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“It’s so nice here,” she said, looking at the plants surrounding them. It was kind of silly, leaving the gardens at home to come hang out in a different garden, but it was a different garden. Sometimes, switching over to a different patch of green was just what you needed to put your head right. On Cypsela, everything except the test garden and the nook grew in rows, but here, the pharmaceuticals team had planted their medicine garden in a single soothing spiral, with individual species neatly labeled and grouped. The air was good, and the ceiling was tall.

Signy took a sip of her tea—black tea, which Cora still didn’t like, even after years of trying. “Their pea plants are coming up well,” she said. “I always had such trouble with that one.”

Cora locked her fingers around Signy’s, anchoring herself and swelling with pride. When Signy said she had trouble with that one, she didn’t mean that species. She meant that template, because these peas, like so many other things growing here, were one of Signy’s pharmaceutical designs. Not everything in the medicine garden was. Some of it was straight from the Primer. Some was other folks’ work. But even that was largely built off of Signy’s designs, or used her techniques.

When the Ring was first being settled, Cora and Signy had talked at length about whether they should live on Lodestone—whether Signy should oversee the med clinic’s garden directly. The job was made with her in mind, and it would’ve been hers if she’d said yes. But she’d made the good point that keeping all your veggies in one basket was never a good idea. Cypsela’s medicine garden served as a fallback for Lodestone’s, and that was enough to satisfy Signy, as far as medicine went. Her real interest these days was the seed vault. She was so happy, doing that work, and that made Cora happy in turn.

In Cora’s opinion, Signy was too modest about what she’d provided to Lodestone (and, by extension, the entire Ring). If she hadn’t had trouble with peas that made blood sugar stabilizers, they wouldn’t be growing here at all. If she hadn’t engineered at least ten of the other plants around them, the other thirty wouldn’t be here, either. And maybe, maybe Lodestone would’ve figured out how to grow canvas plants and manufactured this stuff the way the Primer intended, but a garden like this one was just better, Cora thought. Canvas plants needed weird light and weird climate controls and all kinds of other fussy bullshit. You couldn’t sit in a canvas plant garden and drink mint tea.

Cora put her arm around Signy’s shoulders, pulled her in close, kissed the top of her head. She breathed in the scent of her wife’s hair and floated on top of her own ebbing pain. It was the finest privilege she’d ever had, blending their lives like this. Even when she got sick. Even when the day didn’t go quite as planned. They were still together, and that beat everything else.

In through the nose, out through the mouth.

“Tell me five kinds of pie,” Signy said.

Cora smiled, always touched that Signy remembered this trick. “Strawberry rhubarb, blueberry, apple, peanut butter, and . . . strawberry.”

“You already said strawberry.”

“Strawberry rhubarb is a whole different situation.”

Signy smirked. “Fine. Tell me five items of clothing.”

“Shirt, pants, socks, bra, underwear.”

“Too easy. Tell me five movies you like.”

“Ooh, okay. Uh, let’s see . . . One Restless Summer. Short Bread. Comfort. The Lemon Tree. A Pair of Laces. The Woman with a Big Sword—”

“That’s six.”

“Oh.” Cora chuckled. “I guess I like a lot of movies.”

Signy kissed Cora’s forehead. “And I like you.”

Chapter 38 Cora, Fortune

. . . I got us a bit of boar, a bit of elk, and a bit of humpback whale,” Otto said as he rolled a ball of cookie dough between his palms. “Distorted them, added the air filter from my dentist’s office, of all things, and turned it into a nice layer cake. Now, I don’t know what you’d make of it, but we thought that made for a pretty good rorqual.”

Cora chuckled, likewise rolling dough, likewise wearing an apron dusted with flour. Outside, it was pissing down rain, but at Otto and fam’s, it was hard to care. A pan of mycoloaf was browning deliciously in the oven. A pile of chopped-up broccoli was ready for roasting. Cora had loved every second spent mixing and measuring, even though she still sucked at it. If someone had told her a year prior she’d be learning how to cook, she would’ve looked at them like their head was on sideways, but to her perpetual surprise, she was getting a real kick out of it. It was so much better to eat Otto’s food than takeout or whatever the cafeteria was serving that day. She’d even found herself thinking about using the dorm kitchen to make quick dinners sometimes, which was a crazy idea. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen anybody use the kitchen, except to chill drinks.

“Well, I’d love to give it a listen,” Cora remarked on Otto’s herd of wild rorquals. He, too, was a kick. “You could’ve gone with a heartbeat, though.”

Otto paused as he set a ball of dough down on the baking sheet. “What?”

“You can hear a rorqual’s heartbeat, when you’re in the saddle,” Cora explained. “Up through the floor of the craft, where it comes in contact with them. It’s like this, um . . .” She thought about how to explain a background noise that, to her, was as normal as could be. “This sort of drumming that hums all through the metal. I can’t really imitate it. But it’s powerful, and slow. Only happens once or twice a minute.”

The old man stared at her. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. He took another pinch from the bowl of dough resting between them on the counter. “I didn’t even know they had hearts. I guess I never thought about it.”

“They’ve got five hearts,” Cora said. She set down her dough ball on the baking sheet. It was so easy to tell hers (wobbly, uneven) from his (uniform, perfect). “But, they’re not hearts like ours. Different structure, different tissues. Same basic idea, though. Pumps nutrients around and clears the junk out.”

“I’ll be damned,” Otto repeated. He shook his head and snitched a bite of dough, thinking as he chewed. “I’d still say we made the right call, though. With the animal sounds.”

Cora took Otto’s sampling as permission to do the same. The dough was sticky with sorghum syrup and rich with bread spread. It tasted as good as warm laundry felt. “Oh, for sure. I’m sure it was a good sound you cooked up.”

Otto shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. A heartbeat—not everybody likes the sound of a heartbeat. Some people find it soothing, but others get squeamish. And those aren’t the right feelings for that scene. It was supposed to be full of wonder, wildness—not make people sleepy, and not make them feel gross. If you only have two seconds to communicate the idea of animal to someone, what would do it better for you—a heartbeat, or a roar?”

Cora considered this. “A roar, I guess.” And what a dumb answer that was. She spent a ton of time with one animal species in particular, and she knew exactly what it sounded like. She’d never been around an animal that roared—or vocalized at all, for that matter—and yet . . . yet she’d grown up listening to the kinds of shows that Otto and his husband made together. She’d listened to the aunts and uncles and auntcles at Heartwise read stories about Earth. She’d watched movies from the Primer, and . . . yeah. Yeah, a roar was right. Animals roared.