"And now you're worried that if you made my mother worse he'd want to have people around you all the time and you'd be unhappy like I am?"

"I'm wondering. I need to be alone sometimes too. I can manage with just sleeping, if I had to, because I can lucid dream, but I wouldn't like it; and you don't even have that."

"What is that?"

"Oh - you don't have to be a subtle artist to learn it, maybe you could pick it up, but you'd need to actually sleep to practice. You learn to tell when you're dreaming and then you can control what happens in the dream."

"I want to learn that."

"...I'm not sure how to tell you how to do it because the two usual ways of practicing checking whether you're in a dream or not are making sure text stays the same if you look at it and away and back, and doing the same thing with something that keeps time. You'd have to find something there's consistently a lot of around you, which behaves funny in dreams consistently."

"Ripples in water?"

"I don't know, might work or not. But let's say it's the right kind of thing; you make sure you always double-check any rippling water near you, and eventually you're so much in the habit that you do it in your dreams too, and it'll look different and dreamy. And when you've done that enough then you actually notice, and go, 'wait, this is a dream'. And then you might wake up, but eventually you sleep through it and you can get whatever you want to happen in the dream once you know it is one."

"That's really exciting! I won't be able to try it for ages because usually when something is really exciting I don't sleep."

"That seems counterproductive when the exciting thing is about sleep, but you do the starting practice when you're awake anyway."

"Right! I'll just look at lots of water." He races over to examine the fountain.

Bella giggles. "You all done with me for now?"

"Do you have more lessons? I can sit if we're doing more lessons."

"We've been speaking in Pax this entire time," she points out. "You've figured out letter-sound correspondence well enough that most of what's left is going to be vocabulary. I guess I could explain punctuation."

"The dots at the end of thoughts?"

"There's more kinds, but the dots at the end of sentences are the most common ones in textbook style writing."

"What else?"

So she explains other kinds of punctuation. And bullet points and number-and-letter outlines like what he would have seen in the table of contents.

And then he quizzes her on vocabulary.

"Okay." He does not look happy.

"Do you want a hug before I go?"

"Yes."

She scoops him up - he's so little! - and gives him a hug.

He rather clings to her.