CHAPTER 2 BUILDING
CHAPTER 2 — BUILDING
The sun found him first.
Before he opened his eyes. Before he knew he was awake. Warmth moving back into him the way light moves back into a leaf at dawn. Not waking. Coming back on.
Zaro breathed in.
His body remembered how to do that.
He opened his eyes.
The cabin held light the way old rooms hold it — dusty and soft, with bright shafts where the missing window pane let the morning through. He was sitting with his back against the wall, in the same place he'd been when the wet-static had come and gone and he'd said okay to everything that was listening.
A small yellow figure on the floorboards. Knees drawn up. Two arms wrapped loosely around them. About the size of a human child. The shape of a small mammal. His feet against the wood. His hands resting on his knees.
He looked down at one of those hands.
Yellow.
A hand-shape again. Last night, at the worst of it, he'd looked down and the yellow underneath had been showing through his fingers like light through a cupped palm. Now the form held. The color sat where color was supposed to sit.
He flexed once. Small. Warm.
This was the shape he'd chosen.
He'd understood it in the first minutes after the crater. Not slowly. All at once. The things alive in this world had bodies. They would react to his shape before they reacted to anything else. So he had picked one. Deliberately. Small enough not to threaten. Soft enough not to startle. Mammal-shaped, because mammal-shaped things were what this world had learned to love. He had wanted to be welcomed, not feared.
He wasn't sure if it had worked. There was no one here to be afraid of him yet.
The floorboard under his feet pulsed.
Amber. Slow. Patient.
He pressed a toe against it. "Still there?"
The pulse answered. Once.
"Good."
He stood. Stretched — a motion his body didn't need but did anyway, because it felt right, because the stretching was part of the shape he was keeping.
The door was three steps away.
He took them.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Greenbelt in daylight was not the Greenbelt he remembered from the night before.
That forest had been a wall. Black trunks. Distances he couldn't measure. A thing that watched.
This was a place.
Oak trunks stood in the morning with rough bark showing where the sun reached them. Ferns had opened in the clearing between the cabin and the tree line, their small curled hands unfolding into green. Clover thick enough that his feet sank a little when he walked through it. Wildflowers — white and yellow and one patch of pale purple he didn't have a word for — leaning slightly east, toward the light.
Somewhere to his left, water moved over stone.
He stopped on the porch to listen.
The creek ran clean. No static in it. No wrongness. Just a sound the world was making because the world was alive and the water was going somewhere.
The air smelled like warm earth and bark and something sweet he couldn't find the source of. A flower, maybe. Or nothing. Or just summer.
Then he saw the Spark Dust.
Gold flecks across the leaves where the light caught them at the right angle. Faint glitter worked into the bark of the nearest oak. A shimmer across the shallow crater a dozen steps from the porch — brighter there, where the container had broken open and breathed itself into the ground.
The dust didn't glow.
It caught the light and bent it warmer.
He watched a leaf tilt in a small breeze and the gold on it winked out, then caught, then winked out again. Not alive. Just answering. Whatever light found it, it gave back warmer than it took.
He stepped down from the porch.
The clearing sat between the cabin and the creek like a rough circle of light, maybe forty steps across. The crater was a dozen steps to the north, where the ground sloped gently down before flattening out. The tree line closed around it all — oaks mostly, a few birches, the shadows between their trunks still holding the cool of the night.
The dome boundary was ten feet ahead — a line he couldn't see but could feel, the way a hand knows the edge of a table in the dark. Inside the line, the air felt held. A pressure. His pressure. Outside it, the forest was just forest.
He crossed.
The warmth behind him changed. Not gone. Just behind him now, like stepping out of a heated room into air that wasn't cold but wasn't his.
He knelt at the crater's edge.
The soil there was different. Darker. Richer. Threaded with gold where the Spark Dust had worked its way down into the earth and refused to wash out. Ordinary dirt, until the light moved across it, and then — for a second — it looked like an open stone with veins of gold running through it.
He pressed his palm flat against it.
Warm.
Not from the sun. From below.
He sat back on his heels.
