One didn't.
He stayed like that for a few seconds, jaw tight. Then the stillness went out of him all at once, and he breathed out through his nose, almost a laugh.
"A recording," he said. "I'll grant you that one. I believed something close to it myself, for a time."
He looked down at his own hands and turned them over, studying the backs, then the palms.
"When I left my home after putting out the last of my kind, I carried nothing that was mine. His voice. His appetites. His conviction that existence was a ladder and he'd been born on its highest rung. I took all of it, because there was nothing else to take." He closed his fingers slowly. "And then I went further than he ever had the courage to go. He spent his entire life inside a single species, Noah. Thousands of years arranging humans like furniture, and calling the arrangement a kingdom. He never once lifted his eyes long enough to wonder what might be watching from beyond the walls of his little house."
His eyes came up.
