The carrel seems to have vanished. Oh well. They can find another perfectly serviceable one and see if this one stays. 

Out come the boxes. "Okay, I think between talking and transit and the carrel that was probably a bit longer than we wanted? But try them again anyway. Same rules, make sure you say all the words out loud as you go."

Okaaaay.

She does terribly. 

She does better the second time around and gets them all on the third. 

"I told you it was unlikely that you were one-in-a-thousand bad." 

"Is this not one in a thousand bad? There are ten words! And I've looked at them eight times by now!"

"It's worse than me, but I think we need to adjust the scale until we can accurately measure where you're at. This time we're going to wait two minutes and see what happens." And she gets out a little clock. "Do you have any other homework you need to get done? Languages are really an intermittent thing, most people can't just work at them for hours on end and have it help as much as half the time more spread out."

"History of artificing we were going to do with Bella. Maybe I could alternate this and the syntax?"

"Right. I guess for that we need a book. Uh - I'm going to stay with Annisa and keep time, does anyone else want to - wait, no. Julian, you stay and keep time, and - wait, no. Hmm. - let's get the book after we've tried the really short time periods, okay?"

"...do you know how to make an origami box?"

"...no?"

"Well, it'll help you think about something else for two minutes. Here." She pulls out a blank piece of paper. "You start by cutting or tearing that into a square, like this."

"Okay."

She keeps an eye on the clock; they don't finish a whole box before it's been two minutes. "Okay, now the words again."

She does about as well as the last time.

"Huh.

"Whole set again with no lag time."

Huh? What does huh mean? Is she some kind of extremely mysterious language disabled that Naima recognizes? Is there a diagnosis? Is there a cure? What does 'huh' mean? Maybe Naima's just decided she's hopeless?

She does even worse, this time.

Julian would love to know what Naima's game plan is, but he senses that saying anything right now would interfere with her process. 

"Huh.

"So there was this guy," she says, and grabs another piece of paper and starts making another origami box, just because she's in a doing-things mood and when she gets like this she sort of doesn't know how not to do things. "I forget his name. One of the early people studying memory. And I remember that one of the things he found out was that if he learned a word, and then left it alone until he had totally forgotten it, and then learned it again the second time, it would take fewer repetitions to learn it the second time than it had the first time. I want to see whether that's true for you. But to find that out we're going to have to wait until you've forgotten all of the words, okay?"

" - okay." What else is she going to say.

Hmm.

She gets out some blank flash cards and a pencil and starts drawing pictures on them, without explaining what she's doing to anyone.

This is terrifying but if Annisa is terrified everyone will decide not to ally with her and then she'll die. She'll just...do sit-ups.

"You know," he says to Annisa, "I think you're psyching yourself out. There's no actual reason you'd do worse on the shorter sets, unless you're making yourself panic and throwing yourself off. We can still try the syntax thing, but if I were you I'd just try to – not think of it as learning a language. As much as you can. It's not like you're ever going to need to produce spoken French, you just need to be able to decipher it. So you can treat it like code-breaking or something."  

"Seems like that might interfere with Naima's extremely mysterious data collection?"

"We can try multiple approaches."

Julian has completely forgotten he's not supposed to be helpful. 

"I think it's fine," she says, not looking up from her drawings.

"Okay. I will treat the French as a coded message that someone sent me. Can I try again, or am I still supposed to be forgetting the words?"

"You can try, I suppose it probably won't set our forgetting time back by much if you do it now."