Nancy ignores the perch entirely, in favour of landing on the ground bird-walking all over the floor. Pigeons aren't parrots. Perches don't really feature in their worldview. There's just 'things they walk and sit on sometimes', which tends to include most things in the world.

Matthew, meanwhile, is silent for a moment.

"Are you going to tell me that she lied, then?" he says quietly. "She wasn't the only one to say it was you, you know. You...you made them die..." Despite themselves, their voice catches.

He never went to moebius. They escaped that particular hell. But it features in their nightmares, all the same. And even more so since the Floor, when it became all too easy to imagine death after death after death, except instead of coming back to a cold table in a morgue they'd be under the ground, web walls pressing in around them in the darkness with nothing but Altair's flickering life sign on their senses...

...but no, he's not alone. Not in the Floor. He can sense Nancy's life, clear and strong, and he clings to it like a lifeline.

"You made them come back," they whisper.

He made them come back.