Deia had been counting symbols for nineteen days.
Forty-seven distinct signs. She had catalogued every one. Drawn them. Compared them. Arranged them by frequency, by position, by the company they kept. The work was slow because the work was honest — there were no shortcuts in a language you did not understand. You looked. You compared. You waited for the pattern to reveal itself.
On the nineteenth day, the pattern moved.
She had been reading the symbols left to right — the direction the carvings seemed to flow. But the symbols did not make sense in sequence. No repetition. No grammar. No structure.
Then she tried something different. She stopped reading them as individual words.
She read them in pairs.
