Adrian arrived after breakfast carrying a laptop.
That wasn’t unusual.
The fact that he sat down at Lena’s kitchen table and immediately opened a map was.
Lena lowered her coffee.
“What are we doing?”
“I need you to assess some properties.”
Oh.
Right.
They’d discussed this.
Her Settlement Appraisal didn’t require her to physically visit a property once she had sufficient location information.
Adrian had realized the usefulness of that approximately three seconds after learning about it.
“Yours?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Locally?
Six.”
Locally.
Lena caught that.
She decided not to ask yet.
“Start with the camp.”
Adrian opened the property file.
Lena focused.
‘Appraise.’
The System responded.
Information populated her vision.
Water.
Soil.
Drainage.
Flood risk.
Seismic stability.
Existing infrastructure.
Agricultural potential.
Defensibility.
Transition-relevant factors.
Lena read.
Then frowned.
“What?”
“Nothing bad.”
“That was a frown.”
“It’s annoying.”
“What is?”
“Your campground is good.”
Adrian waited.
“Very good, actually.”
“How good?”
“Not Redtail.”
“Obviously.”
Lena looked at him.
He didn’t smile.
She was almost certain he’d done that on purpose.
“Water security is good.
Flood risk is low.
Seismic risk is acceptable.
Existing infrastructure is useful.
Agricultural potential is moderate.”
“Defensibility?”
“Good.”
“Transition factors?”
Lena read more carefully.
Then stopped.
RARE SETTLEMENT TRAIT: STABLE GROUND
Lena blinked.
“What?”
“It has Stable Ground, same as Redtail.”
“Is that what made Redtail special for you?”
“Yeah.”
She read through it again.
Same trait.
Same effects.
Reduced Transition instability.
Improved long-term settlement viability.
Lower susceptibility to certain environmental disruptions.
“Huh.”
Adrian leaned slightly toward the screen.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning apparently Redtail isn’t the only special property around here.”
That got his attention.
They moved to the adjacent parcel.
Better agricultural potential.
Good water.
Useful topography.
And…
STABLE GROUND.
Lena sat forward.
“Again.”
Adrian stopped typing.
“The trait?”
“Yeah.”
She pulled up the third property.
STABLE GROUND.
Then the fourth.
Same.
Lena went through the appraisals.
Redtail.
The camp.
The surrounding parcels.
Every one of them.
“I thought Stable Ground belonged to Redtail.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Apparently not.”
“How regional is it?”
“I don’t know.”
Lena looked at the map.
“But everything you’ve bought around here has it.”
Adrian leaned back slightly.
“That worked better than expected.”
Lena looked at him.
“What did?”
“Buying the surrounding properties.”
“You didn’t know?”
“No.”
“Then why did you buy them?”
“You told me Redtail was special.”
“So you bought everything around it?”
“Not everything.”
Lena stared.
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“Adrian.”
“There was a reasonable possibility that whatever made your property unusual wasn’t constrained by the property line.”
Lena looked back at the repeated STABLE GROUND notifications.
“You gambled.”
“I acquired assets that were independently worthwhile with the potential for additional strategic value.”
Lena stared at him.
“You gambled on apocalypse real estate.”
“If you want to call it that.”
“I absolutely do.”
“And apparently I won.”
Lena hated how satisfied he looked.
“Next.”
The fifth property was closer to town.
Lena expected another parcel.
Instead, a commercial building appeared on the screen.
She frowned.
“You bought a mechanic shop?”
“Garage, machine shop and vehicle yard.”
“Why?”
Adrian looked at her.
Right.
Stupid question.
“Vehicles.”
“Yes.”
“And when replacement parts stop showing up-”
“We need the ability to repair or fabricate them locally.”
Of course they did.
Lena appraised it.
The land itself was unremarkable.
The facility wasn’t.
Multiple service bays.
Vehicle lifts.
Machine tools.
Welding equipment.
Parts storage.
A fenced yard large enough for heavy equipment.
Existing utility connections.
Lena looked through the rest of the appraisal.
“This is actually really good.”
“Yes.”
“You sound very confident for someone who made me check.”
