The word for water was jala.
Sūrya held up a drinking vessel — smooth, white, no seam, no mark of manufacture — and said it again. "Jala." She pointed at the liquid inside.
"Jala," Moss repeated. The sound felt wrong in his mouth, the vowels too open, the consonant too soft. Like trying to tie a knot with wet rope. He pointed at the vessel. "Water."
"Wa-tehr." She frowned. Her lips moved around the word as though testing its weight.
"Water," he said again.
"Wa-ter."
Close enough. He nodded. She noted something — not with her hands, not on paper. Her eyes flickered, a quick sideways motion, and whatever record she kept was stored somewhere he couldn't see. Inside her head, probably. He'd stopped being unsettled by that on the fourth day, when he realized every person in this place did it.
They had thirty words between them by the end of the second week. Thirty words in a pidgin that belonged to neither language. He learned anna for food, nidra for sleep, sthala for place. She learned "ship" and "hand" and "cold." Each word was a plank laid across a gap that Moss could not see the bottom of.
The tricky ones were the ones that weren't objects.
He wanted to teach her "salt." Not the substance — she already had a word for sodium chloride, some Satya term he couldn't wrap his tongue around. He wanted the concept. Salt as in the thing the sea tasted like. Salt as in the white crust on the dock timbers at low tide. Salt as in the sting in a cut when you washed it in ocean water and you cursed and kept working because the work didn't stop for your pain.
He mimed it. He held up a cup of water — jala, their shared word — and gestured broadly, sweeping his arm wide. The ocean. He pretended to drink it. He made a face, screwing up his eyes, sticking out his tongue. Then he licked his lips and rubbed his fingers together, the gritty residue of imaginary brine.
"Salt," he said. And then, because the word wasn't enough, he pointed at his own skin, at the fine white residue that wasn't there but that he could feel — years of it, worked into the creases of his palms. "Salt."
Sūrya watched with that absolute stillness she had. Not frozen. Not stiff. Present, the way a deep keel was present in still water — all the weight below the surface. She said something in Satya, three syllables, musical and precise.
Then she touched the corner of her own eye. Drew her fingertip down her cheek. And said: "Salt?"
He stared at her. She was asking if tears were salt.
"Yes," he said. "Yes. Same thing."
She made a sound — a short exhale through her nose. He'd learn later that it meant she was pleased, the way a helmsman is pleased when the wind shifts fair. For now it was just a sound, and he catalogued it.
On the eleventh day he tripped.
He'd been crossing her workspace — a room that was too clean, too bright, the floor some pale material that had no grain and no scuff marks and offered no excuse. His boot caught on nothing. His own boot, his own clumsy unmodified foot, betraying him on a surface smoother than ice. He went down hard on one knee, caught himself with both hands. The impact rang through his wrists.
Sūrya made a sound he had not heard before. Brief, controlled, almost reluctant — as though it had escaped through a door she usually kept closed. She covered her mouth with one hand. Her eyes, those large dark-adapted eyes, were bright.
She was laughing.
It was the smallest laugh Moss had ever heard. A laugh on a leash. But it was real, and it changed her face entirely, and Moss found himself grinning from the floor like a fool because this woman who moved like water through glass had just laughed at him falling on his face, and that was the most human thing he'd witnessed in this place.
"Fine," he said, getting up. "Very funny."
She did not understand the words. She understood the tone. She straightened her expression with visible effort and said something in Satya that sounded like an apology but probably wasn't.
The habitat was the most beautiful place Moss had ever been, and it frightened him the way open ocean frightened him — not the obvious danger, but the knowledge that it did not need him. That it would exist with the same perfection whether he was in it or not.
The temperature never changed. He'd grown up in a place where you woke cold and worked until you were hot and then the evening wind cut through your shirt and reminded you that comfort was temporary. Here the air was the same from morning to whatever passed for night. Perfect. Steady. Like being held inside a held breath.
