Whatever else Beth might have on her mind, she still had a day job. The allotment clearing team was sent into new abandoned areas to convert, even as every day took them a little bit further away from the houses and the roads and the water pipes. Theo reassured them that they had as much work as anyone could foresee. There was more demand for allotments than they could hope to meet, seeing as even people who already had one wanted more. But Beth could see, just as well as the rest of the team could see, that they were running out of reasonable places to clear.

  But that would have to be a problem for a future day. Beth was already filled up with enough things to worry about.

  An advantage to being out in relative wilderness was the foraging opportunities. What they’d taken to calling the gleanings. They had free pickings of the end-of-season blackberries, the crab apples and the sloes. In places easier to access, they’d already been stripped bare. Not that any of them were very enthusiastic about the sloes. Beth had tried a taste of the berry directly off the tree and realised she hadn’t previously understood the word ‘tart’. It was more of an attack than a taste. All the moisture in her mouth was burnt away, leaving her gasping for breath. She knew sloes were part of many traditional recipes, but those tended to involve large amounts of sugar and alcohol. They could find the alcohol, but the sugar was largely out of reach. Beth wasn’t at all convinced that the vitamin C and the pectin was enough to justify their existence. But even Silent was conscientious in collecting them, even if only to turn over to the food exchange.

  On the walk to their new destination, Beth was drawn aside by Gwen. “Arthur asked for me to pass along his apologies, luv.”

  “Ah,” said Beth. It took her a moment to place which Arthur and why he’d be apologising, but Beth had to hide a grimace when she recalled. She would have much preferred if he’d politely forgotten he’d ever asked, rather than apologise.

  “What did he do, then?” asked Gwen, inevitably. “Anything I should be whacking him upside the head for?”

  Beth supposed she should have credited Arthur with not simply passing along the gossip directly, but he’d still opened her up to this precise question. Of course Gwen would be curious if asked to pass along that message.

  After the uncomfortable pause, Gwen continued hurriedly, “If you’d rather not say, that’s alright, of course. Never mind me.”

  Beth took a further moment to think about it. Gwen wouldn’t push. But it wasn’t any great secret, either. And that was quite aside from the fact that there was an excellent chance Oakley would cheerfully confide the details the next time he was invited to the high school for lunch anyway. It seemed rather silly to tell Arthur and then draw the line at Gwen.

  Beth shrugged. “Arthur didn’t really do anything that needed an apology. All he did was ask about my mother. Oakley was the one who jumped in with all the awkward details.”

  Beth paused for a third time, and Gwen kept her silence.

  “My mother went missing when I was a child, you see,” said Beth. “But it was a long time ago, now. I was very young when it happened, and I’ve worked through it. Really, I just prefer not to mention it because too many people want to turn it into a true crime episode.”

  “Ouch,” said Gwen. “I know that people can forget the victims, but when you’re standing right there?”

  “Right? Like no, I don’t want to listen to your list of serial killers that might have been active in the area.”

  “People didn’t— they did.”

  “They did. I just got in the habit of downplaying it so that people wouldn’t get too interested. But I guess now, I don’t need to worry about it anymore. It isn’t special, now. Everyone has a family member they don’t know what happened to.”

  Gwen winced and Beth laughed, a bit embarrassed by her own callousness. It was somewhat hypocritical so soon after complaining about other people being insensitive. It had been a half year of isolation, for most people. Not knowing the state of loved ones had become normal.

  “Arthur didn’t…” asked Gwen.

  “No, not at all,” reassured Beth. “He was as tactful as he could be, under the circumstances.”

  “Sure,” said Gwen. “After he’d asked about your mother in the first place. Because as you say, it’s more likely to be a sore point than not, these days, isn’t it?”

  Beth shrugged again. “He was a little blunt. You certainly managed to go our entire relationship without being nosy about it.”

  “To be fair,” said Gwen, “That’s because I don’t want people asking about my family in return. I’m as nosy as a cat at a window when I can be.”

  “Cunning,” said Beth.

