Everything that we could bring inside was inside. Everything that we could tie down was tied down. The light had grown dim and yellow, and rain stuttered the leaves; trees bowed to the wind, not yet at any risk of breaking. The air was awake with petrichor and ozone. Oatmeal cookies and lemon cake, supplemented by a batch of lavender scones, made a warm hearth of the kitchen table. Scattered among the platters lay projections of the storm track, readings from the roof sensors, and the neighborhood’s best predictions for wind, rain, and hail.
Dori, released at last from our protective wraps, rocked on all fours on the floor. She lifted one hand, another, scooted her knee back and forth. A few days ago she’d have given up with a wail; now she thinned her lips and kept trying. Her expression, adult in its seriousness, sparked a pang of fearful delight in my chest. I’d loved her for her whole life, and before that as well as one can love someone before they enter into the world. But at that moment I first felt her as a separate entity moving inexorably toward adulthood. She wanted something beyond the survival instincts she’d been granted at birth, beyond my power to give her—but not beyond her own power.
I curled in a cushioned chair, watching her, leaning against one of Rhamnetin’s legs where he draped over the back. Carol perched on the arm, her embrace warm across my shoulders. Dinar, taking a break between bouts of baking, perched on Athëo’s lap while they alternated bites from a cookie.
“This is surreal,” Rhamnetin said. “We can swing as soon as we hatch, and the plains-folk only take a few days to lift themselves, even if they can’t go far. Spending so many months sessile, and then having to learn two separate ways to move yourself around, sounds terrifying.”
Carol wrinkled her nose. “Kids who can wander away and grab books off the shelves at two days old also sound terrifying.”
“But they don’t—you’ve seen Cytosine’s pair. They’ve got strong instincts to stay with their mother. And we tend to cling to our sisters, but with all your brothers scrambling around, you want to be able to grab tight when someone knocks into you. Will Dori start running away from you?” He stretched anxiously in her direction. She reached for him—and scuttled forward. She froze with a shocked smile on her face, and swiveled her head to check everyone’s reactions.
“Baby, you did it!” I told her, and Carol and Athëo applauded enthusiastically. Dinar offered her a congratulatory bit of scone. She crawled a few more inches to get it, and set up an excited cry of “Mamamamamama!” while we all babbled our parental glee and I made sure to save the record. Raven flung themselves onto their sister for a clumsy hug.
“You lied!” exclaimed Rhamnetin. “She runs toward you!” He held out limbs, and we all spent a few minutes encouraging her to crawl in our various directions. She giggled madly, loving the game. Rain picked up, spattering the windows like the distant drumming I’d felt through Cytosine’s skinsong. People are around you, and you’re part of something. I felt safe—and quietly, watching myself like I watched Dori, surprised by the feeling. The storm wrapped us in a cozy domestic space where no outside demand could touch us. Even the network was relatively quiet, a steady stream of reports on preparations completed, water levels and patterns of flow compared to predictions.
It was a loud enough coziness that no one heard the knock on the door. But we’d never locked it often to begin with, and had gotten entirely out of the habit since the Ringers arrived. The first I noticed Aunt Priya was when Kyo started barking furiously at her umbrella.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I mean, you’re welcome, but this is a hell of a time to be out. Is everything okay?”
She shook the umbrella at Kyo, methodically spattering him with droplets, and he shook the water back at her. She put down the umbrella, picked up the dog, and caught sight of Dori. “When did she start crawling?”
“Five minutes ago, it’s amazing. What are you doing here?”
She sat at the table and took a scone, nibbling as methodically as she’d shaken the umbrella. I waited impatiently: it was never useful to rush Aunt Priya, just tempting. Amid the chaos of the Bet, she did everything thoughtfully, one step at a time—I was never sure how she managed it, but she was a major reason that anything there got completed from start to finish, with an actual middle in between. And a major reason why I knew how to be quiet and listen. So now, with effort, I did.
“The network troubleshooting team is disturbed by the tenacity of this malware. I am, too.” She didn’t look at Rhamnetin, but also didn’t mention what she’d done about that feeling. “Having Asterion here is a risk, but I think it’s more social than technical sabotage. Whatever vulnerability they found originally, they didn’t need to be on-site to exploit it.”
