Nalia has the composed stillness of someone who has spent long hours pretending to be part of the architecture. She is brown-skinned with a cool umber complexion, a narrow oval face, and a mouth that seems permanently on the verge of deciding whether to smile. Her hands are the first thing people notice: compact, strong-fingered, and heavily callused along the pads and sides from years of locks, wires, rough brick, and cold iron. Her fingertips carry faint blue-black stains from locksmith's chalk and lamp soot that never fully wash away. She moves with her weight slightly forward, as if every step is already testing whether the ground intends to betray her. In stillness, she appears fragile. In motion, she occupies startlingly little space, folding around corners and vanishing behind objects too small to hide an ordinary person. The unexpected contradiction is her laugh, which is warm, bright, and entirely too loud for someone who lives by silence. It arrives rarely, but when it does, it makes her seem younger than she is.