Beth worked on practicing her superpowers every day, experimenting to get the best possible effect. The different active skills tired her at different rates, but they balanced out with long she could perform them. If she pushed herself as far as she could in a day, it didn’t seem to matter which skill at which level she used. A day’s work returned the same result. She wondered what happened to the people who only had passive skills, but she didn’t know anyone she could ask.
When she was sure of her conclusions, she dropped a few hints to Sophie. She couldn’t be too explicit. It had almost instantly become a cultural taboo to ask too deeply about people’s skills. Some skills were too obvious or too convenient to hide, but it was still considered polite to ignore any hints. Her father had followed trends and forbidden them from discussing anything. Beth went with it, because it she didn’t want to explain her choices to anyone either. As a result, she didn’t know for sure what either of them had won, but she suspected Sophie had chosen healing. Beth hoped that Sophie had picked at least one other thing that was easier to practice. Beth didn’t want Sophie intentionally hurting herself.
For herself, Beth ran the skin shield as long as she could sustain it, each day and every day. Every time she was tempted to take it easy or to stop early, she reminded herself of the infected she had prepared for cremation. It couldn’t matter how tired she was from her clearing job, or from taking care of the garden, or from looking after the twins. It couldn’t matter how much longer the simplest tasks of living took, from cooking to cleaning to putting up her hair to keep it clean. She owed this to the victims she had stolen from. It was the same obligation as a recipient of organ donation. It would be disrespectful to them to be casual with her levelling.
And, incidentally, protecting her skin against slashing was very effective when facing brambles and other assorted thorns as well.
Without being rude enough to come out and ask, she quietly discovered that her reasonably diligent co-workers were levelling up at about a skill point every second day. Beth took that as her guide. Each defence skill received a new level every four days. The additional levelling went into skill acceleration. It had worked about to three acceleration points in those first two weeks. Almost all of her extra levelling speed was still from the extra effort she was putting in, not the acceleration, but it would add up.
She came home early April to a celebration. She mentally went through her list of important events and came out blank. “What’s going on?”
“Peter won the election!” announced her father. “We knew he would, of course. As soon as I got involved, I made sure that people would know just who he was and how amazing he is. Still, it’s reassuring to see that people can see what’s good for them for a change.”
Beth confirmed it was no longer April first. Not a joke then.
“Good for him,” said Beth. “Is he coming over to celebrate with us?”
“He said that he’d see.”
That was a no, then.
Beth sat down and was amazed at the spread of dishes. There were potatoes and butter, of course, as well as the bread made with potato flour and baking soda that was becoming popular. But there was also more salad than could have come out of her garden. No supps at all. The supps, little pepper-like kernels, two dozen per point, providing about two hundred calories each. They could be added to soups and stews or mixed in with flour. They weren’t a meal, but they could bulk up anything else, and Sophie hadn’t used any.
And her eyes and nose hadn’t deceived her. That was chicken soup, with actual pieces of chicken. The warm, heavy scent brought a sharp longing for times past when she could have eaten chicken at every meal if she’d wanted.
She asked, “Sophie, how did we get this much food? How could we possibly afford anything this luxurious?”
“That’s none of your business,” replied her father sharply.
It was when she was the one who was probably paying for it.
“Please don’t spoil the meal,” pleaded Sophie.
Beth shut up. It would be foolish to have an argument like this with her father without any preparation. She’d just lose and damage her ability to try again when she was more prepared.
Beth took her own bowl of soup, tuning out her father’s small speech about Peter’s great new future. Sophie was right, after all. She shouldn’t let anything spoil this. The food was already bought and cooked. It wasn’t as if they could return it. Even keeping it would be difficult to do safely. She paused over the first taste. She had the contradictory desires to eat it as fast as possible and to savour every mouthful. They ate until they were all full, another nostalgic feeling.
When she was alone, Beth checked The Book. It did indeed now have a description of Peter’s election. The description had all the same disjointed non-sequiturs it had when explaining how Beth afforded the acceleration skill. She had been right. It hadn’t been natural. But try as she might, Beth could not think of anything she had done to get Peter elected. Even if she wanted to believe the absurdity of their personal canvassing efforts changing everything, that didn’t fit. She hadn’t helped Peter because of anything she’d learnt in The Book. She’d helped because of Peter’s own actions.
