Thank you.

No problem. I mean, kind of a problem, but - you're welcome.

Maitimo bounces back over to hug Karen's legs. My father thinks that you should teach him English but my mother says that he should say that you don't need to teach him English right now if you don't want to but he says that that is silly and insulting because probably someone in your life has explained to you at some point that you shouldn't do things for people if you don't want to and - 

- anyway do you want to teach him English.

Awww.

(She's not sure, actually, that anyone in her life has ever specifically told her not to do things for people if she doesn't want to. She can remember getting the opposite message several times.)

Trying to teach anyone anything right now sounds kind of exhausting, given that she is already kind of more emotionally exhausted than she can remember being in a long time. And she spends a lot of her time kind of emotionally exhausted.

Sure. But - maybe, like, in a little bit.

Are you tired? We don't have a guest bedroom but you could have one of ours.

- I dunno. I guess it was pretty late already when we summoned Nienna. 

She's not actually sure she can sleep right now, but she's gotta sleep at some point regardless of how she feels about it.

There's a song for sleeping if you want to but can't. 

I'm good. But I guess I could use a room for a bit.

He bounds off inside. The interior of the house has more sculptures -- a tree, a deer in mid-leap (not touching the ground at all), a series of translucent balls floating above their heads somehow. There's a table crowded with jewelry. There's a bedroom with a ridiculously large bed and a pile of ridiculously soft blankets and a meticulously hand-carved wooden headboard. Maitimo has to pull over a stepstool to climb onto it.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Everyone's OK with me using this?

Well, yeah. They're not using it.

She would point out that she is kind of territorial about her bedroom, except she can't, because actually she hasn't had a bedroom for months and the thing she's wishing for right now is her couch that she doesn't even like.

But it's a bed and she's a human and she needs to sleep somewhere.

OK. Thanks, Maitimo.

You can run away and not depend on anybody if you want. That's - that's the thing I was trying to explain to Zana about what makes places good. If you want to run away tomorrow and do your own thing and not talk to us again it'll work, nothing bad will happen, no one's poisoned the water - am I making any sense -

I'm fine. I'm - homesick, but I'm fine. And tomorrow I'll have more energy for dealing with things. But - thanks.

He slips off the bed.

There's singing outside.

If he leaves the bedroom and shuts the door she - still won't feel very alone actually because everyone here is a mindreader and she doesn't know how to make them stop being in her head, at least when Maitimo was in her house she wasn't staring at him all the time, although she's not sure whether anyone actually is or whether Maitimo knew that she wasn't -

- but whatever. If she takes her shoes off and hides under the covers then maybe she can pretend she's alone.

She cries for a bit. It gives her a headache but it makes her stop feeling quite like everything is way way way too much. Like maybe it's only kind of way too much. She still really misses her couch and her shitty apartment and feeling like she has a space that's hers, or meant for the sort of person she is, or not mocking her for sucking with its mere existence, but it was nice of them to give her a bed and if she doesn't use it she'll feel even worse. And nobody is going to kill her here. Probably.

Eventually she sleeps. She has nightmares again, but it still counts as sleep.

No one is obviously about when she wakes up.

That's a good thing even if her immediate response to everything when she wakes up is 'OH RIGHT EVERYTHING SUCKS'.

Everything does not suck. She's in some kind of alien dimension where nobody definitely wants to murder her. That's fine.

She puts her shoes back on and drags herself out of bed and goes out to figure out where everyone is right now.

They are sitting in their garden eating a pie and practicing English.

Well if she's going to be using their house and they have previously shown interest in talking to her then probably it's better to talk to them than to not talk to them.

"Hi! Thanks for letting me use the bed."

"Hi!" After a second of thought, "you're welcome."

Nod.

"Um - did you have any questions, or anything?"

"Yes!" Hundreds of them, actually. Vocabulary questions and conjugation questions and etymology questions and occasionally tangential cultural or technology questions. 

Well, it's better than independently trying to figure out what to do with herself. She can answer questions that she knows the answers to, which is not all of them but is at least much more than none of them.

He's so happy. He bounces in his seat like a little kid. His English gets steadily better.