Nux watches her curiously, though he respects her enough to purposefully take no notice at all of the way she limps or the tiny hitch in her breath as she sits down. She is here to show him something; he masks his own discomfort, too, as he shifts painfully to look. Fortunately, his hands are undamaged, as agile as the day he first picked up a socket wrench. He takes the leaf from her with due caution, holding it by the stem and twisting it carefully back and forth in his fingers as he examines it. When she says scent, he gives it a sniff.

This is dead, and leaves are alive, she says. He tries to imagine it alive, maybe rippling in the wind like the shiny wire-grass. Fresh and clean aren't words that come up often in his part of the Citadel, so he looks around this room -- easily the cleanest place he's ever been -- and breathes in deep, though his ribs and Larry and Barry all complain at him for it. There they are, his old mates: shrunken with whatever they've given him, but never forgotten. Not worth thinking about, right now. He turns his attention back to the leaf.

"Do we have them in the green place here?" he asks, twisting it again. "Leaves? Trees? Grass? Or is it all in..." The other one. The one she wants to grow in the ruins of Valhalla.