“The first batch of grass seed finished early this morning and is now in a holding tank,” he said. “There’s also a memo asking that the holding tanks be emptied as quickly as possible since there’s a lot of material going down to the planet and full holding tanks will slow up the use of the generation tanks.”
“Then let’s get to work.” I’d spent part of last evening working out where we should start. Accessing the data Stev had sent to my personal pad, we had enough seed to cover several hundred acres. I keyed in coordinates for half the acreage and sent the command to the holding tank for dispersal of half the seed. As the commands were relayed through the city-ship’s various systems and dispersal began, a green tint began filling in the dot map that I had called up on my screen. When it was done, I sat back and grinned.
“You’ve still got the other half of the seeds to plant,” Stev pointed out.
“No,” I said, “you’ve got the other half to plant.”
His eyes widened when I sent the password to his personal pad. His fingers danced through the command codes.
Grinning like fools, we watched the green tint fill in another part of the island.
We both jumped to change the image on our screens when the door slid open and Whit walked in.
“I don’t know why the two of you are looking so pleased,” he grumbled. “If we can’t get this project under control, we’ll have to ask for complete termination and start over. And that will definitely be on our formal records.”
The rest of the team began to file in. Dermi and Fallah walked past me as if I didn’t exist. Thanie slunk into the room, looking like she’d had a very bad night. Even Benj didn’t make any of his usual comments. And none of the others had anything to say as they took their places and called up the data for their part of the project.
Whit was right. It was awful. So much of the plant life had been consumed, there wasn’t enough for the animals to eat. And there was no chance that the remaining plants would reproduce and repopulate the area fast enough. If we dumped the next class allotment of plant life into the area without doing something to adjust the number of animals and insects, it would be consumed immediately.
What it came down to was this: if we were going to restore Balance, we would have to wait out the depletion of life. That, too, was part of Balance. Creatures consumed one kind of life and were, in turn, consumed.
For a while, the predators—both those that walked on the land and those that soared in the sky—would feast. They would mate and produce young who would also feast. But their prey, who ate the plants and seeds, would starve and produce no young. The predators, in their turn, would starve. And the land would start building the links in the chain of survival again—the grasses and flowers, the shrubs and trees, the insects that would pollinate them, and on and on until, once more, there was Balance.
But sometimes a world goes too far out of Balance. Sometimes too many links in the chain are broken too severely, and a world spirals into destruction.
Those are the worlds we restore to Balance as our Atonement to the Blessed All.
The computer chimed the start of class, and I got to work.
There were several requests from Dermi, of all people, for seedling trees. Checking the coordinates she had indicated, I realized she wanted me to put down seedlings in the middle of the deer herds to give them a food source. My next allotment of trees would only feed the deer for a few days at most, and that wasn’t going to help the situation.
But I was still part of the team, and I had to do something to honor the request.
Remembering what Stev had said about the holding tanks, I released all the sapling birch and ash with a Priority attached to the planting command. I planted half the acorns I still had. I ordered the other half for aboveground dispersal. I winced about that, but they would provide some food for the nut eaters.
I didn’t plant or disperse any of them where the deer concentrations were the highest. I felt bad for the deer, but sustaining them today only to have them starve tomorrow wasn’t going to help the team restore Balance to our area.
I also put in a request to Whit’s console for oak and beech trees that were mature enough to reproduce. I didn’t think it wise to send all my requests through Stev, even though I preferred working with his specimens. Whit would use the full acceleration feature of the generation tanks; Stev never did without a very strong reason.
I breathed a sigh of relief when the computer chimed the midday break.
“Well, that was an interesting morn—” Stev started to say as the door slid open and we stepped into the corridor.
It was cold.
“Blessed All,” Whit said. “Some of the heating system must have gone down.” He shivered. “Come on. Let’s get to the food court and get some hot food.”
“If there is any hot food,” Thanie grumbled, hurrying after him.
The rest of the team rushed past us. Stev didn’t move.
“Stev?” I put my hand on his arm. His muscles were so tight, they didn’t feel like flesh anymore. And he was very pale.
“This is how it started the last time,” he whispered.
“No, Stev,” I said, shaking my head. “No. Part of a system went down. The engineers are probably already working on it, and it’ll be fixed in no time.”
His eyes were haunted when he finally looked at me. “Of course it will,” he said.
He didn’t believe it. He had reason not to believe it.
But we couldn’t afford to believe anything else. As part of our Atonement, we lived in a world made of metal. If something really was wrong with the ship, there was nowhere else for us to go. Nowhere.
—————
Dermi returned from the midday break in a major snit. When she checked her data and realized what I’d done, the snit exploded into a prime tantrum.
“You . . .” she said, stomping across the room toward me. “You . . .” She called me a very rude thing. “You did this deliberately.”