“I wanted confirmation.”
Of course he did.
Lena looked at the list again.
Vehicle repair.
Heavy equipment maintenance.
Welding.
Fabrication.
Parts storage.
It was another one of those things that seemed obvious only after someone else thought of it.
“Okay.
Keep the garage.”
“I wasn’t planning to return it.”
Lena looked at him.
“You know what I meant.”
“Yes.”
“Next.”
They finished the last local property.
Adrian closed the file.
Then opened a map of the world.
Lena stared.
There were markers everywhere.
“No.”
Adrian looked at her.
“I haven’t asked anything.”
“You were going to.”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
He opened a file.
The list kept scrolling.
“Adrian.”
“Yes?”
“How many?”
“Forty-three.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I eliminated the less promising sites first.”
“That does not make me feel better.”
They developed a rhythm quickly.
Adrian opened a property.
Lena fed the location into Settlement Appraisal.
The System evaluated it.
She gave him the important parts.
Then they moved on.
Nevada.
MODERATE.
Lena scanned the appraisal.
“Nothing unusual.
Transition stability is moderate.”
“Next.”
Montana.
HIGH.
“High Transition stability.
No significant anomalies.”
“Next.”
British Columbia.
VERY HIGH.
Lena paused.
“Very high.
There’s something about the watershed.”
Adrian stopped.
“Positive or negative?”
“Positive.
It says the regional water system has unusually high Transition stability.”
He made a note.
“Next.”
Chile.
HIGH.
“High.
Elevated geological resilience during Transition.”
Another note.
New Zealand.
VERY HIGH.
“Very high.
Multiple positive Transition factors.
Biological stability is unusually good.”
Adrian marked it.
Iceland.
Lena frowned.
“Uh.”
Adrian looked up.
“What?”
“This one’s bad.”
“Define bad.”
“Very low.”
He stopped typing.
“Very low?”
“Yeah.”
Adrian turned the conventional assessment back toward himself.
“This is one of our strongest sites.”
“Apparently the apocalypse disagrees.”
“Why?”
Lena expanded the appraisal.
“Excellent conventional viability.
Water, energy, defensibility, infrastructure…” She kept reading.
“And extreme Transition vulnerability.”
“From?”
“Subsurface energy instability.”
Adrian’s attention sharpened.
“Meaning?”
“Transition energy interacts badly with the geothermal system.”
“How badly?”
Lena focused on the warning.
Then winced.
“Potential widespread geothermal destabilization.
Increased seismic activity.
Hydrothermal events.
Volcanic activation.” She paused.
“Oh.
That’s not good.”
“What?”
“Possible crustal rupture.”
Silence.
Marcus looked up.
Adrian stared at her.
“Do we keep the property?”
“System says absolutely fucking not.”
Adrian marked it.
ABANDON.
Lena stared at him.
“You’re just crossing it off?”
“I asked you here specifically to identify things my people couldn’t.”
Well.
Fair.
Northern Finland.
Lena sat forward.
“Oh.”
Adrian stopped typing.
“What?”
“This one’s really good.”
“How good?”
“Better than almost everything you’ve shown me.”
“What does it have?”
Lena expanded the appraisal.
“Very high Transition stability.
Low projected environmental distortion.
And—”
She frowned.
“What?”
“It has a site trait.”
That got his full attention.
“What kind?”
“Cold-adapted ecological stability.
Looks like biological systems inside the area are less likely to destabilize during and immediately after Transition.”
Adrian made a different kind of note.
“Priority?”
“Definitely.”
“Next.”
By property seventeen, Lena barely finished saying no Transition-specific concerns before Adrian changed screens.
By twenty-six, she needed more coffee.
Her mother wandered through once, took one look at the map, and kept going.
Smart woman.
By thirty-one, something finally caught Lena’s attention that wasn’t the System rating.
“Wait.”
Adrian stopped.
At the top of the property file:
CONTINGENCY SITE 06
ACQUIRED: 2017
Lena frowned.
“You already owned this?”
“Yes.”
“As a contingency site?”
“Yes.”
She went back.
Site 04.
