Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
She’s right, but it’s the only explanation to me.
“Oh. We’ve been beyond the storm for a while so the ship hasn’t rocked for a good bit. Maybe the food isn’t compatible like I thought, but it sh—”
“I eat like a fucking horse between the hours I spent in bed with you and the walking we do on this freaking ship,” she mutters, and I blink. The translator is still trying to learn that word—the fuck one—and how versatile it is. I look forward to Halun returning home so I can share it with him. “The food is fine.”
“You’re unhappy?”
With me?
This time, Selina is the one who blinks. “No, Bo, I just—”
“Annoyed, maybe?”
That isn’t a better option for me.
It doesn’t appear as if that’s the choice she wants to say, either, but her mood speaks for itself. Tears well in her eyes that she tries to pretend aren’t there when she suddenly hands the bowl back to me without explanation. I still see the tears even as she rubs them away and paces the small space.
“Zawla?” I ask, trying to find what it is she needs.
Mostly, from me.
“How many days?” she asks abruptly.
I ignore the pulse behind my missing eye that feels suspiciously like a stress ache. “I don’t understand.”
“Days,” Selina repeats, turning fast on me like she’s throwing the word at me. “Days, Bo. How many days have we been on this ship? I can’t tell. There are no clocks. Nothing tells time for me here to track things I need to.”
“What things?”
She hasn’t told me of these things she needs to track with time.
Selina stares a little harder at me. “Are you serious right now?”
“I’ll find you something to track time.”
If she has to have it, I’ll make it happen. It just isn’t in a Hallan’s nature to record things like that.
I’m not sure if that’s what she wants to hear or not, though.
Selina gestures at nothing in particular. “Every time I look outside one of the port windows, everything is black. We dim our lights and sleep when we need and want to, but how long have we been doing this?”
Ah, I see.
Her ramblings became progressively shriller up until the end, but I still follow along perfectly fine.
“We need not record time,” I try to explain, but that won’t be entirely possible until my mate experiences life on my planet that is nothing like hers. A place where we spend our days working and caring for ourselves and our people, resting when needed and without expectations for more. No one Hallan is necessarily better cared for than another, either. If we are doing our duty right, everyone is happy.
“Sixty seconds, okay? One … two … three, okay?”
Not wanting her to get more worked up than she already is over this minor issue, I hurry to agree with whatever she wants to hear.
“Yes, okay,” I parrot back to her. “I understand.”
Satisfied, Selina says, “There’s sixty in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, and twenty-four hours in a day. Light and dark. Twenty four.”
I nod, remembering the schedule of lights turning off and on in her father’s laboratory and how I connected it to their waking and resting hours later on.
“What about it?”
Selina looks at me almost helplessly, but I think that’s only because she assumes I don’t understand. “How many of those have there been since we left?”
Exactly as I thought, then.
“Come,” I tell her.
She isn’t as fast to follow me back into the sleeping bunk as I was her into the restroom, but by the time I find the square box tucked away in one of the many cabinets, she’s sitting on the edge of the bed.
“These,” I say, pulling the top off the box, “are counting stones.”
I tip the box her way, making the shiny, smooth pebbles that glow in the dark swish inside.
“There’s a hundred. Anything and everything we need to measure or calculate can be done with these stones.”
She doesn’t look the least bit convinced.
“Even time?” Selina asks.
“An estimation,” I counter, “based on how long I know we’ve been traveling.”
“In days I understand, too.”
“In days you understand.”
“So, how many has it been, then?”
I’m not sure if she thinks the stone will simply give me the answers or not, but that isn’t exactly how they work. I actually need to do the calculations, but the grouping of stones makes it easier for me to scale up the amounts in my mind. If I had a stick and dirt, I’d keep track of my process, or a particular total, with a stroke. Instead, I count the stones needed for hours in a single day on my mate’s planet and begin to scale up the grouping knowing the approximate length of the flight now that we’ve nearly finished it.
“Twenty-five to thirty,” I settle on.
“Days?”
“Yes.”
“My days?”
“Bey,” I confirm to her, looking over the stones I placed into a group on the floor before I scoop all of them into the box. “Your days, Zawla. What are you trying to track?”