Location:Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; The Northern Flats
Date/Time:TC1857.01.21 – TC1857.01.24
They gave her sour milk and cold roast bird at the gate before anybody asked her business, because that was the order things were done in here and had been for six hundred years, and Naida stood in the cold eating with her fingers while the survey party behind her worked out what to do with their hands.
The milk had turf in the back of it, and a sourness that went sideways rather than down, and it was the first thing she had put in her mouth in a decade that her body had recognized before her mind did.
The gate woman waited until she had finished and then greeted her, properly, using the name her mother had carried out of this settlement forty-one years ago and had never once used again.
"That's not been said to me since the summer," Naida said.