It had to be something earlier. Some flapping of a butterfly’s wing. Had their previous death crippled him? Had her brother been inspired by Beth’s own job search? Had it been something she said to Alistair? The mystery bothered her, even as she told herself it didn’t matter. It wasn’t a bad thing, and she shouldn’t rely on The Book exclusively anyway.
The next day, she forced herself to put that aside. She had something more important to focus on, and it was going to be a good day. She wasn’t going to let anything interfere with that. She packed a breakfast up to take with her, humming soon may the ration-man come under her breath.
“You’re leaving already?” asked Calley.
“Yes!” said Beth. “We’ve finally been sent to work on my future allotment. I’m heading over a little early to take a look.”
“Congratulations, I guess,” said Calley.
“Thank you,” said Beth.
“Just this once or will you be leaving early every day?” asked Oakley.
“Maybe not every day,” said Beth. “But when it’s handed over, I’ll probably be heading there for a few hours before work, at least in the beginning.”
“And on your days off as well?”
“Yes, probably,” said Beth, zipping up her backpack and swinging it onto her back. “There’s some preparation work first, then it should slow down a bit when it’s just weeding and watering.”
“You don’t care about us,” said Oakley.
Beth froze in the act of putting her last arm through the strap. “Wait, what? No! Of course I care about you. Oakley, where is this coming from?”
“You have that stupid rooftop garden already,” he said, refusing to look at her. “Why do you need more? It must be an excuse to leave the house. You’re never home as it is, and now you’re adding something else on top of that?”
“The garden barely produces anything,” said Beth. “We can’t rely on just that. I have no choice.”
More literally than she’d hoped. The radishes were the last major success she’d had. The spinaches and lettuces never produced anything meaningful, and the tomato and cucumber seedlings hadn’t shown a single leaf of new growth since she’d transplanted them.
“You have a choice. You’ve chosen to abandon us.”
“Do you really think I want to work so hard?” asked Beth. “I don’t! I wish I didn’t need to. I wish I could just relax in the afternoons and play games with you. But then we’d starve and be on the hook for community work for the council as well.”
“I can work too!” said Oakley.
That wasn’t what Beth meant.
“No, you can’t,” she said. “You have school.”
She would have liked to say that he was too young, and the council wouldn’t have accepted him. But she wasn’t at all sure that was true.
“Look, I need to go,” said Beth, pulling the backpack the rest of the way. “I promised to meet up with my boss. But we’ll talk about this when I get home, okay?”
“If we’re not already asleep,” said Oakley. “With how late it might be.”
There would be no talking to him while he was in that mood, and Beth was already running late. Beth was out of breath by the time she arrived at the school gate. The embankment outside was ablaze with yellow daffodils and orange and red tulips. They had probably once matched the emblem on the gate in design, but they had now escaped into their own abstract patterns. It was a far more glorious mess than had ever bloomed outside her bedroom window at home.
“Allotment, allotment, allotment,” chanted Beth when she joined Theo and Gwen. “Here we come.”
“Not a full allotment,” said Theo, pulling out a set of keys. “Sucks, but they’ve made the call for half allotments.”
It wasn’t unexpected, but it did mean even less food than she’d hoped. They’d need to lean heavily on the supplements.
“I suppose we ought to be thankful they’re not going with quarters, or tenths, or less,” said Gwen.
Theo opened the gate and leading them through it. There was enough of the road surface left to allow them access without having to cut their way through the plants.
“It was damn close,” he admitted. “They still won’t get to everyone, you know. Not by May like we wanted. But, you know, the whole point is to let people feed themselves. Much less than a half-allotment is just, basically, hobby stuff.”
“We’ll continue clearing more allotments after May, though, right?” asked Beth.
If they weren’t, then it would mean terrible things for her job prospects. The Book hadn’t mentioned any prospective unemployment, but Beth still wanted to confirm.
“No, yeah,” said Theo. “We’ll still be out doing this clearing thing until at least this time next year. Almost every single soul who gets a half will be right back on that waiting list for another half. Well, if they are productive with their existing plots, of course. Otherwise, they get booted.”
“Will that mean, then, that a person could end up with two halves completely across town from each other?” asked Gwen. “That would be right tiresome.”
“Could be, yeah,” replied Theo. “At least if they hang on to the old one. But they can trade that half into a whole one in the new place. Then there will be half ones left for other people to claim. Come winter, of course, not as soon as we clear them.”
“After a full year of preparing their allotment and doing all that work?” asked Beth.