Site 11.
Another from 2016.
These weren’t properties Adrian had rushed out to buy after meeting her.
They weren’t even recent.
Lena looked at him.
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Thirteen years.”
She went still.
Marcus.
He’d said he’d been working with Adrian on contingency planning for thirteen years.
At the time, Lena had pictured emergency offices.
Backup servers.
Maybe a billionaire bunker somewhere.
Not forty-three properties scattered across the planet.
“What happened thirteen years ago?”
Adrian regarded her for a moment.
Then he closed the property file.
“We noticed a pattern.”
A graph appeared.
At first, it meant nothing.
Dozens of thin lines crawled across the screen, labeled with materials, facilities and measurements Lena didn’t understand.
Adrian changed the view.
Most disappeared.
What remained was easier to see.
Tiny deviations clustered near the beginning.
More later.
Larger ones.
More frequent.
The trend rose toward the present.
Lena’s attention sharpened.
“The materials.” Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“Yes.”
She recognized several categories.
Alloys.
Polymers.
Ceramics.
Composites.
For more than a decade, Vale facilities around the world had been recording small failures of expectation.
Not necessarily failures of the materials themselves.
Some performed better than expected.
Some worse.
Some simply differently.
Conductivity outside established tolerances.
Unexpected structural performance.
Altered degradation.
Thermal behavior that couldn’t reliably be reproduced.
Different factories.
Different suppliers.
Different continents.
The only thing they had in common was that no one could explain them.
“At first we treated them individually,” Adrian said.
“Manufacturing variance.
Contamination.
Calibration errors.”
“But they weren’t.”
“No.”
Once someone thought to put them together, the pattern had been impossible to unsee.
And Adrian Vale apparently wasn’t the kind of man who could see an unexplained pattern and leave it alone.
The display changed again.
This one was vastly more complicated.
“What am I looking at?”
“A long-range strategic model one of our research teams was developing at the time.”
“For what?”
“Investment.
Supply-chain forecasting.
Infrastructure planning.
Primarily.”
The model had been built to consume enormous amounts of real-world data and trace consequences through interconnected systems.
Adrian had given it the anomaly data.
Then he’d asked it to find what his materials researchers were missing.
It found too much.
Categories populated the screen.
AGRICULTURE
ATMOSPHERIC
BIOLOGICAL
INFRASTRUCTURE
ENERGY
More followed.
The deviations weren’t identical.
They shouldn’t even have been related.
The model disagreed.
A pale region occupied the far side of the projection.
Everything approaching it became increasingly messy.
Beyond it, the projections dissolved into an almost useless spread of possibilities.
Lena pointed.
“That?”
“The Horizon.”
Of course it had a name.
“What happens there?”
“We don’t know.”
She looked at him.
He wasn’t being evasive.
They genuinely didn’t know.
The model could trace the anomalies toward it.
It could show their increasing frequency.
It could model the growing instability surrounding them.
But eventually too many of its underlying assumptions stopped producing reliable results.
The future became noise.
The disturbing part wasn’t what happened after.
It was what happened before.
Adrian pulled up an older simulation.
Supply disruptions appeared first.
Then energy vulnerability.
Transportation failures.
Manufacturing losses.
Food production.
Infrastructure.
Different runs failed differently, but the closer they approached the Horizon, the harder recovery became.
“So you prepared.”
“Yes.”
That sounded almost absurdly inadequate.
Thirteen years ago, Adrian hadn’t known what was coming.
He’d only known something was changing, and every serious attempt to project those changes eventually produced a world his companies weren’t equipped to operate in.
So he’d asked the model whether they could.
They couldn’t.
He fixed the most obvious weaknesses.
Ran it again.
Still no.
The next failures were farther upstream.
Suppliers.
Then the suppliers’ suppliers.
Transportation.
Energy.
Raw materials.
Adrian followed them backward.
Every solution exposed another dependency.
Factories required replacement parts.
Parts required specialized manufacturing.
Manufacturing required raw materials, power and skilled workers.
Workers required food, water, housing and medicine.
Agriculture required seed, equipment, water and people who knew what they were doing.
