air[p]lanes like shooting stars.

[Barrett]

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Sorry about the delay D:

Rook didn't seem to register what Barrett was insinuating, but the mottled teen wasn't particularly surprised. Based on Savina's interview, the coyote's expertise seemed more general and... well, wholesome. If he was disappointed, nothing showed on the surface—if anything, he looked a little confused. The string of names were all Greek to him; in Barrett's world, a plant was a plant. Sure, he could discriminate between trees, ferns, grasses, and flowers, but that was nearly the extent of it.

His tutors had tried to teach him the names of the most common species, but Barrett never saw much practical use in being able to distinguish a sycamore from an aspen. It didn't occur to him to season food with herbs, so toxicity or palatability were never real concerns. His nose could differentiate between the most aromatic species—the sweet scent of a birch or lily was unmistakeable—but his brain had no words to identify them specifically.

“Hmm, I dunno much about it,” he confessed, “so anything's news to me! Maybe something no other plant does?” Even if he couldn't be enticed by the mundane, the bizarre and extraordinary made for fascinating anecdotes and there was something novel about having access to this living, breathing plant encyclopaedia called Rook. Surely amongst the thousands of species populating North America, one excelled as a sedative, reproduced in some innovative new way, or grew so fast it was obvious even on lupine time scales! Barrett wasn't opposed to learning new things in small doses, especially in relaxed, informal settings like these.

As they strolled back toward the crash site, he had the opportunity to share some of his own knowledge. “Well, they were like an airborne truck or bus the humans used,” he began. “Hard to believe they could get off the ground, huh?” Photographs and old paintings were all the proof he needed, but this was essentially a leap of faith; neither he nor anyone else ever saw one of the damn things do much of anything, unless gathering rust counted. The bus connection was something he'd drawn on his own, since the seating arrangement inside a passenger jet wasn't unlike those of the rusted, broken-down school and city buses littering the streets of Halifax.

371

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