“It is a social risk,” I said. “Being here lets them take advantage of whatever they did to the dandelion networks. I know Jace di Sanya wants to convince people that the dandelion protocols are inherently unstable and that we should switch to corporate systems. And to convince the Ringers to treat the watersheds as an obstacle rather than an ally.”
“I don’t know how they’re doing on those things,” Aunt Priya said. “But they’ve managed to convince the troubleshooting team that they’re building something into the antenna to worsen the sabotage. And I think they’re giving that impression deliberately.”
“Could they actually use the antenna that way?” asked Rhamnetin. “There’s no direct interface—they’re calculating interactions and passing them to Astatine, who uses the results to shape construction.”
“I don’t think they could,” said Aunt Priya. “But every time the troubleshooting team gets near the Asterion folks, which is frequently, because they’re trying to figure out what they’re doing, someone acts suspiciously smug about the completion of the antenna. And Elegy got into a late-night discussion with Tiffany di Asterion that involved enough drinking that she trusts what tha said, and supposedly tha let something slip. I don’t believe it. I think this whole thing is social engineering.”
“Tiffany’s more than capable,” I said. “But engineering them to do … what?”
Now Aunt Priya did examine Rhamnetin before she spoke. “Try to sabotage the antenna, under cover of the storm. They asked me to help. I told them I thought it was a terrible idea and doomed to failure, but I wished them luck. And then I came here. Because I’m eighty percent sure it’s a trap—make that eighty-five, with what you say Jace is doing. If a Chesapeake team tries to take down the antenna, why would the Ringers keep working with us?”
Dori, no longer the focus of grown-up attention, began crying. I scooped her against my chest, swayed side to side, rubbed her back. “What do Redbug and Elegy think they’ll get out of this? Even if the antenna comes down, it’ll just get rebuilt.” I glanced at Rhamnetin to check this prediction. “You’re not going to … run out of material or anything, are you?” God help me, that would still be tempting. Even caring for Rhamnetin, knowing what it would cost him and his family, I couldn’t simply dismiss the allure of keeping Earth safely isolated.
“I don’t think so,” said Rhamnetin, though he didn’t sound very sure. He trusted us enough to sound unsure. “Most things that would break the antenna wouldn’t break the builder seeds themselves. Dropping them in the ocean, maybe? We have extras; I don’t know how many.”
Aunt Priya frowned. “I think they’d be almost as happy if it were rebuilt elsewhere—even in corporate territory, rather than in ostensible collaboration with the watersheds. They think it’s less dangerous to our networks, and right now that’s the only danger they care about.”
“But if Tiffany’s been baiting them,” said Dinar, “it’ll never get that far. Asterion will ‘catch’ the attempt as soon as it’s underway, and make themselves out as heroes.”
“I need to tell the rest of the crew,” said Rhamnetin.
I paused in my pacing. “Is that necessary? All we have to do is let the troubleshooting team know that we know—that we’ll warn the Ringers if they don’t back off. They won’t try if they know they’ll be stopped.”
“Oh, good,” said Dinar. “Then they can hate me even more than they already do.”
I hugged her, reaching around Dori. “It’s just, if the Ringers find out about this attempt, Asterion gets exactly what they want. Present company excepted, but Rhamnetin, you can’t tell me that Cytosine wouldn’t hold it against all of us. Redbug and Elegy will figure out who stopped them, either way.”
“Right.” Dinar sighed. “Yeah, go ahead and try to talk them out of it. But maybe let’s try argument, before we give them an ultimatum. It’s more likely to work long-term.”
“I tried that,” Aunt Priya pointed out.
“And you came to us through the storm because you thought we could help.” I came up short. “Why didn’t you text me?”
She shrugged. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but there’s no communication as secure as meeting in person.”
“Right. Well, hopefully we don’t need that much security to talk the team out of being idiots.” I opened a shared channel to Redbug and Elegy, projected it on the table, and sent: I found out what you’re planning. It’s not going to work, and I can tell you why. We need to talk.