The light was wrong. Not bad. Not harsh. Just wrong — too even, too consistent, coming from surfaces rather than a source. No shadows worth the name. On a boat you always knew where the sun was because the shadows told you. Here, the light was everywhere and nowhere and it made his sense of direction itch.
The air had no smell. That was the worst of it. Not bad air, not stale air — air that had been scrubbed of everything that made it air. No salt. No tar. No fish. No sweat. No cook-fire smoke drifting across the harbor at dawn. He breathed it and his lungs were satisfied and his brain was not.
Nobody argued. He walked the corridors — they let him walk now, with Sūrya or sometimes alone in a limited circuit — and he passed people and they acknowledged him with small gestures and moved on. Nobody shouted. Nobody spat. Nobody sat on a step doing nothing in particular. Everyone was going somewhere. Everyone had purpose.
He missed purposelessness. He missed the old men on the Tidemouth docks who sat and watched the boats come in and offered commentary on rigging that nobody asked for. He missed the dogs that slept in the sun outside the fish market. He missed disorder, the ordinary filth of living.
The food came in portions that were exactly right. Every nutrient accounted for. Every calorie balanced. The textures varied. The flavors were present and adequate and left no impression whatsoever. He ate and was nourished and could not remember what any of it tasted like an hour later.
He missed burnt fish. Specifically, the way Kael burned fish — distracted by whatever was in her head, leaving the pan too long, scraping the blackened skin off with a knife and eating it anyway, the char bitter and real on his tongue. He missed food that had been touched by mistake.
In the third week he tried to explain home.
They were in his quarters — a room that was adequate and featureless and could have been anywhere or nowhere. He'd been given a sleeping surface, a sanitary area, a shelf. No window. No porthole. The walls were a color between white and gray that did not commit to being either.
He sat on the edge of the sleeping surface. Sūrya sat on the floor across from him, cross-legged, patient as tide. Between them: the pidgin. Thirty-one words, give or take. Enough to name objects and actions. Not enough for this.
"Home," Moss said.
He pointed at himself. Then he pointed in a direction — north, he thought, though direction was meaningless here. "Sthala," he said, using their shared word for place. He tapped his chest. His sthala. The place that was his.
Sūrya nodded. She said a Satya word — something with a soft ending. Then she said, in their pidgin: "Moss sthala. Before."
"Yes. Before." He paused. He put his hand flat on his chest, over the sternum, and pressed. "Home," he said again, and this time he let the word carry what it carried — the weight of the harbor at dawn, the smell of caulking tar, the sound of water on pilings, the ache that sat behind his ribs like a second skeleton.
Sūrya tilted her head. She said something longer in Satya, careful and precise. Then she tried the pidgin: "Moss sthala. Before. Moss—" She paused, searching. She touched her own temple. Memory. "Moss nidra-sthala." The place he slept. Before.
"No," he said. "Not the place. The—" He pressed his chest harder. He didn't have the words in any language. The ache wasn't for the location. It was for the version of himself that had lived there. For the sounds and smells and the particular quality of light on the water in Tidemouth at the end of the day. For Kael's silhouette on the observatory roof. For the knowledge that you belonged somewhere, that a place had shaped itself around you and you around it, that you and it were the same thing.
He tried again. He pointed at himself. He made a shape with his hands — a container, a hull. He pointed at where the harbor would be. He pretended to pour the hull-shape into the distance. Then he held up his empty hands.
"Home," he said.
Sūrya was quiet. Her eyes did the sideways flicker — consulting something internal, some vast library of knowledge that couldn't help her with this because this wasn't knowledge. She spoke in Satya. The words were measured. She was thinking out loud, he realized, working through a problem.
Then she said, in their pidgin: "Moss sthala before. Sūrya sthala now. Better. Yes?"
He understood what she meant. You are here now. This place is better — better air, better food, better medicine, better everything. Why would you ache for worse?
