Without giving much thought to what he was doing, Alfred reached down and stopped the progress of her hand. He looked down at the line that she'd just been tracing, contemplating how to answer her question.

"Broken lines like that represent death," he said after a moment, his voice quiet. In the stillness of the empty flat, it sounded even smaller than he'd thought. "There was a lot of it, on this line."

Alfred glanced up at her briefly, then guided her hand away from where it had been and towards the center of his chest, where a series of horizontal patterns spanned the gap between the pattern he'd just explained to her, regarding tribal life generally, and the next vertical, which told the stories of his time with the tribe. "Let's talk about a different section," he suggested, still holding her hand lightly in his.