Page 24 of Trade (After the End #7)

“Don’t you cry.” Judith tugs Amy into her side. “If you cry, I’ll cry, and it’ll be a mess.”

“Oh, Boss . . .” Alan trails off, stricken.

“We’ve kept everything shipshape for you,” Reginald says gruffly. “Despite some people needing reminders to not leave their equipment out overnight.”

Alan is too upset to take offense. He shifts back and forth in his boots, frowning like his heart is breaking, his hands shoved into his pockets.

They’re genuinely devastated to see me like this.

They shouldn’t be stuck in here either.

“Gloria!” Cecily comes running, and my little circle opens for her. She doesn’t hesitate. She pulls me into her arms, careful not to squeeze too tightly, but still somehow managing to hug me like she means it. “You’re back.”

And I can hear it—the commiseration in her voice, the regret, the absence of relief. She understands. I squeeze her back. I don’t care that it hurts.

“What do we do now?” I ask her. The question just slips out.

“I don’t know,” she says, her brown eyes shiny and kind, but with a banked anger, too, that maybe has always been there. “You got any ideas?”

I don’t, so we both cry as we smile at each other, mad women together, trapped and hopeless in a concrete box with a smoked glass lid that lets in light but doesn’t allow you even a glimpse or hint of blue.

The others murmur a final “happy you’re back” and head off to work, leaving Cecily and me alone. She wraps her arm around my waist and asks, “Want to see my peas? I’m experimenting with a new fertilizer blend.”

“Absolutely, I do.”

She walks me over to the Irrigation and Fertilization lab area, and on our way, we pass Meghan on her way to the office. She scurries past, eyes glued to the floor, her face bursting into a blush.

Her long hair is tied back in a greasy braid. Guess her source of spare credits for extra hair-washing water has dried up. Her belly is pushing hard on the zipper of her coveralls. She’ll need to switch them out for scrubs soon.

I expect a twinge of jealousy, but instead I’m caught by the miserable expression on her lowered, bright red face. Did she always look this young? She looks like a kid who’s smuggled a pillow under her shirt as a joke.

“Here. Sit.” Cecily pushes me toward a stool by her work table.

I watch Meghan disappear among the angiosperms. She’s beginning to waddle.

Cecily sees where I’m looking. “I know we hate her, but damn, she’s young.”

I sigh. “That’s what I was thinking.”

“Did they tell you what happened?”

I snort. “I only get told what I’m going to do these days. And what I’m not going to say.”

Cecily snorts back. “Well, you weren’t gone for two days when Miss Meghan packed up her things and took herself back to Level N.”

My jaw drops. “She did?”

Cecily leans against the table, crosses her arms, and nods. “At first, we figured she didn’t like being iced out by every married woman in the bunker—and every married man who didn’t want to be sleeping on the sofa—but then we found out that wasn’t even the half of it.”

“It wasn’t?”

“She didn’t move back into the unmarried women’s dorm.”

“Where did she go?”

“Do you remember Paul Andrews?”

“The intern?”

Cecily nods. I remember him vaguely, mostly because he was considered very handsome by the ladies, but he was painfully shy, so he spent a lot of time hiding from female attention in the broadleafs.

I came on him once crouching in the crepe myrtle, and I nearly had a heart attack. He did his rotation and moved on.

“That’s where she went. Straight to Paul Andrews in his dorm.

” Cecily arches her sculpted eyebrows. “It was a scandal. Susan Jordan was down there trying to talk her into coming out. Paul attacked the guys from Safety and Compliance. They got Meghan’s parents down there to plead with her like it was a hostage negotiation. ”

“I had no idea.” But then was Bennett really going to tell me his girlfriend ditched him?

“Well, turns out, it’s not so clear who the baby’s daddy is. Meghan and Paul were apparently sneaking off to the access tubes together when Meghan caught your old man’s eye. Her parents saw an opportunity, so they encouraged her to play along, and then, well, you know what happened then.”

“Oh. My. Wow.” I don’t know what to say. Or feel. Bennett ruined everything for nothing. But then again, what was there to ruin? A program that was downloaded into my brain at birth that I was playing along with, too? The trade we all made—freedom and happiness for the illusion of safety?

“To calm everything down, they let Paul move in with Meghan and her parents and promised they’d get their own quarters down on G once the baby’s born.

It’s been made clear that we’re all expected to pretend like it never happened.

Let me tell you, staff meetings have been awkward.

