Page 77 of As You Wake, Break the Shell

2 Just like with spuds, he’s talking about vat-grown molded apples here. I’m still experimenting with cooking tree-grown apples, but so far I like using red apples better than green apples for this recipe. Size on tree-growns varies, so 3 to 4 apples, or whatever works.

3 Sub with beet sugar

4 We don’t have this here. Signy looked it up and the original Mr. G blend is made of vat-grown clove and cinnamon. Lodestone is synthing cinnamon, but nobody’s making clove yet. We can’t grow the trees that produce this stuff right now, either. So just use 1 tsp of cinnamon for now, and if you ever find out what clove is, use ½ a tsp of that, too.

5 Hard to get at the market, so honestly, sorghum works better than beet if you can’t find brown

Chapter 31 Signy, Fortune

To anybody else’s eyes, the plant in front of them would have looked like a bell pepper. In some ways, it was a bell pepper, with healthy leaves and budding flowers, but underneath, it was many other things. Signy was quite proud of it.

“So that’s . . . that’s my medicine,” Cora said.

“In part.” Signy pointed at a not-quite petunia and a not-quite heartleaf as well. “I also extracted some compounds from these.”

“And then . . . what?” Cora asked. “How do you turn plant bits into medicine?”

Signy was not in the habit of showing people around her workspace, not unless they lived in an apartment across the street. She was also trying very, very hard to not be stupid simply because the woman doing the asking was both charming and good in bed. But Cora was so interested. She was so interested in Signy’s work, and she was listening so carefully, and it was so, so sweet. And she had such nice hips and such nice hands and a smile that made Signy’s knees buckle, and—and—fuck.

Signy walked a few paces to a shelf of basic gardening supplies and stopped in front of an ordinary shipping box with a fertilizer logo. She waved Cora over as she opened the hidden panel cut into the side of the box, revealing the quietly whirring equipment inside.

Cora peered at the jumble of tubes, motors, and jars. “What is this?”

“This is a lab reactor,” Signy said. She pulled her work stool over and hopped up onto it. “Or, well, an approximation of one. It’s a machine you use to mix chemical compounds together in controlled amounts.” She searched for a parallel. “It’s not that different than the chicory machine in your cafeteria.”

Cora leaned in. “Is that”—she started to reach forward, then thought better of touching anything—“a jam jar?”

Signy sighed. “I want to tell you it’s called a reactor core,” she said, “but yes, it’s an old jam jar. And the jar it’s resting in was beans.” The entire device was constructed from bits and pieces, and that, Signy was not proud of. The circulating pump was intended for household plumbing. The gear box had been printed piecemeal by Ramona, in the same opaque plastic she made her trinkets with. The heating unit, the cooling unit, the syringe drips, and the tubes running between were all hydroponic components that could be found elsewhere in the plant shop. The pocket-sized motherboard that made everything talk to one another was secondhand, and the housing for it appeared, correctly, like it had been retrieved from a ferry station recycling bin. Signy didn’t often have cause to look at her tools through someone else’s eyes, and as she did so now, she realized this amalgam might not inspire confidence. “It’s all clean, I promise.”

Cora, to Signy’s surprise, did not look dismayed. On the contrary, she was delighted. “That’s brilliant,” she laughed. “I mean, I don’t know what it does, but it’s amazing that you built this.”

“Oh,” Signy said. “I . . . I mean, I just gathered parts and assembled them. With help. I didn’t design it.”

“Who did?”

Signy’s mouth twitched. This answer was worse than the jam jar. “I don’t know. My friend Sam—she helps me with computer things—she found the basic instructions for this setup on . . . some website, somewhere.” Signy met Cora’s inquisitive look with a sidelong glance. “It’s intended for people who make drugs.”

“Technically you also make drugs,” Cora pointed out cheekily.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.” Cora stuck her hands in her pockets, and she looked from the lab reactor back to the plants. “Why . . .” Her brow furrowed. “Why is doing this illegal? For you, I mean. Not for people who make drug drugs.”

“Because medicine should be made in a sterile lab with oversight. I mix biochemicals in a jam jar I hide in a fertilizer box. Nothing about what I do is okay. It should be illegal.”

“But you help people,” Cora said.

“Not that many,” Signy replied.

“It doesn’t matter how many, or what kind of jar you use. You help people, because the kind of help they need is missing.” Cora shifted from one foot to another. “I know that I’m a . . . an exception. I’m not somebody who can’t get normal help, or can’t get other medicine. I’m just scared of something even worse happening if I do.”

Signy arched an eyebrow. “You would be surprised to learn how many people I know who could say the exact same thing.”

“Okay, well . . . still. The Berth is short on medicine in general, right? Like, that much is a fact.”

“It is.”

“So why not let people do this?” Cora was exasperated, but not at Signy. It was a frustration Signy knew well—the kind directed at no one in particular and the whole world at once. “Fine, okay, you don’t want just anybody doing this in their kitchen or whatever, but why not . . . I dunno, why not give people like you a license and some good equipment, or something? Why not set up little labs at drugstores or—I mean, if you can do this with a fucking jam jar, why are we short on anything?”