Lena lasted twenty-three minutes.
She made it inside.
Took off her boots.
Ate half a protein bar.
Tried very hard not to think about food.
Then opened Inventory.
“Fuck it.”
She started counting.
Not literally.
Thankfully.
The System already knew what was in there.
“How much food do I have?”
Clarify.
“Human food.”
The display changed.
CURRENT HUMAN FOOD RESERVES
Estimated Equivalent: 1,947 person-days
Lena stared.
That sounded like a lot.
It was a lot.
Almost two thousand days of food.
For one person.
She frowned.
Twenty people.
Oh.
“How long does that feed twenty people?”
Projected Duration at Population 20:
97.4 days
Lena stared.
“No.”
The number remained.
“Ninety-seven days.”
Correct.
“I have thousands of pounds of food.”
Correct.
“That’s barely three months.”
Approximately.
“That’s bullshit.”
Calculation accurate.
Lena sat down on the mattress.
Of course it was.
Twenty people.
Twenty breakfasts.
Twenty lunches.
Twenty dinners.
Every day.
She’d known that.
Obviously.
But some part of her brain had still been looking at pallets of rice and cases of canned food and thinking enormous.
Because for one person, it was.
Even for her family, it was.
For twenty people?
It was ninety-seven days.
Lena looked toward the window.
Somewhere outside were thirty-two chickens, five goats, four pigs and a dog.
They were getting ninety days of feed.
And this morning Ruth had asked the obvious question.
What happened on day ninety-one?
Lena had spent the entire day answering it.
Greenhouses.
Irrigation.
Protected production.
Fodder.
Enough food production for twenty people and the livestock.
Ninety days should be enough time to get meaningful production going.
Should.
Lena stared at the number again.
Ninety-seven days of food.
She’d been treating that like a bridge.
Enough stored food to carry them until Redtail could feed itself.
But what if the first crops failed?
What if the second ones did?
What if something broke?
Or disease got into a greenhouse?
Or whatever happened after Transition made growing food harder than any of them expected?
She’d spent all day building redundancy into agriculture.
Three greenhouses.
Backup irrigation.
Replacement pumps.
Manual systems.
She hadn’t built the same redundancy into the thing that kept everyone alive while they figured it out.
“Okay.”
She stood.
Then sat back down.
“No.
How much should I have?”
Clarify.
“If food production fails.”
The System remained silent.
Lena tried again.
“If Redtail has twenty people and we can’t reliably grow food after Transition, how much stored food do I need?”
Chime.
Lena closed her eyes.
“Of course.”
NEW SETTLEMENT QUEST
WHEN HARVESTS FAIL
Stored food provides resilience when production cannot.
Transition may significantly disrupt agricultural production, transportation, biological productivity, and seasonal growing conditions.
Establish sufficient food reserves to sustain Primary Settlement through prolonged production failure.
Current Stored Reserves:
1,947 person-days
Minimum Threshold:
7,300 person-days
Equivalent to:
365 days at projected population 20
Recommended Resilience Threshold:
14,600 person-days
Equivalent to:
730 days at projected population 20
Current Assessment:
Staple Calories: PARTIAL
Protein: PARTIAL
Fats: INSUFFICIENT
Nutritional Diversity: INSUFFICIENT
Infant and Child Nutrition: PARTIAL
Special Dietary Contingencies: INSUFFICIENT
Seed Reserves: PARTIAL
Food-Production Inputs: INSUFFICIENT
Rewards:
Spatial Inventory Expansion
Food Preservation Interface
Bonus Reward dependent upon Completion Quality
Lena stared at 14,600.
Then at 1,947.
Then back at 14,600.
“No.”
Apparently denial was becoming part of her process.
She pulled out her phone.
Calculator.
Fourteen thousand six hundred person-days.
She didn’t even know what that meant in actual food.
Calories?
Pallets?
Warehouses?
She started trying to calculate it.
Stopped.
Why was she doing this?
Marcus existed.
LENA: New procurement requirement.
