The river was exactly deep enough to be inconvenient and not deep enough to be interesting — waist-high on Tiger, chest-high on Lily, with a current that pushed gently but persistently like something politely suggesting they leave.
They stayed anyway.
The auroras had strengthened while they weren't paying attention, painting the water in shifting greens and pale violets. The pollen clouds caught the light and scattered it sideways. Somewhere upstream, the waterfall Tiger had mentioned made a low, constant sound.
Lily was floating on her back, arms out, staring up. Tiger stood with his arms crossed over the water's surface, not quite floating, not quite standing. Somewhere between both.
"Define lost," Lily said, to the sky.
Tiger looked at her. "What?"
"Lost. Define it. What does it mean to you specifically."
He considered. "Not knowing where you are."
"Wrong."
"It's not a test."
"Everything's a test." She tilted upright, water streaming off her hair. "Lost means knowing exactly where you are and not recognizing it. Location is irrelevant. The feeling is about context. You can be lost in a room you've lived in for thirty years."
"That's not lost. That's estranged."
Lily pointed at him. "See, now we're getting somewhere."
"We're getting wet."
"We were already wet." She pushed off the riverbed and drifted a few inches downstream before catching herself. "Your turn. Give me a word."
Tiger looked at the aurora overhead. "Tired."
"Easy. Tired means—"
"Not the normal kind."
She opened it again. "The other kind."
"The kind where you sleep for eleven days inside a dying star and wake up and everything is exactly the same. Where the tired isn't in your body because your body resets." He skimmed the water's surface with one hand. "It's in the part that doesn't regenerate."
"We don't have a word for that," she said finally.
"No."
"We should."
"Probably." He looked at her. "Your turn."
She chewed her lip. "Home."
"Place you return to."
"Wrong again."
"I'm going to stop defining things."
"You're going to keep defining things because it's the most alive you've looked since I got here." She said it simply, not as an attack. Just an observation, like noting weather. "Home isn't a place you return to. It's a place that would notice if you didn't."
"Then I haven't had one."
"This cycle?"
A beat too long. "In general."
Lily didn't push. She turned and floated on her back again, eyes up.
"I had one," she said, "for about forty years. A station. Kelper-9 transit hub. Ugliest place in six star systems — all exposed piping and recycled air and a food vendor on level three who sold something he called soup that was definitely not soup."
"What was it?"
"We never found out. But we kept buying it." She paused. "The station got decommissioned. Just — bureaucratically ceased to exist. Not an Ender. Just time and economics and someone somewhere deciding it wasn't worth maintaining."
"And the people?"
"Scattered. That's the word, right? Scattered. Like we were matter that needed redistributing." She said it lightly, but her eyes stayed fixed on the aurora. "The soup vendor went first. I never got his name."
Tiger looked at her profile against the shifting light.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Lily blinked like the words had surprised her. Then she smiled — smaller than usual, less teeth. "See, that's a word that doesn't translate either. Sorry. What does it mean when nothing stays broken?"
"It means someone wishes it hadn't happened."
"Even if it always would have?"
"Especially then."
She flicked water at him.
"You're doing the poetic thing again."
"You asked."
"I retract the ask." She righted herself, standing now, water at her collarbone. "New word. Give me one you don't have a definition for."
"After," he said.
Lily frowned. "After what?"
"Just — after. The concept of something coming next. That assumes a direction." He looked downstream where the river bent out of sight. "We keep using it. After this cycle. After the Enders get bored. After whatever's watching decides to do something about it." He paused. "But after only works if there's a before that matters. If everything resets, there's no before. So there's no after. There's just — more."
"That's the most depressing thing you've said since we met."
"You asked for a word without a definition."
"I didn't ask for an existential audit of linear time."
"Those are the same request."
She laughed despite herself — surprised by it again, the same way as before. She had a laugh that kept catching herself off guard, which Tiger found privately interesting.
"My turn," she said, recovering. "Floating." She gestured at the river around them. "Not the physical kind. The — you know when you're between things? Not moving toward anything, not moving away. Just suspending. We call it floating but that implies the water's doing the work." She looked at her hands under the surface, visible and strange in the aurora light. "What do you call it when you're doing it on purpose? When the suspending is the point?"
"Regret."
Lily stared. Then she groaned. "That's the fruit thing."
"You named an island after it."
"I didn't know you were going to weaponize it."
"I'm not weaponizing anything."
"You absolutely are." She pointed at him. "That was a pun."
"It was an observation."
"It had pun infrastructure."
"Observations can have infrastructure." He kept his face perfectly neutral. "It's what separates them from guesses. Structural integrity. Load-bearing implications. The kind you float on, for instance, when floating is the point."
Lily looked at the aurora like it had personally offended her.
"I'm not acknowledging that."
"You already did."
"I'm un-acknowledging it."
"That's not a word."
"We've established we're missing a lot of words." She crossed her arms over the water. "I'm adding un-acknowledge to the list. It means to retroactively refuse credit for something you accidentally engaged with."
"That's just denial."
"Denial with paperwork."
Tiger skimmed the water with one hand. "Enough."
"What about it?"
"Define it."
Lily squinted. "Having what you need."
"That's sufficient. Not enough."
"Those are the same."
"Sufficient is a calculation. Enough is a feeling." He looked at her. "You can have sufficient food and still be hungry for something you can't name. You can have enough of something you didn't even want more of."
"When's the last time you had enough?" she asked.
"I'm working on the definition."
"That means never."
"That means the definition is ongoing."
"Is that better or worse than never?"
"It's more honest."
"I had enough once. For about an afternoon, objectively. On Kelper-9, level three, with the not-soup." She paused. "I didn't know it at the time. I figured it out later, which is the worst way to figure out you had enough — after."
Tiger looked at her.
"After," he repeated.
"Yeah." She made a face. "Your word's contagious. I hate it."
The aurora shifted then, folding green into violet into something without a color name — just a feeling. The specific sensation of being small in a way that wasn't entirely unpleasant.
Tiger tilted his head back and looked up at it.
"We used to call that shade something," he said, almost to himself. "On the outpost. We had a word for it." A pause. "I had a word for it."
Lily looked at him sideways, just for a second.
Then looked back up at the aurora.
"What was the word?" she asked.
"I don't remember."
"That's probably fine. Some words only work in context."
The river moved around them, patient and indifferent. The waterfall kept its low sound. Lily tilted her head back until her ears were underwater — the world going muffled and warm and close — and for a moment she could only hear her own pulse, which was strange and reassuring proof that the person standing in this river was still, by some definition, her.
She came back up.
"New game," she said, shaking water from her hair. "Best word that sounds like what it means."
"Murmur."
"Good. Mine's—"
"You said new game. You go first next round."
"That's not how new games work."
"It is now."
She looked at him. He looked at the river. Somewhere in the dark above them, something that was not a star held very, very still.
"Murmur," Lily said, softer. "Yeah. That one's right."