Neal isn't a spy. He's not a Shuos, he wasn't raised to espionage or shaped to serve it. But he has been a con man, thief, pickpocket, and cat burglar for more than twenty years.

So when Jedao pulls his laundry out of the dryer, he will find everything in the load freckled with a small--though not as small as the amount left in Malcolm's drawer--amount of glitter. Weirdly, there's very little sticking to the sides of the machine. A sparse amount of investigation will show the source seems to be a drier sheet, one that was lightly dampened and then dipped in glitter before being tossed into the midst of his still-wet clothes.

"You know, John and I do keep an inventory on art supplies," Neal says, from where he's leaning against a nearby wall, a book now tucked under one arm. "And I am absolutely assiduous about accuracy."