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Signy had registered what Cora was talking about, but she’d slipped into one of those moments where she didn’t really care what Cora was talking about, so long as she kept talking. Signy pulled herself back into focus. “You have the nicest face,” she said. “You just have the nicest face.”
Cora laughed, blushed, pushed her hand back through her thick crop of hair the way that she did when she felt bashful. “Same face I always have,” she said.
“Mhm,” Signy approved.
Cora leaned forward, closing the distance between them. She kissed Signy brightly, cupping her cheek with her free hand.
It never got old. They were starting to get old, maybe. Kissing never would.
Signy laced her voice with the part of herself beginning to glow and deepen. “There . . . is something I’d like to do, before you start thinking too much about cauliflower.” She put her palm on Cora’s upper thigh and bit her lower lip.
Cora’s eyes were brown, but sometimes, when they widened, Signy could catch little flecks of gold. “Yeah?” Cora said with a sunny smile. She slid her hand down, tracing calloused fingers over Signy’s apron strings, then past them to her bare hip. “And what’s that?”
Oh, the buzz between them was delicious. Signy savored it as though she were licking the jam spoon clean. She kissed Cora again, then looked her in the eye and said: “I want to go see how the carrots are getting along.”
Cora’s laugh was loud and brash. She scoffed, tossed her head, pulled away. “Tease,” she said with fake offense.
Signy shrugged innocently. “And then if you want to have sex, I’m sure we can pencil it in somewhere, though I do have this fertilizer question—”
“You fucking tease,” Cora said, throwing a napkin at her. “Go put on some pants.” She began to stack the empty dishes in a martyred way. “I make you a nice breakfast, I bring it all the way here, I—mmph.”
Whatever Cora’s next words were, Signy swallowed them.
A moment passed. They nuzzled noses, pressed foreheads, held close. Held still.
“Would you come look at the carrots with me?” Signy asked, genuinely this time.
The gold in Cora’s eyes sparkled. “I’d love to,” she said.
Chapter 9 Signy, Fortune
ATTENTION, the automated warning demanded of her, as it did every time. THIS SOFTWARE CAN ONLY BE USED BY ORGANIC FABRICATORS WITH VALID LICENSES. PLEASE SCAN YOUR LICENSE NOW.
Signy took her license from the pocket of her skirt and swiped it through the scanner attached beneath her monitor.
LICENSE ACCEPTED, the screen read. PLEASE VERIFY YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE TERMS OF USE.
Signy mindlessly tapped her way through the prompts that followed. Yes, she would only use genetic templates approved by the Berth City Government Agricultural Bureau. No, she would not fabricate anything designed to cause harm or that could be used for malicious purposes. Yes, she would submit a full report of all fabricated seeds to the Agricultural Bureau every two weeks for review, and yes, she understood that tampering with her report would lead to a loss of her license as well as criminal prosecution.
Some of her answers were honest. The ones that weren’t didn’t concern her a bit. She’d yet to have a tampered report flagged, and moreover, she understood how the Ag Bureau’s screening process worked. They weren’t scanning for genome edits as subtle as hers. They were looking for new species, major deviations, crop strains that could disrupt the food supply, unauthorized canvas plants that would produce fully synthesized compounds more or less ready to bottle at extraction. And sure, the Bureau did sometimes go looking for individual ingredients hidden away in ordinary-looking plants, but Signy had a copy of that hit list. The things that would get a report flagged were the building blocks for recreational drugs, not heart medicine and T-blockers, and she was very, very careful to not use any triggering chemicals in her recipes. Sometimes, that required finding creative work-arounds, which just made her job all the more enjoyable. She didn’t do this work for fun, of course—but all the same, who didn’t like a puzzle?
Chapter 771 Signy, Cypsela
The vault garden was a far stricter environment than the test garden. There were no makeshift meadows, no vines crawling along the floor. This cavern had been segmented into planters and plots, many of them tented with transparent covers and paired with air purifiers, in an attempt to keep anything airborne from wandering. Signy wore gloves as a rule in this place (as did Cora), and there were no bees in here. Any required pollination had to be done by hand, which was incredibly tedious, but such was science, sometimes.
She didn’t tend this place alone, or solely with Cora. Little fist-sized robots trundled along the paths, taking soil measurements and misting leaves. Signy’s apprentices from elsewhere in the Ring—the rookies, Cora called them, the newbies, the kiddos, the cubs, even though every single one of them was over the age of twenty—came to Cypsela periodically for hands-on training and big workdays. Much as Signy liked to have her own space, her own curated peace and quiet, she did love the energy of a garden full of sweating, bustling people, and she was constantly, daily, forever glad to not be doing any of this on her own anymore.
God, it had been so much work for such little yield, in the old days.
She crouched down beside a plot containing a new strain of sweet peppers. “Did you dose this one last week?”
“Yeah. Why, is it still looking peaky?”
“Come look,” Signy said with a slight frown. The leaves were limp and flimsy, crunching brown at the tips. She’d ruled out both bacterial and fungal infections, and she definitely hadn’t been underwatering.
Cora knelt next to her. “Ah, shit. I used the spray, just like you said—”
Signy waved off the needless apology as she examined one leaf after another. “It’s not your fault. And it’s not the soil, and it’s not the irrigation, either.” She sighed. “It’s something about this strain in these conditions, but I cannot figure out what.”