"No," he said. He said it too hard. She didn't flinch — he'd never seen her flinch — but something shifted behind her eyes. Attention, sharpening.
He tried one more time. He clasped his hands together, interlocked. Then he slowly pulled them apart, finger by finger. He held up one hand. He looked at it. Incomplete.
"Home," he said.
Sūrya looked at his hand. She looked at his face. She said nothing.
The silence lasted a long time. Not hostile. Not uncomfortable. Just empty — the kind of empty that happens when two people reach the edge of what their shared language can hold and find nothing but air beyond it. Like standing at the bow and seeing the chart end.
He dropped his hand. She lowered her eyes. They sat with the failure between them like a reef neither could navigate.
She came back the next day with a map.
He didn't know what it was at first. She unrolled it on the floor between them — a flat sheet of some material that wasn't paper but behaved like paper, thin and flexible and covered in markings. A coastline. An ocean. A continent at the bottom of the world, white and sprawling, and inside it a small red dot.
"Sthala," she said, touching the red dot. "Sūrya sthala. Prithvi."
He stared. He'd seen maps before — rough ones, hand-drawn, the coastline of his own continent sketched by sailors who'd been there. This was different. This was the whole world, seen from above, seen whole, and the white expanse at the bottom was Antarctica — the place the old stories called the dead land, the forbidden south, the end of everything.
The red dot was where he was sitting.
He traced the coastline with his finger. He found the shape he knew — the northern continent, the bulge of the eastern coast, the deep bay that would be Tidemouth's harbor if the scale were large enough to show it. It wasn't. His entire world was a wrinkle in a line.
Sūrya watched him. Then she produced a second sheet — blank, the same material — and a marking implement. She set them in front of him.
Moss picked up the implement. It was lighter than charcoal, smoother than graphite. He held it the way he held a caulking knife — in his fist, close to the point.
He drew the harbor first. The half-moon curve of the breakwater. The docks jutting out like fingers. The warehouse district behind them, a row of rectangles. The hill above the town. The observatory on the hill — a circle with a line through it, Kael's telescope, the thing that had started everything.
He drew the water. Lines, horizontal, overlapping, the way the harbor surface looked on a calm day when the light broke it into strips of silver and gray.
He drew a figure by the waterline. Small. Standing on the outermost dock. He didn't draw details — no face, no features. Just a person, upright, looking south.
He pointed at the figure. "Kael."
Sūrya looked at the drawing. She looked at the map she'd brought. She looked at his face.
"Kael," she repeated. A question in the way she said it.
Moss pointed at the figure again. Then he put his hand on his chest. Then he pointed at the figure. The gesture was crude and he knew it — a triangle of meaning, himself, the ache, the person by the water. But it was what he had.
Sūrya did not ask for clarification. She did not do the sideways eye-flicker. She looked at the small figure he'd drawn — a stick person on a stick dock by lines that meant the sea — and something in her expression changed. Not softened. Opened, the way a harbor opens when you round the headland and see it for the first time.
She pointed at the figure. She pointed at Moss's chest. She said a Satya word he hadn't heard before. It was quiet and it was careful and he didn't know what it meant but he could hear the shape of it — the way you could hear the shape of a bell even when you didn't know the metal.
Then she touched the edge of his drawing, the corner where the blank space began, and she nodded. Once.
He didn't know what she understood. He didn't know if she grasped the specific or only the general — that the figure was important, that a person could mean more than the information a person contained, that some maps showed where your heart was rather than where your feet were.
But she'd nodded. And she'd said a word. And that was more than yesterday.
A map for a map. A name for a name. The pidgin had thirty-two words now, and most of them were nouns, and none of them were adequate, and they'd keep going tomorrow because that was what you did when the charts ran out. You kept sailing. You steered by what you could see and you trusted that the water ahead was deep enough to hold you.
Moss rolled up his drawing and handed it to her. She took it with both hands, the way you take something that weighs more than it should.