The best earth in this clearing was out here. Past the dome. Ten steps past the edge of the only thing between his small safe world and whatever had tested it last night.
He looked at the cabin.
He looked at the crater.
He looked at the dome — the invisible thing he couldn't see and couldn't stop feeling.
"Okay," he said to no one. "Okay."
✦ ✦ ✦
He went back inside and lifted the Seed Core from under the floorboard.
Both hands. Carefully. The way you'd lift a sleeping thing that might wake up if you were clumsy.
It pulsed in his palms. The amber beat from last night — the one he'd coaxed back from the dark with patience and warmth and refused to let go cold again — was steadier now. Not stronger. Steadier. Like it had decided something about him while he slept.
"I know," he said. He didn't know what he knew.
He carried it down the porch steps, through the clover and the daisies, past the edge of the dome. At the crossing he felt the small drop in warmth again. He didn't stop for it.
He knelt in the center of the crater.
The soil gave way when he dug. Not in resistance. In welcome. He made a space with his hands, placed the Seed Core into it, and packed the earth back around it the way you'd tuck a blanket around someone who doesn't know they're cold.
Then he pressed his palms flat and let warmth flow downward.
For a moment, nothing.
Then the Seed Core answered.
He felt it through the soil before he saw it. A small heat under his hands. A pulse — once, twice — and then something moving. Not the Core itself. Something growing out of it. Reaching down. Reaching out.
The ground in front of his knees lit up.
A thin line of gold raced through the dirt, bright enough to glow through the soil from underneath. It branched. Branched again. Two threads of light became four, became eight, racing outward from the crater in every direction like cracks of lightning frozen mid-strike — except they were under the ground, lighting up the Spark Dust embedded in the earth in sequence, one patch then the next then the next, faster than he could follow.
The whole crater bloomed.
For one long second the ground at his knees was a glowing map — every grain of Spark Dust answering the call, the soil itself awake, the gold lines spreading outward past the boundary of the crater and into the soil of the clearing, racing toward the edge of the tree line.
Then they slowed.
Then they steadied.
Then they faded back down into the dirt, leaving the soil ordinary again, except now Zaro could feel the difference under his palms. The roots were there. He couldn't see them anymore, but he knew where they were. The Seed Core had reached out through the earth and found what it needed and connected.
It was rooted now.
His hands stayed flat against the warm dirt for a long time before he could move them.
"...Okay."
The word came out small. He hadn't expected it to take his breath.
The Seed Core pulsed once under the soil. A quiet thank-you.
"Stay safe," he said.
He said it to the dirt, because there was no one else to say it to. He said it because saying it felt like making it more true. He said it because he was starting to understand that he would be saying it a lot, in a lot of places, to a lot of things he couldn't protect.
He stood. Brushed the soil from his palms.
Then, as he turned back toward the cabin, he stopped.
Something at the tree line.
Not a sound. Not a movement he could point to. A presence. The feeling of being watched by something that wasn't in a hurry and wasn't going to show itself. The back of his neck knew it before the rest of him did.
He stood very still.
The forest gave him nothing. No shape between the trunks. No shadow that shouldn't have been there. Just the summer trees, the ordinary shade, the ordinary quiet.
The feeling held for a long slow moment.
Then it let go.
Whatever had been watching stopped watching. Or moved. Or had never been anything at all — except he knew it had been something, the way he knew the dome was real even when he couldn't see it.
He stood there until his breathing slowed.
Then he walked back to the cabin without turning around, because turning around felt like asking a question he didn't want answered yet.
✦ ✦ ✦
The cabin had been empty a long time.
Dust in the corners. One chair sat with a broken leg tilted at an angle that made the whole room look tired. The lamp on the kitchen table held a spiderweb where its glass shade should have been clean. The missing window pane let the morning in and would let the night in too.
Zaro put his hand flat against the wall nearest the door.
The wood was cold. Dry in the way old dry wood is dry — the kind of dry that doesn't come back without help.
He let his warmth flow into it.