I hoped that would get their attention. But minutes stretched with no response. Dinar went back to the kitchen, continuing her work with unhappy determination. Athëo looked out the window. The unmistakable rattle of hail joined the cacophony of wind and rain. It was no night to be out, but that was far from the stupidest part of what I feared the tech team was doing. I pinged them again.
“Are they ignoring us?” asked Carol. “Or are they not getting the message?”
“I’m sorry,” said Rhamnetin. “I need to call the Solar Flare. I’ll argue your case afterward, but they need to know.”
I had nothing to offer against that. “They do. Go ahead.”
Rhamnetin fiddled with his voicebox. Then he fiddled some more. After a minute, Carol asked, “Well? What do they say?”
“They don’t say anything. I’m not getting through. Ytterbium was worried about this. Our comms—they’re shielded against all sorts of radiation, the hazards you expect in the vacuum, but they’re not resilient to serious atmospheric disturbance. It’s not an issue, at home.”
Dinar came out of the kitchen, sighed, nodded. I shared an exchange with my co-parents, all eyes: the sort of communication that requires high bandwidth and people you know well. That was new, I realized. Somewhere in the last few days, we’d crossed some threshold of comprehension—not yet where I was with my wife, but for the first time I could imagine getting there.
“Let’s try our own people on the ship first,” said Carol. I sent a private text to Eliza Mendez, and for good measure opened a problem thread, priority-flagged: Solar Flare comms are out and I need to reach them right away. Anyone in the ground there? I dropped a similar message onto the common feed, though normally it’d get less notice there amid the storm-related chatter. This time, I’d err on the side of involving the crowd.
“Okay,” I said a minute later. “I can see perfectly well why Redbug and Elegy would ignore me, but not Eliza. And I can see other network threads flowing smoothly. I shouldn’t be shouting into the ether—what the fuck is going on?”
Just for the hell of it, I posted an unrelated message to one of the sensor tracking threads, and got an immediate response. Carol reported no issues pinging her textile exchange feed. But when either of us posted off-topic, asking for help passing a message to the Solar Flare, our words sat in unread isolation.
“Am I being paranoid?” I said at last.
“No,” said Aunt Priya. “Something’s keeping us from getting through. I’m not reaching anyone either, even with encrypted messages.”
If it was malware—and I didn’t see any other obvious explanation—that meant the corporate team didn’t want us interfering with whatever mistake they’d provoked from the troubleshooting team. “But they can’t have infested the Ringer communication channels, right? They couldn’t count on those being out?”
“They could have gambled,” said Rhamnetin. “Ytterbium wasn’t exactly silent about the risk. Or they might not have expected me to be here. Or they might have thought it was okay, as long as Cytosine learned about the sabotage attempt. Even if I can talk her down…”
“You can’t promise that she’ll forgive us, yeah. Though she was unusually friendly, this morning.” I hesitated. “Any idea what that was about?”
Rhamnetin shuffled his legs. “She’s pleased that we’ve become lovers. It’s not entirely reasonable, but you know some of our stories now—we’re like Caffeine and Fructose.”
I tried not to show how much that worried me. Relationships were hard enough without having them stand in for the connection between two entire species. I wanted to work out these nascent connections—not just between me and Carol and Rhamnetin, but between our households—as ourselves, not as archetypes.
“So if things go wrong,” asked Carol, “will she be more forgiving, because she likes what we’re doing? Or less, because we’re not following the script?”
“Redbug could be the Chief with the Lonely Name?” suggested Dinar wryly.
“Maybe?” said Rhamnetin. “Caffeine and Fructose were always great advocates for symbiosis, and no one in the Chesapeake has been that … heroic … yet in her view. It could go either way.”
I shared another high-bandwidth exchange of glances with my household. We could keep trying to reach people by text, and we’d have it on record that we’d tried. But it wouldn’t keep Redbug and Elegy out of Jace’s trap, and it wouldn’t meet anyone’s standards for heroism. “Right. I hope you all understand that going out in the middle of a hurricane is a terrible idea. How many of us need to do it?”