  Beth couldn’t deny she was nosy herself. Jumping in to ask after that kind of lead in felt like a big red ‘don’t press’ button. As tempting as it was wrong. Beth already had hints about just what that relationship had been like, however, and it was even more awkward than her own. A bad parent was worse than a missing parent.

  Besides, Beth had something else she needed to discuss with Gwen now that she had the chance. She hadn’t intended bringing it up that day, but she didn’t want to endlessly procrastinate on whether to bring it up, either.

  “So, in completely different news…” she said, and waited out the laugh. “Do you know Adrian? Part of the office handling refugees? I don’t remember his surname.”

  “Yes, I know who you mean.”

  “So, odd question. Would you agree he is a Bad Guy? I mean, unusually Bad? That he’s behind a lot of the corruption that is making life miserable for the refugees?”

  “You wouldn’t get any argument against that from me. Why are you asking, then?”

  “I think I could probably get him fired,” said Beth, feeling the shape of that thought as she said it. “With the right report to the right person. He’s been indiscrete enough and has enough enemies that someone would probably be willing to step in. He’s left evidence behind.”

  Beth wasn’t going to admit to breaking into her brother’s computer, but she wouldn’t need to, with Gwen. Both of them worked with enough people that wished to remain anonymous for excellent reasons.

  “Good on you for talking to me about it first,” said Gwen with a pleased smile.

  That was a very awkward compliment, under the circumstances. Beth wasn’t tempted to charge ahead without thought like she had been when smuggling things. Beth was tempted to stay silent and do nothing at all because that meant not having to make a decision. Beth still wasn’t sure, in her own mind, where the limits of loyalty to her brother ought to be. And then, past that, to what she’d do anyway, even if it was wrong.

  “And?” prompted Beth.

  “Small world,” said Gwen. “We’ve spoken about that before. As you say, he hasn’t been very discrete. We decided against it, but if you want to argue in favour, I’m happy to hear you out.”

  “You decided against it?”

  “Yeah,” said Gwen. “Chances are he’d just buy his way out, but we figured it wouldn’t help even if he couldn’t. Not as much as one would hope it would. There’d just be a new guy stepping in, taking the same graft. Or a new guy taking even more to catch up on whatever the original guy had gotten away with.”

  That was cynical beyond even what Beth normally thought. After all, there were plenty of people in the government who were well-meaning and hard-working. Just take Theo for example. The new person could be one of those.

  But she didn’t want to come across as childishly na?ve by suggesting that. Instead she asked, “But wouldn’t it at least help in the beginning? The new guy would have to behave while the higher ups were looking over his shoulder, and in the circumstances, they would be.”

  “Could be,” agreed Gwen. “Could be the higher ups would demand a cut of their ownsome. Could be that the new guy would put extra effort into all the initiatives, precisely because the higher ups are watching. Some of the perfectly legal stuff is just as dangerous as the corruption.”

  That flag she’d changed in Steve’s file wouldn’t survive a concentrated initiative to go through everyone again. It might even bring him to the forefront.

  “I guess I can see that,” said Beth quietly. She didn’t know why she was arguing. She didn’t want the investigation to happen at all, not with the inevitable consequences to her brother.

  “Think about it,” suggested Gwen. “There’s no great rush. We can always change our minds.”

  “That’s true,” said Beth.

  She would have preferred an immediate decision for her peace of mind, but that would have been difficult when she and Gwen weren’t even arguing the same thing.

  Helen waved her over as they walked back towards the rest of the party. With an apologetic smile to Gwen, Beth trotted over to join her.

  “When are you going to be scheduling your next scavenging run?” asked Helen. “It’s getting pretty late if we want to get a slot next Thursday.”

  “Sorry,” said Beth. “That sounds good, but I just need to check something first.”

  “The longer we leave it, the less chance that we will be able to work together,” reminded Helen.

  “I know,” said Beth. “I just want to avoid—”

  Beth cut herself off. She wasn’t prepared to discuss it, not yet. But Helen figured out what she meant anyway.