Not heat. Not a thing that burned. A slow steady giving, the way sun on a stone works over a long afternoon. The grain took it. He could feel the wood take it. Fibers that had been holding each other loosely for decades tightening again, remembering what they were supposed to do.
The wall didn't change much. It wasn't that kind of work. It just became a little more itself.
He moved to the next section. Did it again.
Somewhere around the second wall he noticed something.
He wasn't getting tired.
He stopped. Held his hand up. Looked at it in the light from the doorway.
Bright. The yellow sat where it was supposed to sit.
The sun was on him through the open door. The light was coming in and the warmth was going out, and the two were matching each other the way a cup under a tap stays full.
He understood something, even if he couldn't quite say it in words.
In the daylight, with the sun on him, the small work was free.
Not free-free. He could feel that if he pushed harder, faster, bigger — it would tip. But a wall at a time, a board at a time, slow and careful — the sun was paying for it.
He worked through the morning.
The porch railing took an hour. The kitchen wall took two. The window frame he sealed with a thin shimmer of warmth, almost solid, clear enough to let the light through but firm enough to keep the air out. The broken chair he left for later; the leg needed a piece of wood he didn't have, and warmth alone couldn't make wood out of nothing.
By midday the cabin felt different.
Not new. Not fixed up. Just — held.
He stood in the middle of the main room and looked at what he'd done. The walls stood straighter. The air stayed where you put it now, instead of leaking out. The lamp on the table sat dark but clean; he'd warmed the spiderweb out of its shade an hour ago and put the shade back on.
He pressed a thumb to the lamp's base. Let the smallest trickle of warmth down into whatever was left of the bulb.
The light came on.
Amber. Steady. The same color the Seed Core had found last night.
Zaro looked at it for a long moment.
Then he sat down on the floor in the doorway, in the sun, and closed his eyes, and let the light work.
Late in the afternoon a deer came to the edge of the clearing.
A doe. Brown with a white throat, thin legs folded carefully as she stepped out of the tree line and lowered her head to the grass. She stopped a few feet shy of the dome's edge. Raised her head. Looked at the cabin.
Looked at him.
Zaro went still.
The doe watched him for maybe ten seconds. Her ears swiveled forward. Her nose worked at the air. Whatever she was reading — the warmth, the shape of him, the shimmer of the dome between them — didn't make her run.
She lowered her head again and went back to eating.
Zaro stood in the doorway and watched her for a long time.
The first living thing in this world that had seen him and stayed.
He didn't say anything to her. He was afraid if he moved, she'd leave. So he just stood there and let her be a deer, and let himself be whatever she thought he was, until she finally wandered off into the trees on her own time and took some small piece of the day with her.
After she was gone he pressed his palm against the doorframe and smiled, very faintly.
The shape was working.
✦ ✦ ✦
On the second day he tried to make the dome bigger.
He stood in the middle of the cabin, closed his eyes, and reached.
The dome answered.
He felt it go — pushing slowly outward, past the porch, past the clearing, reaching toward the crater where the Seed Core had already pushed a pale green shoot up through the soil.
For a second it was beautiful. The whole safe space growing. The tree coming inside the circle.
Then the trouble started.
His hands started to feel light.
He looked down at them.
The yellow at his fingertips was coming loose.
Tiny flecks of light were drifting off the edges of his fingers, floating up into the air like sparks rising off a fire. Not painful. Not even strange-feeling. Just wrong. His hand was supposed to end where his hand ended, and right now it didn't. The edges had gone soft. The light underneath was leaking out.
He looked at his arm. Same thing. The shape of him was coming apart at the edges, slowly, one bright fleck at a time, like a body made of sand starting to blow away in a wind he couldn't feel.
His chest pulled tight.
He understood, all at once, what was happening.
The dome was too big. He was making more dome than the sun could pay for. The extra was coming out of him. Out of his shape. Out of whatever held the yellow together in the form of a small thing standing in a doorway.
If he held it longer, he would come apart.
He let go.
The dome snapped back to its small size and the relief was a physical thing — a held breath let out, a weight set down. The flecks of light around his hands stopped drifting. They drew back in. The yellow at his fingertips gathered itself together and the edges sharpened and his hand was a hand again.
