Cold crisp air—the loamy smell of plants and pond scum. The girl craned her neck, her fringe blown by a choppy breeze, and watched waterbirds take flight from the grass as a dagger-Satori rumbled through the plain white sky. A dawn song rang out from bells recessed into the shield of the Academy; the rim streaked with black, fertile mud, the very edge dipped into the wetlands that stretched on without a landmark in sight.

  It can't be right to have this all to ourselves. Her spine tingled as she sucked the sweet air. She'd known people who would kill for a vacation like this, and these girls were making a mess of the place.

  Ema Arius Exarcheia bent over a crate and tied a pair of dayglo cleats over her socks and loose culottes. She wished she could run in her z-suit instead, or at least the top part; the stiff, 3d-printed rays were comfier up there than any unmentionables she was aware of. She'd had to get scanned for it, huffing and groaning through a treadmill study while a grid of lines shone through a gel onto her skin. Her mentor had whined that it was expensive and maybe wouldn't have a lot of customers given how unflattering it was, but she didn't care; they should do that for like normal clothes.

  She stood and zipped her chest into a loose tracksuit that he'd had embroidered with the House's crest: A lamb's eye overlooking a loose pile of stones, a grave marker. The cattails seethed as a zooming frigate blocked out the sun.

  Ema's jog took her along the rammed earth along the water's edge, past the marshalling yard in front of the square maw of 1-H's science frigate. Rings dappled the inky water, bugs blinking away as a cargo spider surfaced with the silver uprights of an agricultural tent lashed to its back. A few days ago, this margin would've been some superposition between dry land and water—but they'd reinforced it after our Mica decided that she trusted the load bearing mud about as far as she could fling it.

  ...And that little suckup sure could fling it. Ema shuddered, staring into space.

  "Are you fishing? Do you take a single thing seriously?"

  Mica's pigtails had turned to lightning bolts when she caught Ema handlining in waders during one of those prerecorded lectures. Ema had decided she'd rather rawdog her physics textbook than go to another one of those; watching the grey memory of an aged man tutting about the frigate with the vestiges of his hair optimized to dirty triangles.

  Anyway, Ema argued—if supplies were as short as the President claimed, then it would be better if all of 1-H came down to the margin with tackle so that they wouldn't be a burden while the grow tents went up.

  Besides, she was getting fucking tired of liquid rations, no matter how hard Mica tried to dress them up—since the beige stuff curdled to a kind of Halloumi when heated, the small girl had smeared an orange pat of worm tallow into her pan and made liquid ration bacon with liquid ration souffle and liquid ration bannock bread—and Ema didn't think she could get actually mad at the pipsqueak, but if the way to her heart was through her stomach, then Mica had driven the car into the ocean. Right now, Ema would've killed to dig into a fried pumpkinseed, and no prerecorded lecture was going to stop her.

  "I know these seem like extraordinary times, but the President wouldn't make a plan like this without thinking about our future." Mica bristled, baring her teeth. The show must go on, more or less.

  The two of them tracked mud into the darkened lecture hall looking for the one person who could sort this between them: a grey-haired girl who looked smaller and smaller every day, maybe not in size but in spirit. Io Temperance Harmony Zebulon hunched over her notes in the very bottom row where you could hardly see anything, but more importantly never made eye contact with the students she notionally represented.

  "Do I... really need to decide?" Io smiled, but her shoulders were shaking. They'd been a few weeks underway and she didn't seem accustomed to trimming her own bangs, to the point where it was a wonder she could still identify people by sight.

  Ema really regretted asking. "Y-Yeah. The best use of resources?"

  Io batted her ghostly lashes as if that was some kind of activation phrase. She stared afield, thinking.

  "...Everyone helps with the drone ops. Map the terrain, make sure they're not overdrawing the ship's batteries. Anyone not able goes noodling."

  Ema gulped. "I think just me and Mica have experience with literary cores." She wanted to add: she knew about them, not how to farm vegetables.

  "Then both of you fucking go." Io sighed, her cheeks reddening. "I'm going to go fly a patrol."

  "But there's nobody here—"

  "I don't care. This shit is a waste of time."

  The drifter chucked her notes all over the floor and hunched out the exit, her head lowered in a manner that ill-fit the gilded Vestan jacket.

  The sun's rays smeared everything an even pale green. Ema circled back towards the yard in the shadow of the science frigate, where cargo spiders nursed like kittens from the crinkled umbilicals between the landing legs. That was the actual reason they were still here, instead of in the North looking for the comms dish: their frigate's reactor was acting as a charging station for the drones as they rammed posts into the ground and pulled clear plastic into low prisms that stretched for miles.

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  The literary core was a rather large wheeled unit with a cylindrical protrusion about the size of an oil drum, its surface acid-etched with a grid of ideograms: a passage from the Five Classics. Ema ducked her head bashfully and ran her fingertips over the invitingly textured metal. She felt warm in the chest and couldn't help but totter after the cylinder probably a little closer than strictly safe. It must have been a Moonrabbit-C; third generation going by the treadprints, unless the road wheels had been replaced from an older model.

  "Query. Isn't nature pretty?" Ema smiled, her hands bridged girlishly in the small of her back. It didn't have eyes, so she made contact with its warning strobe.

  "Flower, bird, wind, moon," the core replied in a boyish voice. A bloody cryptic answer. It was a Tian Lung robot, no question. "A thousand words could ill portray the beauty of the one."

  Ema hopped onto the back of the machine as it dipped into the water, leaning her butt on the sun-warmed core. Nearby, a flock of birds scattered as an upright swung into the sky. A cargo spider tucked tufts of green between the waves of tilled loam, its arms a blur of action.