“I provided what I had available,” I replied, trying to remain calm as I stood up to face her. “I’ve also requisitioned my next tree allotment.”
“That’s not going to help my deer now, is it?” Dermi shouted.
“Hey, Dermi,” Zerx said, looking wary and guilty since it was her snit that had given us the locust problem. “Willow is just doing what—”
“Stay out of this, bug-brain,” Dermi snarled. “She did it on purpose.”
The way you poured deer into a woodland that couldn’t support them? “I provided what I had available.”
“You’re doing this just to make me look bad,” Dermi said, so angry she was turning pale. “The deer need food and you could have provided it.”
I took a deep breath. “You could ask to transfer them. Maybe one of the other student teams need some deer. One of the Restorer teams might be planning to bring that species of deer into another area. You could—”
“You get demerits on your score when you ask to transfer,” Dermi shouted. Then her voice dropped to a quiet that was far more menacing. “Of course, you never get demerits for anything.”
Maybe I should have realized this wasn’t really about the deer. Maybe I should have remembered that Dermi wanted the special student privileges I had without doing any of the work I’d done to earn them. She always wanted something from people without ever being willing to give anything in return. Maybe I should have realized how much she resented my friendship with Stev. Maybe I would have been prepared for what happened.
But I really didn’t expect her to hit me because harming someone violated our strictest rules.
And I can’t honestly say which of us was more stunned when her hand connected with my face.
I staggered back into the arm of my chair. As the chair swiveled, my body twisted with it. I
reached out to grab the console, but I was too off-balance to catch myself. My right hand slid. My head hit the console with an awful thud.
I must have blacked out for a few seconds. When I could see again, Dermi was sitting in the middle of the room crying her eyes out, and Whit was doing his best to hold on to Stev, who had his teeth bared and his fists clenched.
I tried to push myself into a sitting position, but something was wrong with my right wrist. I yelped in pain and flopped back down on the floor.
At least that made Stev think of something besides punching Dermi, which would have gotten him into trouble.
The next thing I knew, I was cradled against Stev’s chest and Thanie was kneeling in front of me, crying quietly, holding out a wadded up piece of linen that had a lot of colored threads dangling from it. After songbirds, Thanie loved embroidery, and she always carried a little sack of stuff with her.
She tried to press the linen against my face. It hurt, so I tried to push her hand away.
“You’re bleeding,” Thanie said.
Well, that explained why my face felt wet.
At least she had remembered to take the linen out of the embroidery frame. I just hoped she’d also remembered to take the needles out of the cloth.
“Can you walk?” Stev asked.
“Sure,” I said, not sure of anything at all.
“Close down our consoles for us,” Stev said to someone. It must have been Whit since he was the person who answered.
I wanted to go home. I got walked to sick bay. The medic frowned at the bruise on one side of my face, grumbled about the sprained wrist, and said some very rude things while he took care of the gash on my forehead.
By the time Stev walked me home, my head was pounding so bad it made me sick to my stomach. I barely made it into the bathroom before I threw up.
That didn’t make my head feel better. But what made me feel worse was realizing Stev was hovering outside the bathroom door, probably wondering which would be more helpful—coming in or staying out.
If he really wanted to be helpful, he would have gone as far away from the bathroom as possible.
Sometimes boys have no understanding at all of how girls think.
Of course, that was what my emotions wanted and not what my body needed. Stev was right to stay close by and my emotions were wrong for wanting him to go away—which, by the time I left the bathroom, made me very cranky.
Stev told me in a quiet, soothing voice, “The medic said you’re going to be fine. You just need to get some rest now.” He took my shoes off and tucked me into bed.
Then Father burst into the room.
“The medic contacted your parents,” Stev whispered before he stepped away from the bed.
Father had that look on his face—that pale, tight, angry look he got when I was really sick or hurt and there was nothing he could do about it.
He didn’t say anything. Not one thing. Not a scold, not a soothe, nothing. He just walked over to the bed and very carefully placed his hand on my head.
“I’m fine,” I lied, trying to smile.
Nothing. That was a very bad sign. When Father was this angry and wouldn’t say anything, it meant that he was about to explode.
I wished Mother was there. I didn’t think my head could stand Father exploding.
“The medic said someone should stay with her,” Stev said quietly. Then he added, “I’ll stay, sir.”
Father straightened up, turned, and looked at Stev.
Stev straightened up and tensed.
The air between them seemed to crackle.
“I’ll check in,” Father said. Then he walked out of the room.
Stev let out a deep breath. His fingers lightly brushed my hand. “Get some rest, Willow.”
I must have dozed off, because I sort of remember hearing Mother and Stev talking quietly. Then I fell asleep and didn’t hear anything at all.
—————
I woke up sometime later.