He stared at it.
He turned it over.
Solid. Whole. The same hand he'd looked at this morning, except now he knew what it could lose.
"Okay," he said, quietly. "Okay."
He sat down in the doorway. Put his face in the sun. Didn't move for a long time.
Then, later — after the shake in his chest had settled, after the yellow in him had steadied — he stood up and tried again.
Just a little. Just to see if maybe it had been a one-time thing.
It wasn't.
The flecks came off his fingers faster this time. He let go before he had to.
He sat back down hard.
"Okay," he said. Quieter still. Something that was almost anger but not quite — the kind of anger you have at a rule that doesn't care whether you like it. "I heard you."
The dome stayed small that day.
And every day after.
✦ ✦ ✦
The shelf happened later.
He didn't plan it. He found a stone on his way back from the creek that afternoon — flat, palm-sized, smooth on one side and rough on the other, with a single pale line of quartz running through it like a scar that had healed white.
He held it for a while before he realized he didn't want to put it down.
He brought it back to the cabin and set it on the shelf above the stove, where the morning sun would reach it.
Over the next days he added others.
A piece of the container shell — thin, curved, faintly iridescent — he found half-buried in the crater soil and finally took, after walking past it three times. It didn't pulse. It didn't glow. Whatever had lived in the shell had broken open and gone into the dust and the soil, and the shell itself was just a piece of material that remembered being something else. He held it in his hand and something in his chest did a small slow turn — not memory, he didn't have memory before the crater, but something shaped like it. Proof, maybe, that there had been a before, even if the rest of it had burned away in the fall.
He put the shell fragment on the shelf next to the stone.
A green shard of bottle glass from the creek bank, worn round by water until it was softer than the stone.
A forked branch the tree dropped during its third day of growing.
A feather he didn't know the bird for, long and cream-colored and faintly barred with brown.
None of them were anything.
Arranged on the shelf, in the morning light, they were everything.
He stood in front of them on the fourth morning and understood, without having the words ready, that these were the first things in this world that were his because he had chosen them.
Not because they had been given to him.
Not because they had crashed into him.
Chosen.
✦ ✦ ✦
The tree grew faster than it should have.
Not magic. Not overnight. But faster than anything in the surrounding forest, fed by the Spark Dust in the soil and the warmth he brought to its base every morning.
Day one: a pale green shoot, the width of a finger, trembling.
Day two: knee-high. Already getting bark, which was wrong — saplings didn't do that — which meant this wasn't going to grow like saplings grew.
Day three: past his shoulder. Leaves opening. Branches reaching.
Day four: taller than he was. The trunk had thickened into something that would stand through wind. The leaves were green but the green went deep — as if the color didn't stop at the surface, as if it kept going somewhere before it came back.
He stood at the base each morning and pressed his palm to the bark. The tree drank what he gave it. The sun paid the bill. The cost to him was small as long as he kept it small and kept it patient.
"Hey," he'd say. "You're taller."
He talked to the tree the way he'd talked to the Seed Core. The way he talked to the cabin. The way he talked to himself. Silence felt like giving up, and there was no one else here, and if nobody was going to say anything then he'd say it.
"You know you're outside, right? You know that."
The tree moved a little in the wind.
He rested his forehead against the bark. It was warm.
"I can't move the dome. I tried. It just—" He let the sentence go. "Stay safe."
He said it every morning.
He meant it every morning.
He said it because meaning it once wasn't enough.
✦ ✦ ✦
The wall broke on the fourth night.
Not loudly. A soft sigh of wood giving up, somewhere around two in the morning, somewhere in the kitchen, and he woke to the sound and a small change in the air pressure inside the cabin.
He lay still for a second before he got up.
In the kitchen, plaster dust had settled on the floor in a pale half-moon. The patch of wall he'd spent an entire afternoon on — the one he'd been proud of, the one he'd pressed his palm against and said good to before moving on — had come apart along its old cracks. Not collapsed. Just opened up again. The fixing hadn't held.