  “Is that creep still bothering you?” Helen asked. “What’s-his-name, Kenneth?”

  “I haven’t given him a chance to,” admitted Beth.

  “Are you sure he hasn’t done anything you can report? He isn’t military. They won’t protect him.”

  “It was all he-said-she-said stuff,” said Beth. “He didn’t touch me or anything. All he really did was… solicit a bribe, I guess. A bunch of suggestive comments he’d just say I was reading too much into. And maybe I was reading too much into it.”

  “Don’t do that,” said Helen sharply. “They do it enough themselves. Don’t start doing their work for them. If a guy makes you feel sleezy, he’s doing it on purpose.”

  “I can’t report a guy for being sleezy!”

  “No,” agreed Helen. “You’ve got to pick your battles. You’re not wrong. Any guy you talk to about this is going to take it personally and be exactly that voice in your head. They’re going to react like you accused them personally of unspeakable acts. Like if they can convince you to stop being upset by mistreatment, then they never have to worry about how they treat people again. Because they really don’t understand just how predatory other men can be. I think we should be reporting when we can, to wear down that resistance, but I’m not going to tell you to do it when you don’t think you can win.”

  “I don’t,” said Beth.

  “Alright then. But don’t start doubting yourself. Your instincts are flashing you a warning. Don’t ignore them.”

  “But what if I’m wrong? Maybe he was just teasing, and I took it the wrong way?”

  “Then he would have stopped the second he saw you were uncomfortable. But it doesn’t matter. It’s like stopping at a red light. Sometimes you would have been fine ignoring it. But it isn’t worth the risk. And don’t let people try to tell you that’s unfair to him, either. There’s plenty of people in the world. He is quite free to go off and be friends with the people who don’t find him sleezy. He isn’t owed your time just because he wants it.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Oh, Beth had no desire to be Sulky’s friend. Even before the whole incident. But something released in her. It was a relief to have permission to label his actions creepy, without having to spend mental gymnastics on ways it could have been innocent. It didn’t matter. She’d been uncomfortable, and that was all she needed to care about. It might still replay in her head as she tried to sleep, but maybe now she had an answer to give herself.

  “People!” shouted Theo from the entrance to the new field. “Enough chatter. We have work to do.”

  Helen winked at her. “Let me know when you’ve checked the schedule.”

  “Will do.”

  They joined the rest of the team. The first job was to clear the entrance of overgrown branches, which were forming a very solid wall of their own. Silent pulled the cover off the two-person saw.

  Silent had picked up a skill that had described itself as preservation and been crushed to discover it didn’t apply to humans. It was instead excellent at keeping metal objects whole and sharp. Silent had applied for the slight salary increase awarded for skill usage, and the team had been permitted to carry extra tools as a result, including the coveted two-man saw. They weren’t allowed to fell full trees – that was still the province of a dedicated team – but it did allow them to get stuck in on the larger branches that had previously been such an annoying barrier.

  While Helen and Beth cleared the twigs at ground level, Silent and Gwen tackled everything higher up. Silent used their single ladder to climb to a convenient branch. He then harnessed himself in and let Gwen take the ladder to the other side.

  Crack.

  Beth looked up at Silent in surprise. He was usually good at giving notice that they were starting. The expression on his face made it clear that they hadn’t.

  Gwen was staring at something higher up that Beth couldn’t see from her angle. “Elijah! Jump!”

  Silent started twisting, although it wasn’t clear what he could do, fastened as he was. There wasn’t anything the rest of them could do, either. Another crack, and the branch he was on started falling. It crashed down through the trees onto the ground below. Silent followed it down, landing on his back, the breath pushed out of his lungs in an unnatural grunt.

  Jumpy pushed through the mess of branches and dropped to his knees beside Silent. For once, he ignored the dirt and the decaying leaves and the potential for bugs. His stabilising skill usage wasn’t visible, but they all stared as if they could see and improve the effects by willpower alone. He checked briefly over the places the branches had scraped all the way through Silent’s heavy work clothes to the fragile skin below, before returning to holding his hands over Silent’s chest.

