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“Good morning,” he repeated carefully, and then he smiled at her, and it was the same slow, warm smile he had given her after the kiss.

Her stomach flipped over, and she got up quickly and went to wash her face in the pool.

The beacon was still clipped to the strap of her pack. She saw it when she went to find her tablet, and she unclipped it and looked idly at the screen out of habit. No signal. It was the same two grey words it had shown her every morning since she fell. This time, for one small, shameful second, she was relieved.

She clipped it back onto the strap quickly, as if it had burned her fingers. When she looked up, he was watching her from the edge of the pool. He looked at the beacon, and then at her face, and he didn’t say anything.

She decided that the best cure was to keep busy, so she spent the morning teaching him. It was easier than it had any right to be. He sat cross-legged on the rock across from her with his tail draped over his knees. He watched her face with total concentration while she talked. She pointed at things and named them, and he repeated them. She made little sentences out of the words, and he repeated those too. And every so often, he said something back to her that made her stop and stare at him.

“Water is warm here,” he said, trailing his fingers in the pool. “Cold there.” He pointed downstream. “Warm water comes from gardens. Always.”

“That’s a full sentence,” she said accusingly. “That’s three sentences. You didn’t know half those words yesterday.”

He shrugged, looking pleased with himself. “Words wake.”

“You’re doing it on purpose, aren’t you? Pretending you don’t understand, so I’ll keep explaining things.”

He blinked at her, all innocence, and she threw a berry at him. He caught it without looking and ate it.

The worst part was that she didn’t mind. She liked the way he listened. She liked the way his eyes stayed on her face, as if every word she said was worth hearing. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had listened to her like that. Certainly not Ethan, and certainly not anyone at GenCon.

“Okay,” she said. “Your turn to pick a word. Anything you want to know.”

He considered it seriously. Then he reached out and touched her lower lip, very lightly, with the tip of one finger.

“This,” he said. “What we did. The word.”

Her face instantly went hot. “That’s, um. That’s a kiss.”

“Kiss,” he repeated, and his voice made the word sound much more interesting than it had any right to. He looked at her mouth. “Kiss is good word.”

“Next word,” she said hastily, and he laughed, a low, delighted sound that went straight down her spine.

In the afternoon, he taught her to find her way. He took her out of the gardens and into the passages beyond. She had to put her mask back on as soon as they left the green air behind. She hated it, because after a day of breathing freely, the mask felt tight and hot, and the thin, filtered air tasted of plastic. But she understood why he wanted to show her. If she was ever going to find her way around down here, she couldn’t depend on the lichen, and she couldn’t depend on her lamp. It was already so dim that she could barely see her feet by it.

“Listen,” he told her, and stopped in the middle of the passage.

She listened obediently. She heard the water, and the drip of moisture from the ceiling, and her breathing through the mask. He made a short, low click deep in his throat. It bounced off the walls around them and came back, soft and overlapping.

“Wall,” he said, pointing to the left. He clicked again, turning his head. “Wall. Close.” Then he faced down the passage and clicked a third time, and this time the echo came back slower and fainter. “Open. Far.”

She stared at him incredulously. “You’re using echolocation. Like a bat.”

He looked genuinely puzzled. “Bat?”

“Never mind. Show me again.”

He patiently showed her again, and then again. Eventually she could hear the difference between the quick, sharp echo of a wall close by and the slow, spreading echo of an open chamber ahead. She couldn’t click the way he did, so she clapped her hands instead, and he nodded approvingly.

“Good,” he said. “Now water.”

He led her down to the edge of the stream and made her kneel and put her hand in it. The water was cold, colder than it had been in the gardens.

“Cold water comes from deep,” he said. Then he walked her further along the bank, where a narrow side stream trickled in from the left, and made her put her hand in that one. It was noticeably warmer.

“Warm comes from gardens,” she said slowly. “So if I’m ever lost, I follow the warm water, and it takes me back.”

He smiled warmly at her. “Yes.”