But she could think straighter, or at least it seemed like she could. Ashiban was certain she would never be warm again, would always be chilled to her bones. They filled Ashiban’s bag with grubs, and walked on until night fell, and slept, shivering, huddled together. But after a few hours, or at least what Ashiban took to be a few hours-she had no way of telling time beyond the sunlight, and had no experience with that-their situation seemed immeasurably better than it had before they’d eaten. Their progress slowed as they stopped every few steps to dig for more grubs, or to replace a broken stick.

There was no water to wash the dirt off them, and they were unpleasant to eat while raw and wiggling, but they were food. The few grubs they dug up promised more nearby. “We’ll have to eat anything we find raw.” The Sovereign of Iss frowned, and then went kicking through the leaf mold for a couple of sturdy sticks. Here on Iss things might be different, but if the Sovereign had been carrying fire-making tools, she’d lost them in the mire.

People who lived in space generally didn’t walk around with the means for producing an open flame. Her bag held only their now nearly empty bottle of water. There was no way to make a fire that Ashiban could think of. That was another word Ashiban knew-nearly everyone in the system recognized words in either language that might turn up in a safety alert. Seemed to think for a bit, and then said, “Fire?” in Gidantan. That word she knew-the Gidanta sold prepackaged toasted grubs harvested from their own orbital agronomy projects, and the name was printed on the package. Said something in Gidantan that Ashiban assumed was some version of What are you doing? The Sovereign of Iss stopped, turned to look at Ashiban. Pushed aside the leaf mold under her feet.

Remembered one of her schoolmates saying the sight made them hungry. Ashiban remembered a school trip, once, when she’d been much, much younger, a tour of the station’s food-growing facilities, remembered an agronomist turning over the dirt beside a row of green, sharp-smelling plants to reveal a grub, curled and white in the dark soil. At home they were an expensive treat, either harvested from a station’s agronomy unit, or shipped up from Iss itself. A handful of toasted grubs, with a little salt, maybe some cumin. Surely there might be snails in the woods? But Ashiban wasn’t sure how to find them.

Another word for you got fired