Eventually the question had stopped being whether Vale’s companies could continue operating.
It had become what had to remain functional around them for anything to continue operating.
Lena looked slowly at the property list.
Farms.
Industrial sites.
Warehouses.
Water.
Power.
Manufacturing.
Forty-three locations.
“Jesus Christ.”
Adrian said nothing.
“The model has been doing to you what my System is doing to me.”
That got his attention.
“Every time you thought you had enough, this thing found something else.”
“More or less.”
“For thirteen years.”
“Yes.”
Lena laughed softly.
“That explains so much about you.”
Then she looked back at the anomaly graph.
The samples.
“The things you brought me.”
“They were among the strongest recent deviations.”
And Lena had looked at them for seconds.
Transition Affinity.
Two words his scientists hadn’t had.
Two words his model hadn’t had.
Two words connecting thirteen years of unexplained data to the countdown permanently floating at the edge of Lena’s vision.
“When I told you they were responding to Transition…”
“We reran everything.”
Adrian opened one final projection.
Lena didn’t understand the numbers.
She didn’t need to.
The broad, uncertain Horizon had collapsed.
Not completely.
But dramatically.
Around one point.
Her stomach dropped.
“The date.”
“Yes.”
Her date.
Transition.
For thirteen years, Adrian had known something was building.
He’d known it could become catastrophic.
He’d spent billions preparing for something he couldn’t name and couldn’t schedule.
Then Lena had appeared with both.
She’d thought Adrian believed her unusually quickly.
Now she understood.
He hadn’t needed her to convince him something was coming.
He’d been waiting thirteen years to find out what.
Lena had given him something even more valuable.
When.
They finished the remaining properties shortly after noon.
Thirty-eight survived.
Five Adrian discarded immediately.
Lena sat back and rubbed her eyes.
“I never want to see a map again.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“Let me have this.”
Her mother came into the kitchen carrying Lena’s notebook.
Apparently it was hers now.
“I have questions.”
Lena looked at Adrian.
“Save me.”
“No.”
Traitor.
Her mother sat down.
“Where are you putting everyone?”
Lena sighed.
“We talked about this.”
“We talked about the fact that you don’t know.”
“I know generally.”
“Where?”
Lena pointed vaguely toward the window.
Her mother stared.
Adrian opened another file.
“Across the road.”
Lena looked at him.
“What?”
He turned the laptop.
A rendering filled the screen.
For several seconds, Lena didn’t understand what she was looking at.
Then she recognized the road.
The tree line.
The old campground building.
“Oh.”
Her mother came around the table.
“Oh,” she echoed.
Housing blocks filled what had once been campsites.
A medical facility.
Commercial kitchens.
Warehouses.
Workshops.
Water storage.
Power generation.
Sanitation.
Communications.
Roads.
More housing.
And the plan didn’t stop at the campground.
It spread onto the adjacent parcels Lena had appraised that morning.
She zoomed out.
Then farther.
“This is a town.”
“A contingency community.”
“That’s billionaire for town.”
Adrian didn’t argue.
“How much of this can you actually build?”
“All of it.”
“Before Transition?”
“No.”
Thank God.
Physics still existed.
“How much before?”
“Enough to establish core infrastructure and house several hundred people, assuming delivery schedules hold.”
Several hundred.
Lena looked at the plan again.
“And afterward?”
“Construction continues.”
“With what?”
“Materials already acquired.”
Of course.
“What happens when I start bringing people?”
Adrian looked at her.
“You already are.”
“More people.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“Estimate.”
“That is the problem.”
Her mother had names.
Her sister would have names.
Those people would have people.
And Lena knew exactly how that went.
“More than Redtail can reasonably hold.”
“Then don’t put them on Redtail.”
Lena frowned.
“Where am I supposed to put them?”
Adrian turned the laptop back toward himself.
A few clicks.
One section of the site plan highlighted.
“Here.”
Lena stared.
“What’s there?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Helpful.”
“We can put residential units here.”
“For your people?”
“For yours.”
Lena looked at him.
“Mine.”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“How many do you need?”
Lena thought about the System’s projected settlement population.