Stev was sitting in front of my computer, quietly working.
All the muscles that had tensed as I fell were now aching along with my head and wrist. My mouth tasted like what I imagined the bottom of a swamp did, judging by pictures I’d seen of swamps. And I couldn’t get my body to listen to my request to sit up.
Stev looked at me, saw me struggling, and hurried over to help me up.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
How was I feeling? Very aware that I was sitting with a boy who I might like as more than a friend, looking like some swamp dweller and not being well enough to do anything about it. Which Stev wouldn’t understand at all, so I said, “Thirsty.” I looked at the computer. I just wanted to forget about this afternoon and fuss over my trees for a little while.
“You need to stay warm,” Stev said as he went over to the storage cupboard that held my clothes. He came back with my robe—the worn-out robe that was my favorite piece of clothing and that I wouldn’t ever let anyone but my parents see me wearing.
Before I could tell him to bring something else, I was bundled into the robe.
“Slippers,” he muttered, looking around until he spotted them. Those made him pause.
Mother gave them to me last year as a funny present. I don’t know where she got the idea for them or how she got them made, but I loved them.
They were fuzzy, blue bunny slippers. I wore them so much the “fur” was all matted. The ears, because I tended to play with them while I was thinking through a class assignment, weren’t as stiff as they used to be and would wave at people when I walked.
Stev didn’t say a thing as he stuffed my feet into the slippers. He helped me to the other chair at my workspace. “I’ll get you some tea,” he said, then hurried out of the room.
He brought back mugs of chamomile tea for both of us.
“Your mother has been checking in every hour,” he said as he sat down. “Your father has been checking in every fifteen minutes.” He sounded both annoyed and approving.
“He’s worried about my head,” I said.
“Your head isn’t what he’s worried about.”
At least, that’s what I thought Stev muttered. I let it go. I didn’t feel well enough to try to figure out why Father and Stev were acting odd about each other.
“Where are we?” I asked as I tried to focus on the screen. That was a mistake. My head immediately started to pound.
Stev hesitated. “Based on where you had indicated woodlands and meadows, I’ve made a list of the species that will inhabit those areas.”
That was good. At least one of us hadn’t wasted the afternoon.
“We’ll have to wait until we get back to class tomorrow to plant anything,” I said. We could do all the planning on our computers or our personal pads, but we needed a console to send requests to the generation tanks or command codes for the distribution of species on the planet.
Stev put his mug down. He took mine and set it down before taking my hands in his.
“Willow . . .” He sighed. “You’ve been dismissed from the class project. The message came in a little while ago.”
“Dismissed?” I stared at him in shock. “I’ve been expelled from the Restorer program?”
“No,” he said firmly. “It didn’t say you were expelled from the program. It said you were dismissed from the class project.”
“But that’s the same thing,” I wailed. “At this stage of training, it’s the same thing.” Then I really looked at him. “They dismissed you, too, didn’t they?”
“Yes.” He looked down at our linked hands. “When the message came through your computer, I checked my messages and . . .”
“Was Dermi dismissed?”
“There’s no way for me to know that, Willow.”
Of course there was—Whit. The team would have to be told that Stev and I were dismissed so that our work could be distributed among the rest of the team. If Dermi had been dismissed as well, Whit would have known by the end of the class day—and he would have told Stev.
So Stev and I were out of the program, and Dermi . . .
“The island,” I gasped. “What about the island?”
“Nothing was said about the island. Your code is still there, the password still works. You still have the island.”
“We still have the island.”
Stev smiled slowly. “We still have the island.” He looked at my computer. “But we need to find a console to work from.”
“We’ll find one. And we’ll do the work while we can.”
He gave me an odd look. “Yes. We’ll do the work while we can.” Turning away, he started closing down the computer.
“We can still—”
“Do you want anyone else to know about the island yet?”
“No.”
He continued closing down. He must have understood something about my father’s check-ins that I didn’t because Father arrived home a few minutes later—well before his usual time.
And there I was, sitting next to Stev with my face bruised and bandaged, wearing my grubby robe and my bunny slippers.
When I saw my father, I flung myself at him and burst into tears. “Daddy, I’ve been expelled.”
I don’t know which startled him more—me calling him Daddy, which I hadn’t done since I was a little girl, or crying all over him. But he held me and rocked me and told me everything would be all right. And because for that little while he was once again Daddy, I believed him.
By the time I’d wound down to sniffles, Stev was gone and Mother was home.
They didn’t fuss over me too much that evening. That was Mother’s doing, I think. I stayed in the living area most of the evening, drifting on the music Mother had selected. I could hear them talking very quietly, but I couldn’t focus enough to make out the words.
I drifted on the music and found my way to the deep stillness within me—that place where answers are sometimes found if you’re willing to listen.
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