Read As You Wake, Break the Shell Online Free by Becky Chambers

Chapter 23 Signy, Fortune

Signy stood under the overhang of the apartment block’s front door, a borrowed tote bag slung over her shoulder, containing a tub of leftover dumpling soup. The rain was easing up, but the street was slippery and caustic. She was not eager to catch the ferry.

She eyed her shop front, just a quick dash ahead. Surely it was more sensible to spend the night there. So often, the ferries were delayed on nights like this. Surely the smart thing was to stay put.

This was an excuse, and Signy knew it. The truth was that the puzzle of what sort of plant could you disguise tobacco as had been tugging at her ever since she’d mentioned it to Otto. Her shop was right here. Her work was right here. She didn’t want to wait until morning, with a stupid commute on either end. She wanted to dive straight in and let her thoughts fly.

She had reasons for not wanting to make a habit of spending nights at the shop—good reasons. But when she pulled her phone from her barrier jacket pocket and saw an automated text letting her know that her ferry had been delayed twenty minutes due to ongoing weather conditions, it took zero effort for Signy to toss her good reasons aside and hurry across the street.

Once through the airlock and out of her protective gear, she beelined for the haven awaiting her behind the counter, pausing only to toss Ramona’s lucky turtle into the drawer with the rest. She placed her precious cargo of soup into the fridge, put the kettle on, and waited impatiently for the seed printer’s computer to warm up.

Signy needed to warm up, too. The shop was chilly at night—intentionally so. Plants did not understand the indoors. They did not understand clocks or calendars. They processed their surroundings, in part, through light and temperature, and periodically, they needed to pause the busy work of growing leaves and making sugars. Her shop was not a farm raft, and beyond sticking small plants in the fridge to mimic winter, she didn’t have the equipment to conjure Earth seasons in the ways she knew her plants would prefer.

She could make it nighttime, at least. She could set the lights and the heater to dip and rise in a pastiche of the distant sun her plants expected to be living beneath. She could give them a proxy of their ancestral input, and in doing so, quiet their cells and allow them rest.

As for her own thermal comfort, that was what layers were for. She ducked into her crash room and fetched a blanket from the end of her cot. A customer had knit this one. Her name had been Faye, and she’d needed insulin. The clinics wouldn’t supply her with more after she’d been diagnosed with emphysema. That was where Signy had stepped in. Faye had been shy, and difficult to converse with. She’d worked in sanitation. She’d had two daughters. She’d wanted to live long enough to see her first grandchild born, and she did.

The computer chimed its readiness. Signy made herself a pot of tea, tugged her blanket around her shoulders, and settled in before her workstation. She launched a genetic modeling program she was not supposed to have—thank you, Sam—and began to poke at a simulated helix, mumbling to herself as she worked.

The work was bliss, as always. Biology was a wonder; chemistry, a comfort. All matter in existence could be broken down into the same components, and with studied knowledge of what those things were and how they worked, a person could produce anything. Marvels, horrors, mundanities. Insulin. Napalm. Chalk. An atom here, a molecule there, and you could change the world, for better or for worse. And if you spoke the language of both chemicals and life, you could convince all sorts of organisms to simply spit out whatever compounds you needed to harvest.

A dangerous business, potentially. But also, exhilarating.

Wielding such tools required responsibility, and Signy never took that lightly. She also never thought of herself in more lofty terms than she knew herself to be. She wasn’t a pharmacologist, she wasn’t a chemical engineer, and she wasn’t a respectable botanist in a respectable lab. She was a university dropout in a basement-level retail space, cooking up things that could end lives if she made a mistake. Signy considered it vital to remember she was a tinkerer, not an inventor. She did not create new compounds, nor did she work from scratch. She hacked apart other people’s designs and rearranged them to make things of more specific use. In her mind, all she did was scavenge.

As tinkerers went, though, she was a damn good one. That much she also knew.

Alterations unstable, the modeling program told her. High risk of defects in mature individuals.

Encountering this error message was ordinary as ash. Signy was not fussed. Finding the thing that worked always took dozens if not hundreds of things that didn’t. It wouldn’t have been a puzzle otherwise.

She tried another arrangement, scribbled some notes that she’d burn later, and ran another test.

The progress bar crept across the screen. She rubbed her blanketed arms to keep warm. She thought of the woman who needed this medicine. She wondered what she did on Fridays. She wondered where she was, when she wasn’t here.

The molecule turned and twisted. Signy hoped it would work. She hoped it would help.

Chapter 780 Signy & Cora, Cypsela