"Okay. Where is a list of all the words to memorize?"

Zana takes him to the reference table and shows him the big big big red dictionary.

"This one is the list of all the words."

Sigh. "Okay. - thank you."

"It's not all just the list." She opens it to a random page and points out 'destitute'. "See, it has the word here, and how you say it here, and the language it's from here, and then all of the meanings and the forms."

"I think I will have needed to have memorized most of the book before that will be useful but I guess I can go back through it."

"I think most people don't read the whole thing. They just look up a word when they see one they don't know."

"Well, I don't know any of the words."

"I guess that's true. You wanna start with A?"

"Is there a particular reason to start with that?"

"A is at the beginning. The letters have an order so you can find them. There's a song."

"We order our letters too."

"I think that's smart," says Zana.

"Once you know our letters you can read anything written in our language."

"I mean, I'd have to know the language first. But that seems like a good way to do it."

He flips the book to the 'a's and starts trying to guess how the letter combinations are pronounced.

Zana teaches him how the pronunciation guides work so he can make better guesses.

"...I guess we do have a system for writing words like they sound. I wonder why people don't use it all the time."

"Probably it's the same people who stole all your food and only give it back to you if you work all day doing boring things that you hate."

"You know that's not, like, a specific group of people, right, all the food just belongs to people who own farms."

"That's a specific group of people."

"I guess, but I don't think there was like a group of farmers that made everybody else stop being farmers."

"It just seems really suspicious how you all think that farming is awful when it is not and grownups all do horrible jobs because you won't have any food if you don't."

"Auntie Karen says that lots of the people who work on farms do it because they're not allowed to work other jobs."

"Farms are nice. Everything is pretty and interesting and tastes really good and if you don't like picking it, you can call in other people to do that."

"I don't think that's how all of the farms are here."

"Okay, but they can be like that."