Human food reserve for 20 people.
She hesitated.
One year minimum.
Two years recommended.
That looked insane.
It was insane.
She sent it anyway.
LENA: 365 days minimum.
Target 730 if feasible.
Balanced nutrition, not just calories.
Staples, protein, fats, nutritional variety, infant/child nutrition, special dietary contingencies.
Long storage life where possible.
The response took forty-six seconds.
MARCUS: Understood.
Then:
MARCUS: Is 20 the maximum population or planning baseline?
Lena stopped.
There was that question again.
Twenty.
She’d picked it because she needed a number.
Twenty felt manageable.
Twenty felt controllable.
Twenty also felt increasingly arbitrary.
She looked around the farmhouse.
Redtail wasn’t supposed to be a bunker.
The System kept calling it a settlement.
Settlements had people.
Potentially more than twenty.
But Lena couldn’t prepare for everyone.
Not in twenty days.
Not even with Adrian’s money.
She typed:
LENA: Planning baseline.
Then:
LENA: Make everything expandable.
MARCUS: Understood.
Another message followed.
MARCUS: I will have an initial reserve model prepared tonight.
Procurement can begin immediately once storage capacity is confirmed.
Lena froze.
Storage capacity.
Right.
She looked toward Inventory.
SPATIAL INVENTORY
Total Capacity: 500.00 m³
That was a lot of space.
Or it had seemed like a lot of space.
Apparently Lena needed to stop using that phrase.
She had no idea how much space two years of food for twenty people required.
“System.
How much Inventory space would fourteen thousand six hundred person-days of food take?”
Unable to determine without specified reserve composition and packaging.
Of course.
Lena went back to her phone.
LENA: How much physical storage are we talking about?
Marcus responded several minutes later.
MARCUS: Depends substantially on reserve composition, packaging, refrigeration requirements, and acceptable reliance on bulk staples.
Then:
MARCUS: Preliminary estimate for a nutritionally balanced two-year reserve for 20 adults-equivalent would require substantial dedicated storage.
I recommend integrating food warehousing into the site plan rather than treating it as residential pantry storage.
Lena stared.
Food warehousing.
Great.
She owned a warehouse now.
Apparently.
Or needed to.
LENA: How substantial?
MARCUS: I would prefer to provide a calculated figure after the reserve model is complete.
That was Marcus for I am not guessing because you will treat the guess like a purchase order.
Fair.
Lena put the phone down.
She had space.
More than Marcus knew.
Space where food didn’t spoil.
Space where insects couldn’t get into it.
Space that didn’t need refrigeration.
Space that couldn’t flood.
Couldn’t burn.
Couldn’t lose power.
Couldn’t be looted.
It was, objectively, the best possible food storage system.
And no one could use it except her.
That part had seemed like an advantage.
Now Lena wasn’t sure.
She imagined fourteen thousand person-days of food arriving at Redtail.
Trucks.
Pallets.
Cases.
Marcus asking where they should put everything.
Workers needing access.
People eventually needing to eat it.
Lena could store all of it.
Probably.
Especially with quest expansions.
But then every single thing anyone needed would have to go through her.
Every bag of rice.
Every case of canned food.
Every medical supply.
Every replacement part.
Every seed.
Every…
“No.”
That wasn’t a system.
That was Lena becoming a human warehouse door.
She rubbed her face.
She’d known this problem was coming.
She’d been avoiding it.
Inventory was too useful to keep completely secret forever.
More importantly, it was too useful not to incorporate into Redtail’s actual planning.
But telling someone she had a weird ability to assess materials was one thing.
Adrian had already figured out that she knew things she shouldn’t.
He knew she could identify Transition affinity.
He knew her information source had changed or expanded over time.
He knew Redtail had been selected for reasons conventional analysis couldn’t detect.
He suspected something.
Probably several somethings.
Inventory was different.
Inventory was physical.
Demonstrable.
Impossible.
And incredibly valuable.
She’d gotten used to that.
Which was insane.