“Could you build for twenty?”
“Yes.”
Just like that.
No hesitation.
No question about cost.
Not even a particularly interested expression.
Lena narrowed her eyes.
“Fifty?”
“Yes.”
She stared at him.
“Seriously?”
“Is fifty what you need?”
“No.
I was testing you.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to see when you’d say no.”
“That number will need to be considerably higher.”
Of course it would.
Lena looked back at the site plan.
“An apartment building?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“You’re offering to build me an apartment building.”
“I’m offering to allocate part of the residential build to people you bring in.”
“That’s somehow even more ridiculous.”
“It’s considerably less ridiculous from a planning perspective.”
Her mother tapped the notebook.
“What about people staying over here?”
Lena looked at her.
“You’re staying over here.”
“Yes.
Where?”
Right.
Fucking pillows all over again.
Adrian answered before Lena could.
“We can place a prefab residence on Redtail.”
Her mother looked at him.
“A trailer?”
“No.”
“A manufactured home?”
“Modular.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Primarily what you’re picturing.”
Lena snorted.
Adrian opened another file.
Of course he had another file.
Houses appeared.
Actual houses.
Nice ones.
Her mother leaned closer.
“I get to pick?”
Adrian looked mildly confused by the question.
“Of course.”
Oh no.
Lena knew that expression on her mother’s face.
“That one’s cute.”
“You don’t need three bedrooms.”
Her mother looked at her.
“Maybe I want three bedrooms.”
“For what?”
“Guests.”
“We’re apparently getting an apartment building.”
“I might not like those people.”
Adrian, traitor that he was, continued scrolling.
“Oh, go back.”
He went back.
“That one.”
Lena looked.
Three bedrooms.
Two bathrooms.
A porch.
Of course it had a porch.
“You’ve been looking for twelve seconds.”
“I know what I like.”
“Apparently what you like is excessive square footage.”
“It’s not excessive.”
“You are one person.”
“I have things.”
“What things?”
“My things.”
Lena looked at Adrian.
“You did this.”
“I showed her a catalog.”
“Exactly.”
Her mother ignored both of them.
“What colors does it come in?”
Lena groaned.
Adrian clicked something.
A color palette appeared.
Of course it did.
“Wait.”
Lena looked at the house.
Then at Adrian.
“Can I get a house for my sister too?”
“Yes.”
“Three bedrooms?”
“She has a kid.”
“Then four may be more practical.”
Lena stared.
“Four?”
“If she wants one.”
Her mother nodded seriously.
“She’ll want four.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know your sister.”
Unfortunately true.
“Can I have one?”
Adrian looked at her.
“You already have a house.”
“I was just asking.”
“No, you weren’t.”
Lena stared at him.
He stared back.
“…No, I wasn’t.”
Her mother laughed.
“What?
It’s a nice house.”
“You have a nice house.”
“Mine is old.”
Adrian kept scrolling.
“You’re not getting another house.”
Lena looked back at the screen.
“So there is a number where you’ll say no.”
“Apparently.”
“And they can actually get here before Transition?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Existing inventory.
Site work will be the limiting factor.”
Lena narrowed her eyes.
“You have houses sitting around.”
“Essentially.”
“Of course you do.”
Her mother was still scrolling.
“Do I get to pick where mine goes?”
“Yes.”
Lena turned.
“Within reason.”
Her mother looked offended.
“What does that mean?”
“Utilities.
Access.
Septic.
Setbacks.
The fact that this is still a working farm.”
“So I can pick.”
“Within-”
“Yes,” Adrian said.
Lena stared at him.
Her mother smiled.
“You’re my favorite.”
“You met him yesterday.”
“And he’s building me a house.”
“I bought you this entire farm.”
“No, you bought yourself a farm.”
Lena opened her mouth.
Closed it.
That was annoyingly difficult to argue with.
Her mother picked up the laptop.
“I’m going outside.”
“With Adrian’s laptop?”
“I need to see where I want the house.”
“Mom.”
“I’ll bring it back.”
She walked out.
Lena watched her go.
Then looked at Adrian.
