Page 6 of As You Wake, Break the Shell

Cora took a deep, intentional breath. She brushed a tear from her cheek with the flat of her palm. Longing for the saddle was normal at this stage. The feeling would soon ebb to something less overwhelming. She’d be back up with Colibri in a couple weeks, she told herself, and in a day or two, she’d feel okay. She could always get back to okay.

Cora breathed deep, and she ate her chips.

Chapter 765 Cora, Cypsela

For whatever reason, it felt like a hashcakes kind of morning.

Cora never knew what breakfast was going to be until she made it. Yesterday had been strawberry popovers. The day before that had been barley porridge with heaps of spring fruit and some roasted seeds from last year’s sunflowers on top. The day before that, she’d felt like garbage, which meant the sort of breakfast you scoop out of a canister, shake up with some water, and chug before going back to bed. But today, she was not garbage, and the answer to the question of breakfast was hashcakes. It just felt like it should be hashcakes.

She peeled the potatoes, shredded their purple starch, dashed in some salt and sunflower oil. She tapped her nose with the side of her finger as she looked over the shelves of her fridge, considering the many vegetables available to her. Turnip greens, spring onions, and . . . carrots, she thought. Yeah, that would be a good mix. The existence of mushrooms occurred to her as well as she chopped a hefty handful of greens. She set down her knife and went over to what she had nicknamed the spore drawer—a dark cupboard containing sacks of substrate carpeted with chubby bursts of fungus. She cut a few of the biggest blooms loose, then resumed her chopping, singing quietly as she worked.

Cora loved cooking. She loved making food, loved touching food. The weird velvet of a mushroom cap, the ruffles of an edible leaf, the sweet acidity of—oh, juice, that’s what this breakfast needed. The batch she’d made a few days prior had run out, and while she could be generous and brew a pot of tea . . . nah. Tea wasn’t her thing, and it felt like a juice kind of morning.

She halved beets and apples. She picked three oranges from the dwarf tree stretching up toward the sunlamp in the corner. She peeled a hunk of ginger root. She ran all of it through the juice press as the hashcakes sizzled gently on the stovetop. The air filled with the smells of citrus and crisping edges, and Cora thought, not for the first time, of how much she liked her life.

The hashcakes left the stove for the warming plate. Cora bottled the juice, sliced some of yesterday’s bread, toasted that on the oiled pan, and put a large dollop of jam in a tiny bowl. Her stomach growled, but she cleaned her mess first, washing the knives and wiping them dry. She could have let it be until after they ate, but she knew the chances of her actually washing up after the fact were slim to none. Better to take care of it now than—

A sharp twinge blossomed in her brain stem, near one of her old implants. It stopped her in her tracks, ended her singing. The twinge was a warning—familiar, unwelcome, and boring. So fucking boring. Nothing in the universe was as boring as pain.

Cora put down the scrub brush and took her medicine.

She looked out the window as she washed the capsule down with a cup of water. Cypsela was facing away from the sun for the moment, making the starscape beyond as crisp as frost. Other moons and moonlets flocked the foreground; all of them felt like friends to her. Cora hadn’t ever experienced “good weather,” but she’d seen it in movies from the Primer, and she thought that maybe watching the drift of icy rocks from her kitchen window wasn’t so different than looking out and seeing clouds or a rosy sunrise. Sometimes, depending on the angle of her home, she woke up not to stars but to the spectacular canvas of Solace’s upper atmosphere. Storms were beautiful, when you didn’t have to be in them, and with an ice giant, keeping a safe distance was the only option. But today, her window offered stars and rocks, and she liked stars and rocks every bit as much.

She finished her water, sip by sip, and let the medicine do its work. The pain ebbed. The fog she hadn’t noticed settling in her mind cleared away. She was okay. She could always get back to okay.

Interstitial

If you read any sort of text while piloting your rorqual, they will process the information right alongside you, whether you read aloud or not. However, rorquals lack the ability to distinguish between stylistic differences in written communication. They are not actually reading the page, after all—they’re experiencing both your cognitive processing of the text and your emotional response to it. What might count as academic or “dry” text to the average reader can be very entertaining for a rorqual, if their pilot is interested in the topic being read.

This can be a useful tool in communicating complicated concepts to your rorqual, or ideas you yourself are not well versed in. To put it simply: don’t be afraid to read them an instruction manual. It might be the high point of their day.

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C:\logins\twiiig\documents\kidstuff\bestthingieverwrote.rd

Name: Lily Marten

Homeroom: Spruce

Grade: 1/10

Once upon a time, a bunch of assholes from Earth decided to go to space. Actually, it was several bunches of assholes.1 Each bunch was a business and they divided up space for themselves. One was called the Orion-Cygnus Trade Alliance and we are supposed to care about them enough to write about why they are important. I am writing about them like I was told to even though I think they are some of the worst people to have ever lived in history.2

Space is big, so the people who made OCTA couldn’t go out of the Solar System, which is where Earth is. They sent out colony ships to other systems to make colonies in other systems because one system isn’t enough I guess.3 Each ship was made of a Mothership and also landers inside. The landers had bioprinters and kincrete on them so they could print embryos and grow people to turn that planet into a colony. They also sent tools, metal, cell cultures, starter bacteria, and some other stuff.4 They also sent the Primer, which is sometimes useful but mostly propaganda and that’s why we have to learn it in school, because school isn’t actually for teaching people to think for themselves, it’s for making people into good little robots.5

Here is a transition. Robots are what raised the first generation of people here on Fortune, but then they self-destructed because people are supposed to raise themselves. Fortune is not a direct colony from Earth. It’s from another planet called Argosy. They are an OCTA colony so they also sent ships. The Primer says that every new planet is chosen carefully to “maximize the chances of colonial success, which will in turn enable its citizens to thrive” but this is bullshit because Fortune is even worse shit and everybody knows it.6

When a colony gets good enough, it is supposed to be able to go to space itself and then go find the Mothership and join OCTA so we can make money with them or something.7 We can’t go to OCTA and we’ve never even talked to OCTA because Fortune is the worst planet in the whole universe. We can’t do communications even to orbit very well because of clouds. We can go to space but not very far. My sister is a rorqual pilot and she goes to the moons. That’s cool and all but that’s as far as we can go. It’s not very far now is it?8

In conclusion, OCTA is important because they are why we are alive. But it would be better to live on a sun where we’d all have fried up already. That is my conclusion to this essay.9

1This language is not appropriate for homework. We have talked about this.

2You are entitled to your opinion, but your attitude needs serious adjustment.

3This sentence is lacking proper punctuation. Did you even bother to run a grammar check?

4Be more specific. What other stuff?