octopus in a warm baritone.

"Hi Hjerte," Malcolm replies, sitting crosslegged on the ground in front of the blanket. "I bet you can sort things four times more quickly than I can."

Hjerte laughs indulgently, and as Ulla starts quietly singing a wordless tune, he'll reply, "I also have more practice at it. She keeps singing supplies for mosaics when we get bored."

"I'll try and keep up a reasonable amount," Malcolm assures him. He sits down on the floor, watching the wall while Ulla sings.

Ulla will join them in sorting even while she finishes singing, pearls and shell and stone dropping to the blanket she's spread as a dropcloth. Some of her notes are a bit rough and abrasive, which is only fitting as they scrape the surface of the door clean.

Then she grins at them both for a second before her design consultation. "What do you think, Hjerte? Warren sitting above the pool, and Will laying below it? Maybe I'll put you on the door too. You can help balance out James symmetrically, if I have his goose on one side and an octopus on the opposite. His graduation gave you to me, so that feels appropriate. And Jasper's in the pool, so he'll be beside Will, also fitting."

Hjerte chuckles. "If you like. It did feel a little unbalanced since you added James, but you know you're bound to add someone else eventually, whether you like it or not. That's part of why Warren left you here."

Malcolm frowns faintly, but it's a frown of curiosity, not displeasure.

"Who's Jasper? Why is it fitting for him to be with Will?"

Ulla laughs. "We both use names from different breaches for him. Harkin for the breach where he was Will's brother, Jasper for the breach where he was mine."

"Oh, right. I know Will calls him Harkin. I didn't realize... Do you think it's weird that I just call him by... his name from here? Well. We've never been anything in a breach so I guess it's normal."

"He told me after the breach, when I slipped and called him Jasper, that the name the Admiral calls him was given to him by people who couldn't pronounce his actual name. And that it represents the worst part of him. I'm fairly certain he'd rather be called Harkin, like Will calls him, instead."

Ulla's hands pause, and she looks up at Malcolm as she adds, "He doesn't consider his names in breaches less his than any other name he's had."

“Well… but…. Why wouldn’t he just say so? Should I ask him about it? I’m not sure it feels right to just call him Harkin when I’m not really… part of that,” Malcolm muses, working through it outloud. “Not without an invitation.” A pause. “Maybe I should ask Will.”

"Because he doesn't bring it up. I didn't know until after that breach offered an alternative. Even then, I had to press a little to find out which he preferred. At first he just said that Jasper wasn't wrong, it was still him." He didn't volunteer a preference until she asked a very direct question.

"I don't know how freely Jasper will answer if you ask him. But I do think it's a safe assumption that Harkin is better than Sweeney. The name from pretty much any breach would most likely be better, but Harkin seems simplest, given Will."

"Because I'm kind of... an accessory to Will," Malcolm suggests. "For him, I mean."

"No," Ulla says. "You aren't anyone's accessory. And if that's what you thought I meant by inviting you, you're wrong. He wouldn't... call you family and then look at you like an object. Neither would I."

She huffs out a breath, then adds, "It's simplest because presumably Will is the person you'd wind up talking to most often. But I've heard some people call him Red, and that's probably good too. You could use Jasper, but pretty much no one except me and perhaps Florian uses that, so it leads to questions, like yours. I think Sweeney might be his least favorite of all the names he's had, so any of those ought to be a significant improvement. If you do decide to ask him, keep it simple and direct."

He considers that thoughtfully. Then he looks up at her. "Give me an example of what you mean by 'simple and direct'," he requests, because when people give him instructions that subjective, he tends to get them wrong.

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