“You understand that you’ve created a problem.”
“She seems happy.”
“That is not the same as safe.”
He took another drink of coffee.
Lena looked at the empty doorway.
Then at the community plan.
The apartment building.
Her mother’s house.
Her sister’s house.
Forty-three contingency properties.
Thirteen years.
He’d known something was wrong for thirteen years.
Not what.
Not when.
Just enough to know something was coming.
And he’d prepared anyway.
He’d spent billions following dependencies backward.
Building redundancies for failures he couldn’t predict.
Acquiring properties he might never need.
Stockpiling the pieces required to keep communities functioning after everything around them stopped.
He’d believed Lena because she’d given him the two things he’d never been able to find.
What.
When.
And when she’d told him she had people…
he’d made room.
Lena looked at Adrian.
Okay.
Yeah.
It was time.
“There’s something I need to show you.”
Adrian’s attention shifted fully to her.
A pause.
“The thing you weren’t ready to tell me?”
Of course he remembered.
“Yeah.”
He set down his coffee.
That was it.
No questions.
No sudden intensity.
He just waited.
Somehow, that made Lena more certain she’d made the right decision.
“Come on.”
She led him outside.
Her mother was standing near the edge of the yard with Adrian’s laptop, apparently comparing two locations.
Lena pointed.
“Do not help her.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Good.”
They continued toward the staging area.
Several pallets had arrived that morning.
Lena stopped beside one loaded with irrigation equipment.
She checked the label.
Eight hundred and twelve pounds.
Perfect.
Adrian looked at the pallet.
Then at her.
“What am I looking at?”
“About eight hundred pounds.”
“And that’s important because?”
“Because I wanted something heavy.”
Adrian looked at her.
“Why?”
“Watch.”
Lena put one hand against the wrapped load.
She hesitated.
Once.
Then-
Store.
The pallet vanished.
Adrian stopped.
Lena watched him.
He looked at the empty patch of gravel.
Then at Lena.
Then back at the gravel.
Silence.
Lena waited.
Finally…
“How much?”
She stared at him.
“That’s your first question?”
“Yes.”
“Not where did eight hundred pounds of irrigation equipment just go?”
“I assume that’s what you weren’t ready to tell me.”
“You are deeply annoying.”
“How much?”
Lena folded her arms.
“My mom screamed.”
Adrian blinked.
“Was I supposed to?”
“A little.”
A faint smile tugged at the corner of Adrian’s mouth.
His attention returned to the empty gravel.
“Five thousand cubic meters.”
Adrian looked back at her.
“Five thousand.”
“Currently.”
That caught him.
“Currently?”
“It can expand.”
“How?”
Lena hesitated.
“Different ways.”
His eyes narrowed slightly.
Then something clicked.
“This is part of the rewards you’ve been getting.”
Lena looked at him.
“Some of them.”
“Your source expands it.”
“I call it the System.”
“The System expands it when you complete objectives.”
“Sometimes.”
Adrian was silent for a moment.
Lena could practically see him rearranging everything she’d told him.
The objectives.
The rewards.
The farm.
The livestock.
Whatever he’d suspected she was receiving every time the System pushed her toward another stage of preparation.
“That’s why you were so concerned about completing them.”
“Among other reasons.”
“That explains the inventory discrepancies.”
Lena frowned.
“What discrepancies?”
“Marcus noticed that some supplies were disappearing from staging without being transferred anywhere.”
Oh.
Lena had been storing things whenever she had the chance.
It genuinely hadn’t occurred to her that the logistics genius tracking everything coming onto Redtail might notice when some of it ceased to exist.
“He noticed.”
“Immediately.”
Of course he fucking did.
Adrian looked at the empty space again.
“Five thousand cubic meters.”
“You’ve said that twice.”
“It’s a significant amount of storage.”
“I know.”
“And potentially not the final amount.”
“Probably not.”
That was when Lena realized telling Adrian it could get bigger might have been a mistake.
His expression hadn’t changed.
That was the problem.
She knew him well enough now to recognize when his brain had started doing something dangerous.
“Don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“Whatever you’re calculating.”