He stood there in the dark with his form a little dimmer than it had been in the day. The sun was gone. Anything he did now would come out of what he'd stored.
He looked at the broken section.
He thought about the afternoon he'd spent on it. The care. The warmth. The way he'd thought it was done.
It hadn't been done.
It had been pretending to be done, the way tired old things pretend when you ask them to.
For a second something hot came up in him — not anger at the wall, not really, but at himself for believing the wall was fixed. At the world for not playing along. At the fact that this was going to keep happening, and happening, and happening, because nothing he built was going to stay built on the first try.
He breathed out. Long and slow.
"...Alright."
He knelt. Put his hands against the wood.
Again.
Not the same word as giving up. A different word, that sounded like giving up, but meant something else.
He worked slower this time. Less force. Less sure of himself. More patient with the fact that wood this old wasn't going to be fixed in one pass.
When he finished, the wall held better.
He didn't say good.
He stood up, looked at his work, and went back to the mat in the main room. He lay down. Closed his eyes. Let the yellow go quiet.
The sun would be back in a few hours.
He would need it.
✦ ✦ ✦
Fifty miles east of the Greenbelt, in a suburb where the lawns were trimmed and the Wi-Fi was fast, a fifteen-year-old girl named Mina Patel sat in her bedroom flying a drone she had built herself.
The drone was three miles away. Two hundred feet above the canopy. She couldn't hear it. She couldn't see it with her own eyes. She could only see what its camera saw — a small bright window of green forest on the screen attached to the controller in her hands.
She'd been flying it every morning for four days.
She was looking for something nobody else knew was there.
It had started on Sunday at 6:47 a.m., when one of her drone's sensors had picked up a signal she couldn't explain. Not weather. Not a cell tower. Not a downed satellite. Just a warm spot on a cold map, somewhere deep in the forest, somewhere past the logging road, somewhere nothing was supposed to be.
It was still there now.
It hadn't moved in four days.
Her bedroom was the kind of bedroom parents don't fully understand. Circuit boards stacked where other girls kept books. A whiteboard with equations half-erased and half-finished. The blinds were drawn three-quarters down against the morning because the glare on her controller screen at this hour was brutal. Her laptop sat open on the desk to her left, showing a second view of the drone's camera and a scrolling log of every reading the sensor had pulled since Sunday.
Her mother thought she was doing a school project. Her father thought she was building a quadcopter for the science fair. Both of those things were technically true. Neither of them was what she was actually doing.
She was hunting.
The controller in her hands was the same model her cousin had bought her two birthdays ago — except hers no longer looked the way it had when she'd unwrapped it. The grips were wrapped in athletic tape. A small metal heat sink was glued to the side, because she'd burned out the original one pushing the unit harder than its manufacturer had ever planned for. Two extra switches sat below the standard sticks, wired in by hand. Her thumbprints had worn shiny patches into the plastic where her hands lived.
The drone itself had started as an off-the-shelf hobbyist quadcopter. Eight months ago. She'd been rebuilding it ever since. New firmware she'd written from scratch. Custom sensors she'd added one at a time, with parts ordered in small enough batches that her parents wouldn't ask — sensors that could pick up things most consumer drones couldn't even tell were there. From twenty feet away the drone still looked like any drone you'd buy at a hobby store. Up close it was hers, down to every wire and bracket.
She'd run the strange signal against every dataset she could find — university-public, government-public, one she probably wasn't supposed to have — and gotten nothing. No match. The signal didn't match anything in the world.
She had to go look.
She just had to find the middle of it first.
"Hold altitude," she said under her breath. Her right thumb adjusted by a fraction.
The drone held.
The signal was there again. Stronger today. Whatever it was hadn't moved, and she was getting better at finding the middle of it.
She inched the drone northwest. Her eyes flicked to the laptop — the reading climbing — then back to the controller screen.
The reading climbed higher.
She leaned forward.
The drone clipped a branch.
The hit was soft — barely a jolt through the feed — but the propeller caught and the drone yawed hard left, spinning half a turn before lodging in the crook of an oak branch thirty feet up.