  Silent groaned, a good sign compared to the alternative. Even better was when Silent pushed himself unsteadily to sitting, Jumpy supporting him. Silent twisted to the side and threw up. Beth was surprised to notice that Jumpy didn’t even flinch, instead continuing to support Silent’s weight.

  “Ow,” he said, in a deadpan voice.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Did you break anything?”

  Silent took a deep breath, only to wince and throw up again.

  “I think he’s cracked some ribs,” said Jumpy. “He’ll be fine for the next few hours. But he needs to get to a proper healer.”

  Not all healing skills were created equal, they’d discovered far too late to benefit. Jumpy had ended up with one that worked instantly but temporarily. Much more respected, and lucrative, were the skills which would convince the body to fully heal itself. It took longer – minutes for cuts, hours for broken bones, weeks for missing limbs – but the result was worth it. It would be a full, complete recovery, as if the injury had never happened in the first place.

  “Do we take him back to Campus?” asked Beth. “Or to the base?”

  “We can’t,” said Gwen grimly. “We don’t qualify for the military healers.”

  “Of course we do,” said Helen. “We’re on an official job, here.”

  “Only if we’d followed the official safety protocols. As it is, we’ve forfeited that. Since, you see, we wouldn’t have been hurt if we’d followed them.”

  “The safety—” said Helen, “but those things are complete nonsense! We’d never get any work done.”

  “We couldn’t even follow them for this if we’d wanted to,” agreed Beth. “We’d need two spotters for every person off the ground, as well as a supervisor. Seven jobs for a team of six.”

  “We’re not supposed to have a pair off the ground at all, you know,” said Theo, his voice sounding strange. “That’s why we were only issued a single ladder.”

  “Rules made up in ivory towers by people who’ve never even seen real work,” said Helen.

  Gwen cast a look at Theo. “Rules designed to be ignored. Rules that mean we can never sue the government for anything, seeing as we’re never in compliance.”

  With realisation, Helen said, “Rules that mean we can’t use military healers.”

  Theo said “No.”

  “No?” asked Gwen with a raised eyebrow. “No, we can just report this and get treatment for Elijah, no problems?”

  Theo flushed. “We… yes, there will be a problem. I don’t think they meant to deny us treatment, but we have been ignoring safety. Not just the more absurd bits of the regulations. We’ve been ignoring common sense as well. And that’s on me. I’ll take the fall.”

  “No, you bleeding well won’t!” said Gwen.

  “Gwen—”

  “You think we’ll all just be shiny and happy after you’ve thrown yourself on your sword? They’d fire the lot of us, you know they would.”

  “What, so we just let Elijah suffer?”

  “We can’t,” said Jumpy. “He does anything even vaguely strenuous in the next few weeks, and he risks putting a rib through his lung.”

  “Can we get him to a back-garden healer?” asked Helen.

  “That would cost more than a few weeks salary.”

  “Yeah, but less than getting fired. They aren’t just going to ignore things if he suddenly takes a month off ill. They’ll know we were ignoring safety.”

  “They already know. If we were keeping to safety, we would be so far behind schedule we’d still be at the high school.”

  There was a digression into the prices being charged by various black-market healers, and Beth was taken aback at one that sounded a lot like it might be Sophie. It wouldn’t be unreasonable, she supposed. She had long suspected Sophie’s skill had been healing. And really, hadn’t it been a little odd that she and her father had refused to speak of their skills even to their own children?

  But if Sophie was making a lot of money, why had they needed to borrow from Beth? It could be for the legitimacy, she supposed. Just as much as she made sure to have a reasonable origin for her wealth, so would they. At least until her father was established enough in his soap business. A business that might well have been a money laundering front all along. But if they had money, and they had a way to launder it, why did The Book still think they wanted to send her to a farm?

  Beth shook her head sharply. She was letting assumptions pile on top of assumptions. There were more urgent matters.

