Weird and confusing! Confusing and weird! She will totally just grab and nibble the bread, though.

There is a grocery store on the ground floor. Here is how an elevator works. Her card with her ID number has her first payment of basic income, minus two weeks' rent on the transitional apartment; she can live there as long as she wants but most people find somewhere they like more after a while. The remaining amount is $LARGENUMBER and will more than cover groceries and a wardrobe of a dozen or so outfits and incidental expenses like a computer of her own and taking some classes if she wants to do that. She will get more money after two weeks and can decide then whether to stay here or go somewhere else.

Out her window she can see the park. It has a pond, with assorted fancy ducks in it, and pretty trees, and blue and purple flowers.

Awww! It's exactly what she asked for.

No one she knows is here and she doesn't dare try to contact anyone. She has no idea what to do and can't readily look that up on the internet because she hasn't learned to read yet. She stays in the apartment she's already familiar with and gets food and a couple of outfits and hangs out at the park a lot. It feels like some kind of parable about laziness and greed, only she's not quite ready to agree that the moral of the story is that she should never have wanted a break. It's still better than Sesat.

Eventually she asks Rijaga what she's supposed to do next.

"There's no specific thing you're supposed to do, but you might want to get Allspeak, take a literacy class, maybe take more classes to see what you're interested in and what you're good at," Rijaga says.

"What other classes should I take? How should I know if I should take more classes than that?"

"- well, you take more if you're bored and you pick whichever ones look interesting, but it'll be easier to find them once you can read."

"...Okay."

She can get Allspeak. She can sign up for a literacy class. ...She can't reliably do homework or remember when to show up.

She gets transferred to a different literacy class that is mostly just a teacher with office hours; she can drop in as long as it's daylight outside and get tutoring.

She can show up to that.

...Until she notices she's forgotten things and is too afraid to admit it.

She doesn't get in trouble for not showing up to the class, she just won't be further tutored in reading till she does.

It takes her a while to drag herself out of her pit of terror and shame and go tearfully confess that she's not actually capable of learning anything and thinks maybe it was a mistake for her to try.

The tutor is confused about this. He doesn't think she has Allspeak-resistant dyslexia. She was doing fine till she took a break from studying. What's the problem?

She's forgotten some letters. No one who could possibly successfully learn to read would do that. (She is, in fact, doing only slightly worse than average for an adult spending about as much time and effort on learning to read as she is.)

"- yeah, that's not unusual when you're starting, especially if your schedule's erratic and there isn't much material actually written in your own language to read! It's okay! The second time you learn a thing it'll take you longer to forget, and by the time you've learned it a few more times than that you'll be reading whole words well enough for Allspeak to translate you random signs and packaging and stuff, and you'll get so much practice you won't forget at all ever again."

"...If you're sure."

"Yeah, I see people forgetting letters all the time. It's very normal."

She can keep trying, then. And keep making progress. After a while she gets slightly but noticeably better at studying and time management.

"You're improving faster than before!" he says encouragingly. "I think Allspeak'll kick in for you properly this week or the next and then we can get you more material."

How is she succeeding at this? That's baffling.

She smiles. "What kind of material is there?"

"I usually start adults new to literacy on Ritter's Animal Facts, everyone likes learning weird animal facts and they're written for kids so the language isn't overwrought but the material's obscure enough that it doesn't feel too condescending the way picture books do."

Nodnod. "That does sound interesting."

"Isn't it? Here's one you can take home, maybe it'll click for you all of a sudden when you aren't even here." He gives her a glossy card with a picture of a baby seal on it.

It does not make anything just click but it does inspire her with its adorableness, which helps.

Nelen, after dropping her off, goes back to the ship and files a report and gets some sleep and then returns to work.

Any time Feris notices him after that he smirks.