Mina's hands froze.
"No."
Flat. No panic in the word. She was already thinking.
She tilted the controller's flip-up screen to kill the glare and looked: rotor speeds, tilt angle, what the propeller arm could take, wind direction, the angle of the branch against the left rear arm. All the numbers she'd added to the firmware herself, all visible on a screen the size of a paperback book.
She ran the math.
If she reversed the rotor hard enough to free the propeller, the arm might snap. If the arm snapped, the drone would fall thirty feet onto roots and stone. The chassis was custom. The sensor array was custom. She'd spent three weeks getting it right with a borrowed oscilloscope and a lot of coffee.
The numbers said wait.
Her hands said now.
She didn't know why her hands said now. Her hands were sometimes wrong. But they were right often enough that she'd learned to listen to them when the numbers were close.
She pulsed the rear rotor at seventy percent.
The drone shook. The propeller scraped against bark — an ugly sound through the feed, the kind of sound that makes you wince before you even think. Then it caught air.
Free.
She brought it down in a slow drift, cleared the branch by inches, and put it down soft in a clearing fifty meters from the logging road.
She let out a long, quiet breath.
"Ha."
The word came out of her mouth before she decided to say it. Half win, half relief. She sat back in the chair. Looked at the ceiling for a second. Laughed once — a short tired laugh, the kind you do when you've scared yourself and you want to pretend you haven't.
Then she leaned back into the screen.
The signal was still there. It hadn't moved. It hadn't cared that she'd almost lost her drone. It sat in the data like something patient. Something that had nowhere else to be.
She zoomed in.
There was something inside the signal she hadn't seen before. A thread of gold in the readings — not a color, the data wasn't colored, but that was the word that landed in her head when she looked at it. Gold. Warm. A signal inside the signal.
She stared at it.
Then she did something automatic — a habit she'd developed during long flights. She tapped the controller to pull up the last thirty seconds of camera footage. Just to confirm the drone was undamaged. Just to look at the canopy where it had landed.
The forest below was green.
Then she scrubbed back two seconds.
For one frame — just one — there was a small bright catch of light in the canopy. A glint. Like sunlight off something metal. Or off something else.
She paused the playback.
Stared.
Zoomed in.
Pixels. Just pixels. Whatever it had been was gone in the next frame.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she put it out of her mind, because it was probably a leaf, or a bit of foil from someone's old camping trash, or a reflection off water. Forests had a thousand things in them that caught the light wrong. One frame of one drone fly-by didn't mean anything.
She didn't delete the footage.
She put it in a folder. Just in case.
"What are you," she said to the readout.
The data didn't answer.
She was going to have to go look.
She picked up her phone. Opened the thread with Kai.
She typed: come over. you'll want to see this.
She watched the three dots come up almost instantly, the way they always did when Kai was at his bench and his phone was within reach.
omw
She put the phone face-down on the desk.
✦ ✦ ✦
She heard the kitchen door before she heard him on the stairs.
Her mother's voice from downstairs — bright, unsurprised: "Kai, sweetheart, you eaten?"
"Already did, Mrs. P. Thank you."
"Mina's upstairs."
"Yeah, I figured."
His sneakers on the wooden steps. He didn't bother knocking on her door. He never did. Mina didn't bother looking up when it opened.
There was a smear of dark grease at the base of his left thumb. A fresh solder burn on the pad. A thin line of iron filings in the creases of his right knuckles. He'd been in his garage workshop already this morning — he'd been trying for two weeks to get a salvaged motor to run on the kind of power his electromagnetic crane could supply without overheating, and Kai didn't stop a problem until the problem stopped him.
"Show me," he said.
She kept her eyes on the screen. "Look."
He came around behind her chair. His hands — his hands were never still; his hands were a separate animal that needed something to do at all times — had found a small disc magnet on her desk and pressed it against the steel hinge of her laptop. He pulled it off. Pressed it back. Pulled it off again. Slow, even. He'd done this with a hundred magnets in a hundred rooms; it was how his hands listened.