“Some people won’t care,” said Gwen thoughtfully. “If they plant only things like potatoes and tomatoes, then they’d prefer brand new virgin land in the next year. Escape the diseases and pests building up in the soil.”
“Yeah,” said Theo, “and the new place might be better. Some of the ones this year won’t even have piped water and stuff.”
“And the new people on the list get the bad locations that are left over?” asked Beth.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Well, if it took them a whole year to decide that it would be a good idea to grow food, then that’s on them, you know?”
Beth thought of the half-arguments she’d had with Sophie about her getting her own allotment, and hid a wince.
They walked around the edge of the buildings, judging what was and was not practical to clear. Just visible at the bottom of the property was an area that had been left wild for so long it had fully returned to woodland. Theo immediately announced they’d be excluding it. It wasn’t practical to clear the thicket of thirty-five-meter-high trees, including the eponymous Scots Pines. Not when it was on such a steep slope down and up. The slope was probably the very reason it had been left untended by school management, even with their access to power tools.
Beth thought she heard water. “Is that a river at the bottom?”
“If it’s rained recently, yeah, sure. Rest of the time it’s dry. It used to be a proper river, I think, but not after we built all these houses and stuff around it.”
In the long term, that could matter. Pines were doing an excellent job, but who knew what would happen in five years or thirty-five, when they needed some replacement part that no longer existed? One day, the municipal water and drainage could fail. But that was a consideration for later.
Their team had only been allocated a single week to the location, so they had to pick and choose what to focus on. It made sense to start with the two large sports fields, upper and lower. The upper had the remains of an eight-hundred-meter track. The lower was even bigger, but any markings had long since worn down into incomprehensibility. A rough estimate showed it would result in six hundred and forty half-allotments, all with easy access to water. That would be the bulk of the location. But once they were done with that, they’d try to convert some of the larger courtyards and empty spaces, at least those not laid to stone.
That was precisely why Gwen and Beth had come early. They were hoping to find the perfect spot for themselves. After doubling back to see which area she liked the most, Beth noticed Gwen coming out of one of the buildings.
“Where did you go?” Beth asked.
“Remember they said that they’re going to let allotment owners move in if they wanted? I went to have a quick look-see. The classrooms aren’t half bad. They’ll convert easy. I’m going to take them up on that.”
“Did something go wrong with George?” asked Beth.
“It’s a bit of the opposite, really,” said Gwen. “We felt it wouldn’t be proper to start dating while he was still my landlord.”
“Gwen, really?” asked Beth, with wide eyes.
“I didn’t become a nun from the disappointment or anything,” said Gwen. “It’s been four months since I broke off my engagement with The Bastard. Plenty of time to move on.”
Beth didn’t think four months was very long at all. But then, Beth had friends who had difficulty remaining out of a relationship for more than a week. Gwen was a grown woman. Presumably she knew her own mind. Beth could only wish her well.
The rest of the team arrived, and Beth and Gwen went to start their day job.
“Oh, and I have good news,” said Theo. “We got some of that petrol tanker after all. Not much, you know, but enough so we can fire up the industrial mulcher. All the scrap wood is going to be woodchips.”
“What happens to the woodchips?” asked Gwen with intensity.
“Left here for the allotments,” said Theo with a smile.
“Excellent.”
Beth always worked hard, but it was special when it was her own allotment they were working on. By the end of the week, they were officially done and Beth was the official owner of a piece of land 12.5 meters long and ten meters wide. She and Gwen had dithered back and forth but eventually decided on the smallest of the converted courtyards. The privacy and the protection from the winds made up for the slight loss of sun from the nearby trees. The intentional dead space left around the buildings also gave them a little more elbowroom. It was just three full allotments on each side of the existing concrete path, broken in half. Beth walked around the substantial path around the perimeter, the smell of new woodchips and freshly cut grass all around her.
Theo called her back to hand over the preliminary order form.
“This is just the stuff to get you up and planting as soon as possible,” he explained apologetically. “The real order form will be available soon.”
Beth was waiting for it. A previous version of The Book had referenced that order form.
Beth was a little dubious about how great it would really be, but she looked forward to finding out for herself. In the meantime, she looked at the one Theo had just given, and almost snorted. Potatoes and cabbages.
She discovered she’d been completely overthinking the potato situation. She couldn’t have planted enough potatoes to feed her entire family even with infinite space. To produce the four thousand kilograms of potatoes she’d need to supply five people, she would have needed one thousand five hundred plants. The most seed potatoes she was permitted to order as a new gardener was five pounds worth. Sixty plants, maximum.
