They’d finished the bucket.
It was one liter in size.
It looked like a toy in her hand.
Mandy Donovan cupped the bucket in her palm.
“Are you two messing with me?” ‘This isn’t what I asked for.
I need a functional bucket.
The water at their secret base is waiting to be collected into my Space.’
“Forget it.
You two just keep practicing.
I need a big one, something that can hold twenty liters of water.
The bigger, the better.”
“The bucket isn’t urgent.
First, make something else for me,” Mandy said, explaining with words and gestures how the two brothers could make her a simplified version of a dowsing rod.
Tomorrow, she would use it to find a well.
The strange contraption was finished.
Gary and Etta had no idea what it was for.
They wanted to ask Mandy, but they found she had fallen asleep.
The house had no lighting, so as soon as the sky grew dark, the inside was plunged into blackness.
「The next day」
The three of them set out, carrying bamboo baskets, tools, food, and water.
Mandy kept the strange device the brothers had made tucked inside her clothes.
Etta wanted a look, but she refused to take it out.
Outside the city, the gathering area was just a stretch of yellow sand.
Here and there, people were bent over, rummaging for something in the sand with their butts in the air.
Neither Gary nor Etta mentioned gathering.
They had enough points for now to get by for a while, so there was no need.
Mandy had only mentioned gathering in passing; in reality, she didn’t even spare the area a glance.
“Aren’t we going to gather anything?” Etta couldn’t help but ask as the three of them were about to leave the gathering area.
“If you want to gather later, there’ll be plenty of time.” Finding water wasn’t a quick job, and Mandy certainly didn’t think she’d strike it rich on her first try with the dowsing rod.
“Let’s stick to the plan for now.”
Once they were out of the gathering area, Mandy took out the strange device and quickly assembled it.
She held it up, slowing her pace.
The wind was strong!
Worried the wind would affect it, Mandy started walking backward, using her free hand to shield it.
“Mandy, what are you doing?” Etta couldn’t take it anymore and poked her from behind.
Mandy was ticklish.
She flinched, and the device in her hand trembled with her.
She instantly held her breath.
“You’ll see in a bit.
Don’t ask, and don’t touch me.
You can go sit over there and play for a while.
Or go back to the gathering area, that’s fine too.”
“I’d better stick with you.
I’m carrying these tools,” Etta replied, the bamboo basket on his back as he trailed right behind her.
Gary remembered how Mandy had made the strange device.
He created another one with his power, assembled it just like she had, and held it up as he slowly walked a short distance away.
He could tell that the device relied on maintaining a certain balance.
All of Mandy’s movements were aimed at maintaining that balance, keeping it from being affected by outside forces.
As time trickled by, Etta was about to speak again.
But Gary spoke first.
“Mandy, look what happened to mine!” On his device, the two metal wires, which were supposed to be parallel, had suddenly crossed.
He set them parallel again, but a second later, they crossed on their own.
Hearing this, Mandy’s eyes lit up when she saw Gary’s device.
“Step aside, let me see.” Holding her simple dowsing rod, she walked over to the spot where Gary had been standing.
Sure enough, the metal wires crossed.
She immediately took her device and Gary’s, tucked them into her clothes—actually putting them into her Space—and said, “This little gadget is our family’s secret.
You are absolutely, under no circumstances, to tell anyone about it.
Got it?”
‘Dowsing is an ancient technique.
To think I’d still be using it after traveling hundreds of years into the future.’
“I won’t tell, but—” Etta was bursting with curiosity.
“Can’t you just tell us what it is?”
“Grab a shovel, both of you.
Start digging,” Mandy said, picking up a shovel herself and starting to dig at the spot where the dowsing rod had reacted.
With the two brothers’ help, they soon dug a hole two or three meters deep.
The dry yellow sand began to show signs of clumping.
Once they reached that point, Gary exclaimed in pleasant surprise, “Is there water here?
Is that what your gadget does?
Find water?”
Mandy put a finger to her lips.
“Shh.
Just keep digging.
The earth down there isn’t all yellow sand.
Pile it to the side separately.
I’ll need it later.”
The deeper they dug, the yellow sand gave way to yellow soil, and the bottom of the deep pit turned into thick mud.
“I’ll try my best to make a proper bucket when we get back,” Etta said.
They had water but no way to carry it.
He stuck the detector needle from his wristband into the mud.
PING!
[Natural water source.
Moderately polluted.
Potable.]
“We found—” Etta started to yell in his excitement, but Mandy, with her quick reflexes, slapped a hand over his mouth.