  “We don’t need a back-garden healer,” interrupted Beth. “We just need to fake a scenario where he could have become injured even within the protocols. We have enough people if we’d done this from the ground, right? I mean, that’s why we’re allowed the saw in the first place?”

  Jumpy snorted. “If they were sawing branches from the ground, he couldn’t have acquired these kinds of injuries.”

  “What if only one person was climbing? We have enough people for that.”

  “What kind of sawing would we possibly need to do with one person on the ground and the other halfway up a tree?”

  “Surely we can come up with something,” said Beth. “We were in close quarters because of a fence or something, and it was the only viable angle. Elijah was on the ladder, but he’d secured himself to a branch as required. Except the branch itself fell, pulling Elijah down with it.”

  It was nonsense, obviously. No one bothered to clip in the harness when they were going up and down a ladder. But it was technically required as soon as they were above a meter and a half.

  “The spotters?” asked Gwen, but more thoughtfully than in objection.

  “We tried desperately,” replied Beth. “But couldn’t overcome the harness. Lucky that I have Warding Shell skill, or I would be horrifically scratched up myself.”

  “What made the branch fall, then?”

  “Who knows?” said Beth with a shrug. “It all happened so fast.”

  “It’s not— impossible,” said Theo. “But…”

  “Why bother including the two-man saw at all?” said Gwen. “Elijah was just going up to trim some branches with a lopper, with his harness and his two spotters holding the ladder and Theo as supervisor, when the branch fell.”

  Everyone considered that.

  “That is a lot simpler,” acknowledged Beth, a little embarrassed.

  “Hard to disprove,” agreed Helen.

  “They aren’t going to send out an investigator,” said Jumpy thoughtfully. “We aren’t suing them for anything, after all.”

  They exchanged glances and nods and then collectively turned to stare at Silent.

  “Whatever,” he said. “You’re the ones running the risk.”

  He was still sickly white under his tan, reminding them all that they were on a time limit.

  “Alright,” said Theo. “We’ll give it a try. I’m going to report that he fell, and that pulled the branch down with him. Gwen, you’re the right-hand spotter and you’re going to report the branch fell first and pulled Elijah down with it. Beth, you’re the left-hand spotter, and you don’t know what happened, it all happened so fast. Mark, Helen, you couldn’t see anything, just heard the crack of the branch and then the thump on the ground when he landed. Elijah, you remember climbing a ladder to trim branches with a lopper, then a vague impression of something hitting you across the back, then throwing up with Mark helping you. Nothing else.”

  “Won’t it be suspicious if we all remember something different?” asked Beth.

  Theo snorted. “Much less suspicious than if we all remember the same thing, believe me. The only time witnesses ever agree with each other is when they’ve rehearsed their story ahead of time. Just keep it simple. As close to the truth as possible, but don’t worry if you end up contradicting each other.”

  Beth found herself checking with Gwen that she agreed.

  Gwen nodded. “This lets them choose whatever they think is the most likely. We’re not the one’s drawing the conclusions. We’re giving them the space to. If they think it’s most likely that Elijah was pulled off balance, or that he passed out, or that he has concussion, then there’s evidence for whatever they want to think.”

  “He probably does have concussion,” said Jumpy.

  “All the better,” said Theo. “Can Elijah walk? Or should we call an ambulance?”

  “I can—” said Silent.

  “You can,” interrupted Jumpy. “But it would make the healing more complicated. If we’re doing this, we might as well get the full benefit out of it.”

  “Ambulance it is, then,” said Theo.

  Gwen was sent back to make contact, while Beth, Helen and Theo did their best to stage the scene. Or at least sufficiently confuse the scene. They moved the ladder and Silent and then packed everything away and moved Silent back to the road. It wouldn’t stand up to an investigator with the proper skills, but the average person wouldn’t be able to tell what had or hadn’t happened.

  The healer who came with the ambulance was also fast-but-temporary and had no interest whatsoever in the accident site. Soon enough, they were all back at Campus and being pulled aside for short interviews. Beth stuck to her assigned script. She knew her lying abilities weren’t great, but she could mostly stick to the truth.