Meghan sits in the way back, looking like a tomato, Bennett stammers over his words, and everyone gets whiplash looking between him and her. ” She cackles.

I manage a small smile. “All of that for a taste of apple at the holidays when there are trees full of them Outside,” I say.

Cecily immediately tenses and glances around. “You can’t talk about that,” she hisses. “I know it’s hard, but you can’t. They’re listening. I don’t know how, but they always are.”

“Sorry,” I murmur. I hate the fear in her eyes. I hate all of this.

She gives my hand a quick squeeze. “It gets easier,” she says.

“Does it?”

“It has to, right?” she says, then sighs, brushes her palms on her pants, and turns to her tomatoes. “Let me show you how my babies are doing.”

We don’t talk about Meghan or Bennett or Outside again.

Cecily shows me her data, and we spitball some ideas for other variables she can test, like the fineness of the bone she’s been grinding for the fertilizer.

She tells me about the newest developments in the feud between Alan and Reginald—and how she believes it’s foreplay, at least on Reginald’s part.

I ask about the mimosa and the black cherry I’d been trying to baby back to health. She tells me Amy took over sharing her water rations with them, but the leaf scorch and dieback are still progressing.

She doesn’t ask about my injuries, although her eye keeps returning to my busted lip. I don’t mention the Outside again.

Eventually, a tech asks for her help, and I’m left alone to wander around my trees.

As long as I can remember, they’ve always been the same height.

I grew taller, but they stayed the same.

I always thought they were so grand, but I can circle my arms around each of their trunks and examine their topmost branches from a sixteen-foot ladder.

I don’t know what to do with myself. What did I do at work before?

Worry, mostly. Check on things that never really needed it.

Answer questions for nervous techs so no one accused them of doing the wrong thing under their own initiative.

Can I split the last of this bag between the oak and maple?

Should I go ahead and deadhead these? Do you think if we rotate the birch, it might fill out on the other side?

Yes, yes, yes. I’ll take the blame if Bennett takes issue with it. I’m his wife, after all. He loves me. You’re safe. I’m safe. We’re all safe.

What would Dalton think of it here?

He’d think it’s small and sad and stupid, and he’d be right.

We’re moles in a burrow. Snakes in a hole. How am I going to live in here for the rest of my life? For another month? Week? Day? Minute?

I force myself to breathe through the panic and wander over to the kitchen garden exhibit, inhaling the delicate scents like I always do as I walk past the aluminum beds raised on sawhorse tables. Sage. Thyme. Basil. Mint.

“Hi, Gloria. Good to see you back,” a tech calls over from where she’s snipping some dill, probably for a dish Food Services is preparing for one of the Head Administrator’s dinners, food she’ll never taste.

“Good to be back,” I say automatically, letting my fingers trail over the herbs.

Touching the plants outside of the scope of duties is explicitly forbidden.

Without exception. It’s a primary tenant of Agricultural Preservation.

The tech pretends not to see me do it. I’m a lottery winner now. I have a free pass.

I pass the cilantro. Oregano. Rosemary.

Rosemary.

Where is the lavender?

There. Lavender.

An entire bed of it. English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Woolly varieties. Someone in the first gen loved it.

And there is sage. Sage burns.

The germ of an idea takes root, and for the first time since the bunker doors slammed behind me again, I feel something other than pain and despair. My heart pounds.

I take a second look at the tech clipping the dill and rack my brain for a name. Debbie. That’s it.

I stroll over and flash her my first real smile in days. “So, Debbie. I am going to be transplanting some of these herbs for a new study in the general botany lab.”

She pauses a beat. Then another. My heart races quicker. The smile is plastered on my face.

“Which plants?” she finally says.

“Rosemary. The Portuguese lavender. Sage.”

Her gaze lingers on her babies, and her mouth draws into a frown. I know exactly how she feels. I brace myself for her to ask to see the paperwork.

Instead, after another long moment, she sighs. “How many of each?”

“As many as you can spare,” I say, knowing her heart can’t spare a single one.

She sighs again. “I’ll pot them for you and start bringing them over tomorrow. Will that work?”

“Of course. Thank you.” I can’t believe she’s doing it without question. Is she going to go straight to Bennett as soon as I walk away?

I give her one last smile, but before I can leave, she stops me with a gloved hand on my forearm. “Your dad was a great man.”

“He was. Thank you.”

“My sister won the lottery. Back when he was still alive. He helped her. I’m helping you. So don’t say thank you.” She lowers her voice. “Just don’t get caught.”