Seven days in a row…I'm back in my groove! Or is it a rut?

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Kiley sat and tried to read her book. Nearly soundlessly her lips formed each word, feeling the sounds leech through her skin and imprint themselves on her mind. She tried to lose herself in the prose but it was too dense for that escape. Whoever had written this text had no mind for rhythm or syntax, or even the basics of sentence structure. He obviously felt that a high word/period ratio was essential to make him look intelligent. She had her own opinion of people who couldn't be bothered to find punctuation on a keyboard, and it wasn't high.

She sighed and dropped a page to rub at her eyes. Knives was right. This book was crap. But it was the best source of information she had, and even bad ideas are better then no ideas at all. She could see places where he started with a decent grasp of the facts, then took them and ran with them in a completely illogical direction. Weeding out those few facts was a difficult process, but she wasn't the sort of person to quit just because the job was hard.

She found she was still rubbing at her eyes and realized it as the delaying action it was. She dropped her hand back to her lap and forced herself to start reading again. She instantly ran into another jumble of overlong words and forced her way through, slogging through the morass of syllables with the stubbornness that was her trademark. She finished that page, and the next, and made it to the end of the chapter before allowing herself a break.

She looked up at the moons and sighed. Between Ace and Knives she didn't really have time for herself anymore. Not that she minded too much; it kept her from brooding, after all. She just wished she had a little more time in the day, some time she could use to do something fun. Not that there was much that was fun for her to do around here. She fell back, laying in the sand and staring at the stars. Hard as it was for her to admit it, she was beginning to get bored. You can't just take an adrenaline junkie and set her out in the middle of the desert with nothing to do, and not expect her to get… twitchy.

Yes, that was it. She was very twitchy. She felt like she was leaving something undone, forgetting something important. She knew that she wasn't, but the feeling was there all the same. Mentally, she reviewed what she had and had not done since arriving here. She frowned a little. All her Ts were crossed, all her Is had been dotted, but that cringing feeling around her spine wouldn't go away. She gave her instincts a shake and tried to reason with them. Just because she hadn't been in a life or death situation lately was no reason for them to go haywire. She did value their input, really, and was sure she would need them again soon. Just not now.

Reasoning with them seemed to work, a little. At least the crawling up and down her spine stopped. She sat and stared at the stars for a while, looking for constellations she recognized and still not finding any. Undaunted, she started to make up some of her own. There, those over by the top of the spire to the east of her, those were a cross. Mostly. A crooked cross, but a cross. She looked for Cassiopeia, as the celestial W had been her favorite, but none of the stars ahead were cooperating.

Realizing that she was still procrastinating, she sat up again and tried to wriggle out of reading the next chapter. Most nights she only forced her way through one, but tonight's chapters were uncommonly short. She tried to convince herself that there was no time limit on finishing this book, that she could read one short chapter tonight and a short one tomorrow and have no problems. The stubborn part of her resisted the notion. She had decided to read two tonight, and stopping halfway through would just be giving up.

Her hands grasped the book once more and she began to mouth the words again.

"Do you have to speak when you read?" came a voice out of the darkness. She jumped, a little, and flushed at having been caught surprised.

Guess her instincts had been right after all. She was being watched by a very dangerous individual. Abashed, she begged their forgiveness as she turned towards the voice. Knives was propped up on an elbow, his face cast into stark relief by the light of the moons. It gave his visage an even more sinister look then it normally sported.

"It used to be believed that people who read silently were obnoxious braggarts," she said, purposefully not answering his question.

"Yes, back when only six or seven people in a country knew how to read. You may come from a backward world, but not one that backward."

She smiled and marked her place on the page with a finger. "I can read silently," she admitted.

"They why don't you try that. Your muttering is keeping me awake," he said dismissively, but made no move to settle back down.

She watched him, a sly smile lurking about her lips. "You want an explanation," she intuited. "What are you going to give me in return?"

"I won't kill you tomorrow."

"Mmm." She stayed silent.

He sat up. "What do you want?" he asked waspishly.

A kiss, leapt to her lips, but she shut them tightly before the traitorous words could escape. "To hear you say my name. Nicely."

He looked confused. "Say your name?"

"Yeah. Not "woman" or "vermin." Kiley."

"That isn't your name," he said, smugly. "Your name is AnneMarie Salome Judith deBelville."

She blinked, her only show of surprise. "That's right. You were listening at the window."

He smirked. "Now explain."

She paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts. "It's mostly a memory aid. I have very good reading comprehension, but when I can read out loud I have nearly perfect retention."

"How good?" he asked.

"I lose track of about seven words in every ten thousand. And that's exact words, not meaning."

"That's 99.93% accurate," he figured, more to show that he was listening then because he believed her claim.

She nodded, and rummaged in her bag. She pulled out Swiss Family Robinson and tossed it at him. "I last read that in the tenth grade. Pick a page, read five words. Test me."

He opened it to a page at random and read. "Once you told me about."

She closed her eyes and thought for a moment. "About a strong man, I think his name was Milo, and he had a tiny calf, and he used to carry it about everywhere."

He picked another page. "The leafy shade of this."

"Great tree is far more beautiful than any church. That's one of my favorite parts."

Knives closed the book. "Impressive."

She shrugged. "It's not eidetic, but it's as close as I can get."