"Until you're fourteen."

"How old are you?"

"Twelve."

Tarinda nods. She doesn't volunteer her age. She flips through the dictionary.

Eliko and the old man continue their conversation on rhetoric. The vocabulary is probably a little beyond Tarinda yet.

It's very helpful on advanced grammar, though. And it's distracting from her odd behavior with the dictionary. Flip flip flip.

After a while, another customer comes in and the old man goes to help them.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm looking at this dictionary."

"Why?"

"I have a thing that can remember it and remind me how to say things."

"That sounds useful."

"It is!"

"Is it part of what you're going to build?"

"The thing I have knows how to build the thing."

"What else can it do?"

"It can show me pictures and put sounds in my ears but only I can see and hear them. - that sounds bad. I know exactly how it is doing it but it is doing it in a way I cannot show you. It knows a lot of things. It can remember anything I see or hear. It can do complicated math very fast. It can control some other things I have in my body for me."

"That sounds helpful."

"It is!"

"What are you going to do when you finish the dictionary?"

"See if there are good ways to make some money."

"You might have to wait until tomorrow."

"Why?"

"It's getting late. Things are closing."

"Yeah. I guess I can camp out and I won't need food urgently right away."