“We only get five pounds?” she asked, a bit plaintively.
Theo tapped the line with her information on the sheet.
Experienced Gardener.
“Yeah, no, I took decided I’d correct that for you.”
Beth caught her breath. It wasn’t something that would dramatically affect this first purchase, but it would make a substantial difference in what she would be able to buy in the second. If Pines had been willing to accept people’s own analysis, she would strongly have considered lying about it. She knew that Gwen had approached Theo to ask him to certify her. But Beth wasn’t experienced, and they all knew that. It hadn’t felt right to ask Theo to lie about it.
“Thank you,” said Beth.
“It’ll all be waiting lists for anything on the second list, you know,” warned Theo. “Nothing is assured. But unless things go wildly wrong, you should get a second five-pound seed bag. But you have to return the equal number of seeds to the co-operative when you harvest. Please don’t make me regret it.”
“Absolutely,” said Beth.
If nothing else, Gwen wouldn’t allow her to mess it up too badly.
It turned out, it wasn’t just Gwen who was willing to jump in and help. The twelve owners of the garden quickly found each other and sat at the canteen table with some precious paper. Even after all the official work had been completed, Beth was amazed at just how much planning went into preparing an allotment. They roughed out the basic details on a map: the borders of the individual allotments, the direction of south, the light shadows cast by the buildings and the bigger trees, the existing water supply and drainage, some guesses at the strongest winds, and the slope of the ground. From that, they planned the places that would need extra ditches dug, where windbreaks should be planted, and where to set up compost bins and storage.
The actual frames for the compost bins would only be single plank high for the meantime, but some wood production had started, so there were promises of more. There were even whispers of a skill that helped with that. Everyone had hope that they’d be able to grow the frames at the same rate as the contents. They laid out the paths, compacting the ground by running wheelbarrows over planks of wood, and conveniently distributing the woodchips to every bed at the same time.
The best layout for the beds could be determined on an individual basis, but that didn’t mean it didn’t get discussed. There was a heated debate on whether to run the beds north-south or east-west. Eventually they all admitted they actually agreed – north-south was best for large plants that would shade out the neighbours, and east-west for small delicate plants that need to be sheltered from the wind. Beth went with a compromise. The majority of north-south down the length of the allotment, with a few east-west at the front.
“We also want a trench all around the plots,” said one of the other gardeners. “Plant out garlic around the edges. It will help keep out the pests.”
“No-one has that much garlic to plant.”
“We can dig up some wild garlic. I’m pretty sure we can get an exemption to that rule about digging up plants on public lands.”
“If you plant the wild garlic, it will become the pest. That stuff is wildly invasive.”
“Not if we eat if fast enough.”
“There’s only so much wild garlic anyone can tolerate in spring, and I think we’ve all reached our limit already.”
“I have some nasturtium seeds,” offered Beth. “Don’t those help as well?”
Beth originally intended to only share with Gwen but realised there was no graceful way to do so. Instead, she offered them to everyone in the group. She’d only managed to purchase two packets, but that packet had come with forty seeds. Taken care of properly, and with a bit of luck, that would give everyone four or five they could plant at regular intervals around the perimeter. Having fewer pests in the entire area could only be a good thing.
“They’re the opposite,” explained Gwen. “They attract the pests first, so you can treat them on the nasturtium and not on your more delicate crops. But we should definitely plant them.”
By the time they were ready to call it a day, Beth was grateful for the stamina and muscles she had developed the previous few months. She would never have managed to do all that work prior to the infection. On the way out the gate – which she had her own key to! – Gwen stopped her.
“Are you free Friday night, luv? There’s this thing happening at George’s place. Sort of a combined moving and birthday celebration.”
“Sure, I’d love to,” said Beth. “Whose birthday?”
“Mine, my birthday is tomorrow.”
“Happy birthday in advance!” Beth replied.
She ignored the irrational hurt of the reminder of her own forgotten birthday. It was silly to feel jealous.
“Thank you,” said Gwen easily.
When Beth got home, Oakley was still refusing to talk. He wasn’t giving her the silent treatment. He’d say good morning and pass the salt and such. But he refused to have any deeper conversation about why it was unreasonable for her to spend anymore time at home. Frustrated, Beth gave up. If Oakley didn’t want to talk, then that was his choice. Beth had too much on her plate to worry about him as well.