Adrian would not be used to it.
Neither would anyone else.
What happened once he knew?
Adrian had given her access to Marcus.
A purchasing card with a functionally irrelevant limit.
Crews.
Materials.
Specialists.
He was spending money on Redtail at a rate Lena couldn’t comfortably calculate.
And he hadn’t demanded anything except access to information she chose to provide.
So far.
That mattered.
It did not mean she should hand him every secret she had.
She needed boundaries.
Very clear ones.
Inventory was hers.
Not Adrian’s.
Not Vale Industries’.
Not Redtail’s, technically.
Hers.
She decided what went in.
She decided what came out.
She decided who knew.
And if Adrian had a problem with that…
Lena stopped.
What?
She’d stop accepting his help?
Return the black card?
Tell Marcus never mind about the two-year food reserve?
That was the other problem.
She needed him.
Not personally.
Logistically.
Financially.
Organizationally.
He could do in hours what took Lena days.
Marcus had arranged agricultural specialists for tomorrow morning after receiving three text messages.
Adrian had resources Lena couldn’t replicate.
And Lena had things he couldn’t replicate.
Maybe that was the point.
Not trust.
Not completely.
Mutual usefulness.
She could work with that.
Her phone buzzed.
ADRIAN: Marcus tells me you’ve requested two years of food.
Lena stared.
Of course he did.
LENA: He tattles.
ADRIAN: He reports.
LENA: Same thing.
Three dots.
ADRIAN: Why two years?
Lena thought about the quest.
WHEN HARVESTS FAIL.
She couldn’t tell him that.
Not yet.
LENA: New information.
Agricultural production may be unreliable for extended periods.
The reply came quickly.
ADRIAN: How extended?
LENA: Unknown.
ADRIAN: And your source recommends two years.
Lena paused.
He’d called it her source.
Interesting.
LENA: One year minimum.
Two recommended.
Nothing for almost a minute.
Then:
ADRIAN: That’s useful.
Lena frowned.
LENA: That’s your reaction?
ADRIAN: Would you prefer panic?
LENA: A little concern would make you seem human.
ADRIAN: I’m very concerned.
LENA: You text like you’re ordering printer paper.
ADRIAN: Panic remains operationally unhelpful.
Lena smiled despite herself.
Then another message appeared.
ADRIAN: Marcus also says storage is becoming a constraint.
There it was.
Lena looked at the case of water.
At the food in Inventory.
At the interface only she could see.
Her thumb hovered over the keyboard.
She could tell him.
Right now.
I have storage.
Instead she typed:
LENA: I may have a solution.
The response was immediate.
ADRIAN: May?
LENA: Complicated.
A pause.
ADRIAN: Does complicated mean expensive, difficult, or something you don’t want to tell me?
Lena stared.
Annoying man.
LENA: Third one.
This time the pause was longer.
ADRIAN: Understood.
That was it.
No question.
No pressure.
Somehow that made it worse.
Lena waited.
Nothing else came.
“Seriously?”
Her phone remained silent.
Fine.
She put it down.
Picked it back up.
LENA: I need to think about it.
ADRIAN: Then think about it.
Lena glared at the message.
She wasn’t sure why that irritated her.
Probably because she’d been prepared to defend a boundary he hadn’t challenged.
She set the phone facedown.
Tomorrow, specialists were coming to design agriculture for a world with unreliable weather.
Marcus was going to start buying enough food to feed twenty people for up to two years.
Redtail was going to need warehouses.
Cold storage.
Protected storage.
Distribution.
And Lena had nearly two hundred cubic meters of impossible space sitting nowhere at all.
She wasn’t telling Adrian tonight.
That decision felt good.
For approximately five seconds.
Because she knew what she’d actually decided.
Not no.
Soon.
Lena looked at the countdown.
20 DAYS : 05 HOURS : 14 MINUTES
Twenty days.
She didn’t have the luxury of keeping every secret until she felt comfortable.
She just needed to decide which ones were worth the risk.
And who was worth taking it with.