“What are you shouting about?
If you call people over here, I’ll beat you up.”
She brandished a fist to intimidate him.
Etta’s eyes grew misty as she held his mouth shut.
Mandy couldn’t bring herself to actually hit him.
Before letting go, she warned the two brothers, “From now on, just do whatever I tell you to.
No questions.
Because even if you ask, I won’t answer.”
“Don’t make Mandy mad.
If she gets mad, she’ll abandon us,” Gary added, also trying to scare Etta.
“And I’ll abandon you, too!”
“Brother!” Etta bit his lower lip and let out a small, aggrieved “oh.” ‘Fine, I’ll be good,’ he thought.
‘Why is everyone always threatening to abandon me?’
“First, make me a lidless box, about this big,” Mandy said, gesturing the size.
She told each of the brothers to make one for her.
While the two brothers were using their superpower to create the boxes, Mandy kept busy.
She piled the excavated yellow soil into a cone like a volcano, dug a crater at the top, and threw in some yellow sand and some of the mud, mixing it all together with a shovel.
The boxes were ready.
Mandy packed the clay mixture into one of the boxes, tapped it on the ground, and flipped it over.
Out came a damp mud brick.
Then she made a second one.
And a third.
Gary understood what the boxes were for and started copying Mandy, making mud bricks.
He didn’t know what her ultimate goal was, but he figured it couldn’t be wrong to follow her lead.
“Etta, go over to the gathering area and find some things we can burn.
The more, the better,” Mandy said, tossing the bamboo basket to him.
‘The internet said these bricks need to air-dry for a few days.’
She couldn’t wait that long.
As soon as they were half-dry, she planned to fire them as a first experiment.
‘The heated bed in the bedroom is eight square meters, and with the stove, I’ll need about four hundred bricks.
Then there’s one wall, which will take another three hundred.’
With these numbers in mind, while Etta was off gathering firewood, Mandy and Gary made nearly a thousand bricks.
The first ones they’d made were already half-dry and could be handled.
Mandy copied what she’d seen in a video, stacking the bricks in a crisscross pattern.
“Gary, you go gather firewood too.
The more, the better.”
The thousand bricks were arranged in two large stacks.
While the two brothers were away, Mandy stuffed some wood chips and charcoal fragments into the gaps between the bricks.
When they returned, she used the firewood they had gathered to cover the stacks, so no one would know about the kindling hidden inside.
She lit fires for both stacks.
“Is this enough firewood?” Gary asked, wiping his forehead.
Black beads of sweat dripped down his cheeks.
“If not, we can go get more.”
Mandy didn’t actually know if it was enough.
‘If this doesn’t work, we’ll just have to try again next time,’ she thought.
‘But I have to get this heated bed built before it gets cold.’ “Let’s just wait and see for now,” she said aloud.
“Brother, the water in the pit is clearing up,” Etta said, squatting in the pit and staring at the water at the bottom.
The mud had settled, leaving a thin layer of clear water on top.
“If we dig deeper, will we get more water?” Etta was eager to try.
Without waiting for Mandy or Gary to say anything, he grabbed a shovel and jumped into the pit.
“Now that we have water, you two should wash up.
From head to toe,” Mandy instructed.
“There’s no one around, so you can wash your clothes later, too.”
“Let’s dig a little deeper first, get some more water,” Gary said.
He created one of the box-shaped containers and scooped up the thin layer of clear water from above the mud.
“Mandy, here, you drink.”
‘Mandy didn’t want to drink!’
But she couldn’t refuse.
The two kids hadn’t taken a single sip themselves, offering the first water to her.
How could she say no?
She immediately took the box and had a mouthful.
“You two drink the rest.
I’m good.”
‘The more of this moderately polluted water she drank, the higher her own body’s contamination level would become.’
‘She’d seen people with severe contamination before.’
‘They spent their last moments in agonizing wails.’
‘She didn’t want to die like that.’
The pit grew deeper.
The muddy water became less viscous.
The fires on the brick stacks began to die down.
A crackling and popping sound emerged from the stacks, and Mandy’s heart clenched.
‘Not enough heat and the bricks will be fragile.
Too much, and they’ll warp.
What would her first batch of fired bricks look like?’
As the fire died down, the bricks within the stacks gradually came into view.
From the looks of it, they were mostly intact.
She glanced back and saw two little bare-bottomed mud monkeys who had washed the soot off their bodies.
“They’re still just kids…”