Writing to Fenna never worked. At the most you got two curt, clipped lines back. She just wasn’t very comfortable with words. I thought about this during training; maybe this, unconsciously, was one of the things that drew me to Uria. Same age as my mother, comically opposite, fluent in nine languages while Fenna’s silence fanned out further all the time. Once, on an endorphin high post-workout, I described the situation to my crewmates. The next morning I woke at dawn, and pursued every single way my words might come back at me.