Because it wasn’t just that one celebratory meal they were overdoing. Not to the extent of chicken soup again, but all the meals they were eating were more elaborate than they needed to be. They weren’t using enough of the supps. Sophie had tried, a little, each in turn. But other than those few experimental meals, they’d almost stopped using them entirely.
It wasn’t like Beth didn’t understand why. It wasn’t that the supps tasted bad. They tasted of nothing. The very platonic ideal of tasteless. That meant that when they were added, everything else tasted less. Bland was a misrepresentation. It tasted like the core of the food had been removed. Spices and salt and sugar helped, but who had any of those?
It wasn’t literally Beth’s money they were spending, she’d come to realise. She would have had to sign off on any further loans. That just made it harder to argue. Since she couldn’t come at it directly, the twins would have to be her entry point. Her father might be a little upset at her questioning his parenting, but he’d be considerably more upset if she directly questioned his spending habits. Or his conviction that he’d shortly be so rich that none of this would matter.
“I have a concern about the twins,” said Beth, doing her best to sound earnest.
“Oh?” asked her father, rightfully suspicious.
“You see,” said Beth, intentionally mimicking her father’s speaking patterns. “I’m worried that they’re getting a little spoiled. All their friends are eating almost nothing but the supps, but they’re eating real food every meal. It’s making them stand out.”
“I don’t think we should just take the handouts those aliens are giving us,” said her father. “It’s rather shameful, honestly. And really, who knows what’s in it or what it does?”
“Pines has released a study on it,” said Beth. “You know that Peter said it’s perfectly safe and nutritionally complete. Really, it’s just the same thing as a meal replacement drink. It’s even good for us, what with how limited our foods are. Are we really going to tell the twins that they should avoid things that are good for them just because they’re a little bland? I’m sure when you were young, you would have been grateful to have them."
Beth knew for a fact that her father lived on chicken nuggets and potato chips when he was young. It wasn’t like he’d lived through the Second World War. But she also knew that her father wouldn’t want to contradict the image of a hardened survivor he was so fond of roleplaying.
Sure enough, her father pivoted. “Slops take points. What if we need them for something more important down the line? We shouldn’t just be careless with things. You never know what stupid thing they’ll come up with next.”
“The twins have their full allowance. We can let them save some just in case, but they don’t need to save it all. Isn’t it reasonable to ask them to contribute to the household if they can? Teach them independence and how to stand on their own two feet?”
After she had been so firm about not expecting the twins to work, Beth was conscious of her hypocrisy. She knew that there would be future auctions but didn’t know how the point distribution would work. She intended it mostly as an excuse to supplement the food with her savings, but inevitably some would come from the twins for the deception to work.
But her father didn’t disagree with anything she said. Beth could see in his eyes.
“We can’t expect the twins to eat slops while we don’t,” said her father. “Besides, that sounds like it would be so much extra work for Sophie.”
There it was. The real hurdle. Not what the twins would eat, but what her father himself might be expected to eat. It was time for the trump card.
“That’s true,” said Beth. “We can’t expect Sophie to make different meals. It’s just that I’m afraid that it will end up looking bad for Peter. You know how he said that we had to be a good example for everyone. The government is trying very hard to promote the supps as the proper way to live. If it comes out that Peter’s own family isn’t, then what kind of message does that send?”
It was nonsense for more than one reason. For one, very few people were really going to care what Peter’s extended family was doing. For another, Beth would be shocked if it turned out the de la Hayes were eating much in the way of supps themselves. But the de la Hayes were rich enough to eat anyway they liked. Her family was just pretending.
“Do you think so?” asked her father, sufficiently concerned to forget he was asking Beth’s opinion.
“You know how much Peter relies on you,” said Beth with a straight face. “It would be a terrible thing for him if we became a scandal rather than a help.”
“I suppose we could include a bit of slops into our meals.”
Her father didn’t sound particularly convinced, but it was enough of a concession. Beth knew she could encourage Sophie to make full use of it. She could give over a portion of her own points in supps without Sophie asking any questions. They would start spending less.
Beth should have been happy. She wasn’t.
So what if her father was now making money, or if he had found a way to borrow money in his own name? He had left the debt in her name intact. They weren’t in the clear. Her father should have been willing to cut back because it was common sense. He should have been doing all proactively, without Beth even having to suggest it. Beth shouldn’t have needed to fight.
