Page 33 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“You’re really good at this.”

“I know.” I grin at her, meaning it, no false modesty in it today. “Feels good to say that out loud instead of waiting for somebody else to notice first.”

The day tests me more than I let on. Around noon, the second baler jams hard enough that I have to make a call fast, splitting the remaining crew between two smaller machines instead of waiting on repairs, reshuffling half my schedule on the fly while forty volunteers wait for direction. Around two, a sudden gust nearly takes down half the tent Dot’s set up over the food table, and I’m the one who gets there first, hauling the pole back upright before it can do real damage, barking out instructions that people actually listen to without questioning.

By late afternoon, the fields that looked half-hopeless three weeks ago are stripped clean, pumpkins stacked and sorted, crates loaded onto trucks bound for both the festival supply and Wren’s own stall inventory.

Around four, Silas finds me at the scale wagon, ledger open, doing math he’s clearly redone three times already based on the look on his face.

“We’re going to hit it,” he says, like he still doesn’t quite trust the number. “Co-op’s minimum. Combined tonnage, both farms together. Going to clear it, maybe by a couple dozen pounds, if that last field comes in the way it’s tracking.”

I don’t know the full extent of what that number means to him. But I know enough right now, watching him stare at a column of figures like it might change if he blinks, to see what it’s doing to him. Something loosening in Silas that’s been wound tight.

“That’s good, right?” I ask. “That’s a good thing?”

“It’s the biggest thing,” he says, and doesn’t explain further, just closes the ledger and goes back to work. But he’s got a different set to his shoulders for the rest of the afternoon which makes me happy.

Somebody starts a fire in the burn pit as the light goes golden, and the whole crowd settles into that satisfied exhaustion that comes after a real day’s work done well, together.

“That patch by the south fence,” Pete says, wandering past with a plate of Dot’s pie, nodding toward the section that’s been thriving since before Wren ever set foot on this land. “Never seen pumpkins come in that size this early in a season. Whatever Eleanor was doing with that corner, somebody ought to bottle it.”

“Good soil,” I say, same answer everybody’s been giving all season, though something in the back of my head snags on it a little harder than it used to.

He shrugs, unbothered, and wanders off toward the fire. I let the thought go, it’s easier to enjoy the day than chase down a question I don’t have the patience to answer right now.

Wren’s asked me about it too, more than once, even mentioned a soil test kit that came back useless, a notebook of Eleanor’s she’d already gone through twice looking for an answer that wasn’t there. Didn’t think much of it at the time, just another odd thing about a farm that’s been full of them since the day she got here. I think about it a little longer than I mean to, watching the fire, before somebody hands me a plate and the thought slides away again.

The volunteers peel off in twos and threes as full dark sets in, waving goodbyes, loading trucks, Pete finally corralling his teenage crew back toward town with a promise of pizza that gets them moving faster than eight hours of fence work managed all day.

By the time the crowd’s thinned to almost nothing, it’s mostly just us left around the burn pit. The five of us and Dot, who’s decided the leftover cider’s not going to drink itself and has planted herself in a lawn chair with no apparent intention of leaving anytime soon.

“Somebody explain to me,” Dot says, pointing her cup at Cal, “why this one’s smiling. I’ve known you since you were knee-high to a fence post, Callum Ashworth, and I don’t believe I’ve seen you smile unprompted more than four times in thirty years.”

“I’m not smiling.”

“You’re smiling.”

“It’s the firelight. Tricks the eye.”

“Uh-huh.” Dot doesn’t look remotely convinced, and neither do I, watching him sit there with his forearms braced on his knees, something loose and unguarded in his shoulders that wasn’t there this morning.

“Leave him alone,” Silas says, not looking up from where he’s methodically stacking crates that don’t strictly need stacking yet, his hands needing a job even when the day’s over. “Man’s allowed one good day a year.”

“That an official ration, or you just protecting him because you’re both allergic to being teased?”

“Bit of both.”

Asher’s stretched out on his back near the fire, hands laced behind his head, more relaxed than I’ve seen him look in weeks. “For the record,” he says, to the sky rather than anybody in particular, “I’ve been smiling all day and nobody’s said a word about it.”

“Nobody’s surprised by yours,” Dot says. “That’s the difference. Yours is an everyday occurrence. His is a solar eclipse.”

Wren laughs at that, curled up on an overturned crate with a blanket around her shoulders that I’m fairly sure is actually mine, gone missing from my truck sometime this afternoon and never returned. Nobody’s mentioned it. I’m declining to be the person who does this. I like the look of it wrapped around her.

“You’re all ridiculous,” she says. “I want that on record too.”

“Comprehensively,” Silas agrees, dropping down beside the fire, close enough to Wren that their shoulders brush, not quite reaching for her hand but close enough that the gap reads more like restraint than distance. “Been ridiculous a lot longer than you’ve known us. You’re just getting the concentrated version, on account of there finally being somebody worth performing for.”

“I don’t think that’s a compliment.”