“I’m not calculating anything.”
“Bullshit.”
A faint smile touched his mouth.
Lena sighed.
“It’s called Spatial Inventory.
Nonliving things only.
I have to touch something to put it in, and I can take it back out again.”
“And the pallet is just stored?”
“Basically.”
“Under what conditions?”
“That’s the other ridiculous part.”
She waited.
“Time doesn’t pass inside.”
For the first time since she’d made eight hundred pounds of equipment disappear, Adrian’s expression visibly changed.
Lena smiled.
“There it is.”
“Time is suspended.”
“As far as I can tell.”
He looked toward the empty gravel again.
This time he was quiet for considerably longer.
“Five thousand cubic meters.”
“We’ve established that.”
“Of effectively permanent storage.”
Lena hadn’t thought of it quite like that.
“I guess.”
“Food doesn’t spoil.
Medication doesn’t degrade.
Equipment doesn’t corrode.
Anything vulnerable to temperature, humidity or time can simply be removed from the equation.”
“If it fits.”
Adrian looked at her.
“Five thousand cubic meters.”
“When you say it like that, it sounds excessive.”
“It isn’t.”
That was possibly the most Adrian answer available.
Lena laughed.
“Yesterday I started working on a genetic archive.”
“Livestock?”
“Mostly, so far.
Semen.
Embryos.
Existing conservation collections if Harper can get access to them.
Seeds eventually.
Other biological material.”
“And you want to store it inside.”
“If it works.”
“Have you tested cryogenic material?”
“Not yet.”
“Then we should.”
“Yeah.”
Adrian was looking at her differently now.
Not at Lena, exactly.
At the implications surrounding her.
Food that couldn’t spoil.
Medicine that couldn’t degrade.
Biological material protected indefinitely.
Five thousand cubic meters today.
Potentially more tomorrow.
“This changes things,” he said.
“I know.”
“Significantly.”
“I know.”
Lena retrieved the pallet.
It appeared exactly where it had been.
Adrian studied it for a moment.
“You should have told me sooner.”
Lena’s shoulders tightened.
He saw it.
A beat passed.
Then Adrian exhaled.
“No.”
Lena frowned.
“That’s unfair.”
She said nothing.
“I would have preferred to know sooner.”
“That’s different.”
“Yes.”
He looked at her.
“You had no reason to trust me with this when we met.”
“I barely had a reason to let you onto my farm.”
“You didn’t.”
“You came anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Still annoying.”
A faint smile touched his mouth.
Then disappeared.
“Why now?”
Lena looked back toward the farmhouse.
Her mother was still outside with his laptop, apparently determining exactly where her new house was going to sit.
Beyond her, Redtail spread across the land.
The barn.
The livestock.
The greenhouse frames.
Across the road, Vale’s property waited beneath the trees.
A town that didn’t exist yet.
Forty-three contingency sites scattered around the world.
Thirteen years of preparation for a disaster Adrian couldn’t name.
Until her.
“Because you’ve had thirteen years to prepare for something you couldn’t even prove was coming, and somehow you ended up building a town.”
Adrian looked at Lena.
“That’s your reason?”
“You didn’t build a bunker.”
Something in his expression shifted.
“No.”
“That’s my reason.”
Adrian was quiet.
Then he nodded.
Once.
His gaze dropped to the pallet.
Then moved toward where Lena’s mom was still picking out her new home.
Toward the laptop.
Toward the map containing thirty-eight viable contingency sites and thirteen years of accumulated resources.
Lena saw it happen.
“No.”
Adrian looked at her.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re thinking.”
“Usually.”
“You’re thinking something expensive.”
“Money isn’t the limiting factor.”
That was somehow worse.
Adrian started toward the house.
Lena followed.
“No.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“I know exactly what you’re going to say.”
“I doubt that.”
“You’re going to tell me about some warehouse full of incredibly useful shit in Germany.”
“Not Germany.”
Lena stared.
“Switzerland.”
“Fuck you.”
He kept walking.
Lena followed.
She had made a terrible mistake.
Probably.
On the other hand…
she did want to know what was in Switzerland.