He leaned closer to the screen. Then, without looking, reached past her and tilted the laptop hinge a few degrees back.
"Your glare's killing the contrast," he said.
She hadn't noticed the glare. She did now.
He looked at her, then at the controller resting on the desk beside the laptop. The timestamp on the playback was still up. He could see the camera feed — paused on the moment the propeller had caught.
"You hit a tree."
"I did not hit a tree. The drone encountered a branch."
"Sure."
"It is not the same thing."
"Sure."
She gave him the flattest look she had.
He was already past it, leaning closer to the screen.
"That's new," he said, looking at the signal on the laptop.
"That's new."
"How long?"
"Four days."
"I mean before that. Has it ever pinged before?"
"No. Sunday morning, six forty-seven. Cold before that. Warm since."
He looked at her.
"You've been sitting on it for four days."
"I've been checking."
"Mina."
"What."
"Four days."
"I had to be sure."
He sighed through his nose. "Right. Sorry. Forgot who I was talking to."
She didn't smile. But she didn't argue either, which from Mina was the same thing.
He let it go. He usually did, with her. Not because he agreed. Because arguing with Mina about her process was like arguing with a thermometer about the temperature.
"Where is it?" he said.
"Deep. Past the logging road. Past anything anyone I can access has ever scanned."
"Source?"
"I don't know."
"Guess."
"I don't guess."
He moved the magnet from the laptop hinge to a steel screw on the desk and back. Slower now. She knew the shift; it meant he was thinking, not fidgeting.
"If you don't guess," he said, "what do you call what you did when you pulsed the rotor at seventy percent just now instead of waiting for the wind?"
She paused.
"That's different."
"Okay."
"It is."
"I said okay."
She looked at him. He was looking at the magnet, very faintly grinning.
"Shut up," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
"Probably."
She turned back to the screen. The signal sat there, warm and patient and refusing to be weather or rock or interference. Kai leaned over her shoulder to read the numbers.
He was quiet for a few seconds.
"That's not a thing," he said finally.
"I know."
"I mean — that doesn't match anything."
"I know."
"So we go look."
"We go look."
He nodded once. Short. Decision made before he'd finished saying it. Kai was the opposite of her on almost everything that wasn't math. Where she checked, he committed. Where she ran simulations, he went outside and found out. He was wrong more often than she was. He was also, every now and then, right in ways she couldn't get to from behind a desk.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow."
He stood. Pocketed the disc magnet without thinking — the same way another kid would have pocketed a phone, or a wallet, or keys. It went into his jeans next to a small Allen wrench and a folded paper sleeve of spare washers and whatever else he'd had on him when he'd walked out his door this morning.
Then, almost as an afterthought, he scanned her desk. Picked up an empty glass vial from the cluster of components by her monitor — one of the small ones she used for spare screws — and pocketed that too.
"What's that for," she said.
"In case there's something to put in it."
She didn't argue.
He paused at the door.
"Your drone okay?"
"It's fine."
"Because if you need me to—"
"I said it's fine."
He grinned. Headed down the stairs. The kitchen door opened and closed and the room was quiet in the way it always was after Kai left — too quiet, the air a little emptier than it should have been.
From downstairs, her mother's voice: "Mina! Lunch!"
She didn't move at first.
She was already pulling the camera footage folder back up.
The frame was still there. The glint was still there. Just one bright pixel-cluster in a sea of green canopy.
Probably nothing.
She closed the folder.
She opened the signal readout instead. The thread of gold was still there. Small. Warm. Waiting.
Somewhere out in the Greenbelt, fifty miles away and a little northwest of anywhere anyone had ever thought to look, something was making a signal that did not match any known thing in the world.
She stared at the warm spot on the cold map for a long time.
Then she saved the file. Closed the laptop halfway. Stood.
Whatever was in the Greenbelt would still be there after lunch.
At the doorway she paused and looked back — at the controller, the laptop, the signal still glowing faintly on the screen.
Tomorrow, she thought.
Then she went downstairs.
✦ ✦ ✦