Page 20 of As You Wake, Break the Shell

“You will,” Cora said.

Signy was unwilling to partake of the offered optimism. “I haven’t yet,” she grumbled.

“Well, that’s why I said will,” Cora said. She got to her feet and extended a hand up. “You will. You always do.”

Cora took Signy’s hand and stood. “Not always.”

“What was it I heard you say to Dylan?” One of the cubs. “‘A failed batch doesn’t mean you failed, it just means you’ve learned something for the next—’”

“Are you quoting me?” Signy asked. “Are you quoting me to me?”

“It was good advice,” Cora said.

“Oh, that’s so annoying,” Signy said. She turned away and continued on to the carrot patch.

Chapter 10 Signy, Fortune

In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be a need for someone like her. Signy believed that wholeheartedly. Medicine, in all its varied forms, was not meant to be cooked up in a homemade lab reactor in the back of a random shop, nor should it be handed out by someone other than a doctor. And in fairness, that wasn’t how most medicine in the Berth was made. The stuff you got from a clinic or a pharmacy—the mass-produced stuff, the legal stuff—that was made in dedicated labs with proper equipment and oversight.

Contrary to appearances, Signy preferred that approach.

The problem wasn’t a complete absence of medicine. The problem was too little medicine, and within an official capacity, that meant the cold logic of triage. Signy’s list of orders that day was nothing if not a portrait of the downside. Jonathan had gone blind in a factory accident and could no longer work. He was a low priority for medical treatment. Madeline had cancer and would not survive the year. She deserved to die in a body that felt like home, but her chart argued otherwise: a low priority for medical treatment. Evie was in a low-priority retail job she could keep muddling through despite her condition, and therefore . . . a low priority. Some of the others could have gone the normal path to getting help, but at a cost to other aspects of their well-being. Phoebe simply didn’t want to be pregnant and was afraid of having an intake conversation with a counselor who would kindly, repeatedly point out that in all physical respects, she had no reason to not carry to term. Paul hated his clinic’s psychiatrist and had struggled mightily to find one he was comfortable working with. And Cora—

Cora was trying to protect a friend, it sounded like. Signy still had a lot of questions on that front. Perhaps she would understand better after seeing the friend in question. And if she didn’t understand, she could always cross the onion flower off her list. In the end, this was her shop and her say.

As for the legality of Signy’s methods . . . well. There she and the law did disagree, and she wasn’t keen on denying people care for the sake of rules she found absurd. She wasn’t stealing, she wasn’t hurting anyone, and she wasn’t using raw materials in amounts that might go to better use. There was no better use than quality of life, in her opinion. The law, on this point, was broken ideology masquerading as practicality, and unlike the law, Signy wasn’t stupid. She kept her services small, quiet, and unprofitable. It was either that or do nothing, and she couldn’t stomach that option.

This was not a perfect world.

Chapter 772 Signy, Cypsela

Signy stared silently at the carrot patch. She almost didn’t hear Cora hurry over after she called for her. She almost didn’t hear Cora say, “Oh my god, are they ready?” Much as Signy loved her wife, in that moment, the entire universe contained nothing but one single flower on one single umbel on the one single plant standing before her crouching knees.

“Honey? What’d you find?” Cora asked from a thousand miles away.

Signy didn’t know how to reply. She was frozen, vibrating. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until she reminded herself to let it out.

It was happening. It was finally happening.

Chapter 11 Signy, Fortune

Kincrete was a marvel, so long as you didn’t think too hard about it. Thinking too hard about kincrete led to existential crises, and Signy had no patience for those.

She emptied half a sack of the dusty stuff into the hopper. She queued the template for her altered version of white moon petunias, hooked up the water hose, flipped a few switches, and hit the big green button that read PRINT.

Kincrete. A dehydrated blend of reconstitutable organic compounds, which was a nice way of saying it was broken-down dead stuff you could turn back into living stuff. Literally everything that had ever been alive (aside from the very first generation of single-celled goo) was made out of broken-down dead stuff turned back into living stuff, so, really, getting your head in a twist about kincrete was pointless. It had amino acids, it had peptides, it had carbon and nitrogen and all the rest. Just add water and create life, as Earth itself had done billions of years before. You could not print a mature multicellular organism with it—there were limits to what even OCTA technology could do—but you could make an embryo, and that was all anything needed to get started.

The seed printer began to hum and chug, pumping the now porridge-like contents of the hopper into the print chamber. The extruders began to align themselves accordingly, and in the meantime, Signy got up to reheat the kettle. A little pantry cupboard stood nearby, and from this she took a bowl, a fork, and a packet of instant ramen. She helped herself to some of her wares, snipping a handful of greens from the kitchen planter display out in the shop. She dropped the dense tangle of dry noodles into the bowl, watched them puff up as she covered them with water, mixed in the spice packet, mixed in the greens, then covered it all with a plate and waited.

Within the print chamber, tiny shapes began to take form. Two dozen dollops of DNA and protein, each configured to her specifications. They were uniform in shape and color—flat so as to not roll off a table, bright so as to not get lost. These were the only type of seeds Signy had ever known, but she knew from her years of research that wild seeds were not so plain. Out in the galaxy beyond, there were seeds the size of dust motes, others the size of your head. They were skinny, furry, heavy, silken, lumpy, wafer-thin, hard as stone. Some could float. Some could spin. Some had hair, or pockmarks, or wings. They could sleep in the dirt for thousands of years until they decided the day was just right, but before the moment when they sprouted up toward the sun and spread new leaves to catch the light, you would have no way of knowing about the millions of potential lives waiting beneath every city and building and footstep.

As Signy understood it, Earth was a planet of seeds. But as a child of Fortune, she’d never seen a seed that hadn’t come out of a printer. By design, none of the plant species in the Primer could produce seeds on their own (unless they were grains or textile fibers, in which case they were made to be infertile). Whenever Signy was working with a genetic template, she could see where those reproductive brakes had been placed. She longed to snip them away and see what happened next. But if an inspector came in and saw something bearing seeds, or found a jar filled with irregular shapes that didn’t have a print code etched in their sides, it wouldn’t matter how well Signy’s reports had been doctored or how careful she’d been in covering her steps. That would be the end of her work.

Still, though. She would’ve given almost anything to see the real thing.

Chapter 773 Signy, Cypsela

Two years ago, Signy had taken the brakes off the template for kaleidoscope carrots. It was the cultivar they’d had the best luck with growing on Lodestone, and also the one Cora liked cooking with the most. She got such a kick out of all the colors.