  “There was a crack,” said Beth, rubbing at her arms. “Like a tree was going to come down, you know? Except no-one was felling any trees in the area. I remember being confused about that, until I realised it was a branch, you know? The branch that was supposed to hold Elijah’s weight? I mean, I guess I always figured that if I had to spot some-one we could get that road-runner moment, when he’s over the cliff but hasn’t started falling. But we didn’t. I wanted to grab Elijah, I did. But he just… he just wasn’t there.”

  “Did you get injured yourself?” asked the interviewer, looking at where her hands were patting.

  “Oh,” said Beth, looking at her arms herself. “No. I have a skill that protects me from that. That’s why I don’t need long sleeves, you see? Elijah doesn’t. His top was a wreck. I wonder if it can be repaired? That’s the last thing he needs on top of all of this. And we’re coming into winter soon, too.”

  The interviewer was quickly bored with Beth’s rambling and sent her back to join the rest of the team. They left at the end of the day, still without any clue about whether their story had worked. Theo had been the only one required to write up an account formally, but they were all questioned. They weren’t told about any concerns. They didn’t know if anyone had been sent to the location to investigate. They couldn’t even ask without suggesting that there was something to investigate.

  Silent had been treated, at least. They couldn’t take that back.

  They waited, on edge, trying to figure out how long they would have to give it before they could be confident that they weren’t going to be prosecuted. Reassurance of their success came from an unlikely source – they were issued with a new set of safety guidelines. One with expanded guidelines for three-point attachments and additional testing of attachment points.

  Beth was giggling to herself while Silent just rested his forehead on his hands.

  “I guess following this will prevent you from repeating your ‘accident’,” said Theo.

  That was enough to provoke the rest of them into laughter.

  But the shock of Silent’s fall was enough to change their procedures. They didn’t start following all the safety guidelines – they couldn’t. But they did confine use of the two-man saw to the ground and were more cautious. They were all aware that a second improbable accident would get a lot more attention. They were all also aware they had been lucky. Nothing Jumpy could have done would have been enough if Silent had broken his neck. Their illusions of invincibility had been stripped away from them.

  The scavenging missions were supposed to be what was dangerous. Smuggling goods out and selling them on the black market was supposed to be what was risky. The everyday work of chopping down plants was supposed to be safe.

  They found their balance. While she waited those last weeks for the next auction that would destabilise it all again, Beth spent her free time turning tomatoes into paste.

  With everything that had been going on, she had become somewhat negligent of her little rooftop garden. The little tomato plant that had refused to grow all spring had made up for it over the summer. It had taken over the entire bed, the pathways beside it, and a not insignificant part of the roof. The other plants were drowned under sprays of tomatoes. The ones closest to the sky had been pecked by birds or other creatures, but there were plenty more hiding from sight. More than could be incorporated into meals.

  She used the paste as a large part of her gifts for Peter and Sophie, who had their birthdays in quick succession. She had a dozen imaginary arguments with herself, where Peter or Sophie or her father complained about the insufficiency of her gift, only for her to be able to clapback with an appropriate zinger. A chance for her to finally confront them about failing to get her a gift at all without sounding like a petulant child.

  She was denied her chance. Both parties thanked her with the blandness of an employee getting the office card. Beth reminded herself, again, that a forgotten birthday was hardly the worst thing that could happen to people. It wasn’t even the worst thing she herself was now complicit in.

  Beth double checked her hidden and locked box again. She hadn’t forgotten about Adrian and those incriminating documents. She wished she could forget. It would have made everything easier. Instead, she simply had to ignore it.

  She was knee deep in the logistics of releasing goods to the black market, and laundering the profits back to people who needed them. Not just her original plans of the refugee centres and schools, but also the individuals who lacked even that basic safety net. There were channels that filtered help to those it could, when it could. Beth used up some of her favours, but she gained more in return. All invisible from the surface, so they wouldn’t draw attention of predators to the most vulnerable of prey.

  Beth told herself it was enough.