This crew is well-fed and organized and-- not clean, no one is clean these days, but cleaner.

...weird. 

The chance that this crew is going to be interested in him is slim at best, but he might as well try. 

"Hey?" 

Someone glances up. "Hey! We're from Eros. What crew are you from?"

He has to remind himself to say "Don't have one," and not 'Nova.' 

"Oh." She looks him up and down and seems to take in for the first time how small he is. "Well, if you like, you can travel with us a bit, that's twelve days of enough food even if Lev decides not to let you into Eros."

He'll take it. "I'd like. My name is Sasha Moon, what's yours?" 

"Loki. --I named myself when I was eleven."

"Yeah, so did I." Is there anything obvious that he can be helpful with? 

"Do you know how to read?" Loki asks.

"Yes, I do." 

"Can you go in there"-- she gestures to a bookstore-- "and figure out which of these they have, and if they have them bring them to the cart?"

The list consists of medical textbooks, survivalist books, guides to the identification of local plants, agriculture books, poetry, and fiction. 

He nods and takes the list and goes. 

They have a solid half of the list — Sasha pauses a couple of times to open the poetry books and copy out other poetry from other books into their margins — but they have more of the fiction than the medical textbooks and more of the plant identification guides than the agriculture books.

He emerges from the bookstore an hour later with twelve books. 

For the rest of the day, Loki has him repeat a similar process in various bookstores and clothing stores and toy stores, and clear out everything that isn't expired in various restaurants, food stores, and pharmacies. (They pick up ten days' worth of clothes in his size.)

He is not assigned to the group that has to deal with the forklifts.

...huh. So they are planning on keeping him, at least for a while. 

He continues to copy out poetry in the margins of other poetry; he's good at getting into and out of spaces that look too small to be gotten into. Some of the toys they aren't being assigned to get from the toy stores still have batteries in them; he takes those whenever it's even halfway feasible. 

Loki notices him collecting the batteries, congratulates him, and tells other people to do the same thing. 

Comfortably before sundown, they stop to eat dinner. Someone has caught a game bird, stuffed it with its eggs, and roasted it; they share that and some wild greens. 

Good! If he's getting congratulated for things that means that probably they'll continue wanting to keep him around! 

Dinner is really good. Possibly this is because he's been hungrier than usual since he started walking but it's still true. 

"If you have any questions you want answered about Eros, I can answer them," Loki says. "There are a lot of rumors. We aren't actually a sex cult."

"...it had not occurred to me to wonder whether you were a sex cult. I haven't heard the rumors, I'm from about ten days south." 

"Now I'm worried I turned you off us!"

"You look better-off than anyone else I've passed in the last ten days and you're sharing your food, it'll take a lot to turn me off you. What is up with Eros?" 

"We can fight the aliens." She eats a bite of her food. "If you've been walking you might have noticed that there aren't any drones around here, and we didn't set anyone to watch for them."

"I had noticed that." He'd thought — he isn't sure what he'd thought. That he'd been lucky enough not to see them. "How?" 

"We reverse-engineered the drones so that instead of the aliens crossing into our world we're crossing into their world." She eats. "Places in their world correspond to places in our world, and if you clear out the aliens in the area they can't send any drones to that area."

He does not need reminders to keep eating, but if he did need them, he would have needed one then. 

"Holy fuck." 

"I know, right? --The reason people think we're a sex cult is that when a pilot's in the dream world they make a giant robot out of love, and the robot works better if you've had sex with people you're in love with."