Chapter 371 --371
Demerti was quiet.
"I do not understand families," she said. "People who went home happy. The kind that produces faces like that. I have never had — I have many people who would follow me. That is not nothing. But it is not that."
He looked at the sky for a long time.
"Samuel," he said, eventually.
She looked at him.
"He calls you elder sister," Demerti said. "You know this. You knew when he said it the first time that it was — something. And you have been—" He chose his words. "You have been going to the city with him. The mechanisms. The fried dough. The river." He paused. "He looks at you the way — if you will permit me to say this — the way that children look at the person who is their somewhere."
She was quiet.
"You said he told you he had never had a somewhere else," Demerti said. "But I think he has a somewhere now. I think it is wherever you are." He looked at her. "And I think perhaps the same is becoming true in the other direction."
The sky was the same sky. The clouds had moved — the shape from ten minutes ago was completely gone, replaced by a different one, and in another ten minutes this one would be gone too.
She sat with what Demerti had said.
She did not confirm it. She did not deny it. She was not certain she had the vocabulary for it yet, or that the vocabulary was necessary. Some things were true before they were named. The petrichor had a name, Fen had said, because it was worth naming. But it had been real long before anyone named it.
"You never wanted to become an administrator," she said, after a while.