Good.

Lev kisses him while he's still half-asleep and leaves in the morning.

Cute, and good, and good and cute. 

He gets up after a few minutes and — he doesn't actually know what Marlo does in the mornings — checks a book out of the library and sits in a public space and reads. 

Marlo isn't particularly looking for him, but he finds him anyway, sits down near him and doesn't interrupt. 

"The answer's yes," Sasha says, without putting his book down. "If you came here to actually ask. And I talked to Chris, he's in favor." 

"Oh," he says, very soft. 

He's smiling. It isn't the nervous-and-covering-it smile; it's softer, more sincere. 

"What's your current anchor's name?" 

The smile fades, some. "Tristan Green." 

"Have you told him yet?" 

"No. 

— I was waiting until you said yes, it —" 

"I know." 

He's very gentle. 

"Go tell him." 

Marlo nods — stands up — glances back at Sasha — goes. 

And Sasha watches him go, and then goes back to reading, and does not go back to paying attention to what he's reading. 

The next morning, Chris finds him. 

"Welcome to being an anchor."

He's never sure which words are going to be the right ones, with Chris, but he's pretty sure he can't actually get away with just not saying any words. 

Even so he can't think of anything to say in acknowledgement, so he nods up at Chris instead before saying, "I assume training starts today?" 

"Yes. You're off scavenging, anchors and pilots aren't allowed to be scavengers. Should I tell the kitchen not to expect you?"

"...sometimes having something repetitive to do with my hands is helpful but I don't think it'll be anywhere near as regular. So, yes, please." 

"Marlo floats around and helps where he's needed, you might like an arrangement like that." He hands Sasha a binder. "This is the book Lev wrote about anchoring. I'll be in my office if you have any questions, please ask. Marlo will also be around."

"Thank you," very earnestly, and he takes the binder and goes — not to Lev's room, to his own room, and reads. 

It's printed out on paper, like old books from before the Bliss, not handwritten. There are blank pages in the back for him to take notes. (A page in the front tells him not to write on the book itself.)

The first chapter is about how the dream world works and mostly covers what people have said to him before. The next few chapters are about the mechanics of anchoring: how the headset works, what the different indicators mean, what sort of things he should point out to his pilot and what things he should leave alone.

The rest of the book is about relationships. There's advice about self-care techniques that work for different anchors. There are exercises to help you develop a sense of fondness and admiration for your pilot: write down a characteristic that makes you proud of your pilot; think of things you and your pilot have in common; describe beliefs and values you and your pilot share. There's advice about how to avoid escalating fights: admit fault; use I-statements; bring up concerns as soon as they occur to you instead of letting them fester; say things like "you're hurting my feelings" and "let's start this over again" and "let's find our common ground" and "we can agree to disagree." There are several chapters about figuring out when you should break up.

The entire book sounds like Lev. 

He takes notes in the back of Lord of the Rings and reminds himself to tell Lev how much he loves him tonight, not that he wasn't going to before. 

He can't get through the entire book by dinner but he brings it with him to Lev's room. 

"You have my book!"

"I do! Sometimes I get to a sentence that sounds particularly like you and I have to put it down for a few seconds to smile goofily at the wall." 

"You should tell me all the things you don't like so I can fix it for the next version!"

"It might be a little hard to fix 'a bunch of this advice is meant for a person who is not me,' which is the main problem I have with advice books in general, I am not great at remembering that actually books of advice have to be useful to everybody and that if a thing wouldn't work for me I can just go 'okay, that's probably helpful for someone else' instead of arguing with it."