  Yup. Yup. That looks about right. Those are definitely vegetables. Ema nodded self-deprecatingly as if someone could see it. A dragonfly buzzed near her ear, making her flinch.

  She knocked on the cylinder. "Which seeding pass can I blame for this wet hell?"

  "Given fish or tackle, choose tackle. Your betters forbade me from assisting you with your homework."

  "I'm really asking," Ema pouted. What a stodgy poker; was it this mean when talking to its spiders? "A-And could you not start every answer with a chengyu?"

  "Deep roots, solid trunks. Verily, Norilsk was seeded before the reign of His Grace. The depth of organic matter indicates at least 2,000 years of development. Although unspectacular in appearance, these wetlands are a climax ecosystem. Even the little Sparrow has five organs."

  Even the Sparrow... yeah, you're just fucking with me at this point.

  Ema let out a deep breath, watching small white flowers sway in the shadow of a lone cloud. She remembered the hunched figure of Io as she excused herself from the lecture hall, and felt her chest tighten with a penetrating sense of remorse. Taking into account that things had gotten just a little out of control—she looked up and saw an unfamiliar moon hovering in the blue, a chalky reminder of just how far she was from any place she'd call home—there was something ugly and complicated in the way Io carried herself.

  Apparently she'd been a Guard captain of some description on board that drifter ship, but she so obviously chafed at inherent authority. How did that even work? And Ema remembered the tears in her eyes when they'd tried to talk about what happened on Tyumen. Was she just a perfectionist, or was this all a bit too much, too fast?

  Ema closed her eyes and tried to remember a time she'd felt hollow. They'd come to Auriga with the refugees from one of the planned colonies; a passenger hall filled with skeletal bodies, red from the third or fourth reflection of a reaction warhead.

  Her mentor had taken her to tea in one of the small cafes on the upper stratum, placed her small body in a quilted chair while white flower petals stewed in a brass balance. The smell was light and fresh and vegetal. She remembered how the warmth spread through her chest—how the distance between them melted, and how she'd hugged his broad chest and told him how scared she'd been. Ema had no illusions that it wasn't a drug. She tried to recall the name.

  "...Do you think there'd have been Zifflower?" Ema asked the Moonrabbit.

  "In theory," said the literary core. A ring around the base of the cylinder illuminated as it thought and spoke to itself.

  "I'm guessing there's a but."

  "Believed to have grown wild before the Imperial age, Zifflower became nearly extinct for reasons unknown, only blooming about once a lifetime. A bloom has not been recorded in about a century. Historically, most Zifflower tea has been brewed from the same aged stock from the previous harvest, leading to a fluctuation in prices that is most extreme before the next bloom."

  "Do you think we can find some?"

  "It is currently the warm season. It is believed that the dormant pods would need a cold shock to activate, although this alone is not sufficient."

  "I wonder if we could divert some of the spiders and go looking for the pods."

  "This is highly inadvisable."

  "Well, I'm advising you now." The girl clicked her tongue. "Chop chop."

  Ema had the literary core bring her closer to the stand of newer tents in the west, further away from the Academy and 1-H's science cruiser. The black shape of a low rock shelf pierced through the fog, distant and wide. She glanced nervously at the radio on her hip to see if Mica had noticed her moving out from her zone of operations, but it was silent for now.

  One of the machines handed her a hard brown pod about the size of a fist, covered in black mud. Positive identification; the characteristic whorls on the surface, a shape like a knife-blade complete with tang. She raised it to her nose and sniffed. It smelled like dirt, obviously.

  Ema stroked her chin. Getting it to grow might be an interesting distraction until they reached the comms dish in the North, and maybe the cold up there could facilitate some kind of experiment; Fredda might have an idea, what with the hydroponics rig being her responsibility. Now there was a mental image: drug lord Ema, serving a mild disasociative to schoolgirls with scones. But the chemicals wouldn't develop until it actually germinated, so until then it was pretty worthless.

  "Advisory," the core piped up, which nearly made Ema jump in the water. "Seeding Unit 30 has ceased communications unexpectedly. Last position 0.5 li northwest. Replace / recover / retry?"

  That wasn't too far. Ema pointed her finger due northwest as if directing a loyal steed. The literary core obliged, its treads slowly trundling through the shallow water and dappling it with petals of reflected sky. As she approached the seeder's resting place, her initial impression was that it had marooned itself in a particularly deep section of mud, the thin square of its hull half-immersed in the water—but as she drew closer, she quickly picked the radio off her hip and paged Mica.

  "You're not in your zone," Mica whined. "Do you want a bunch of amulets breathing down our necks because you've been slutting it up with their cores?"

  "Listen—" Ema's throat felt dry all of a sudden. "We're alone on this planet, right?"

  Mica grumbled. "Well, there's definitely no Feds. Norilsk is attested from the time of the Emperor, but right now we're the only people that know how to reach it."

  Ema stared down the hole in the side of the Seeder, the blue of the sky visible on the other side. A thin tuft of steam coiled lazily from the wound. She felt a kind of mirror-pain spread across her shoulder—phantom blood running down her armpit.

  Who would do something like this? Ema cupped her fingers over her mouth, holding back tears.

  "You... don't suppose somebody's been living here all that time?"

  "Hmm... They'd have to be some kind of uncontacted tribe, seeing as we didn't detect any heat emissions from orbit. Man, I'd hate to get on their bad side, but we've got a mission to do."

  Ema blinked as a shadow briefly wiped over the core and the grass. Overhead, a wing of Geminis banked westwards, laden with bombs.