“What’s going on with the baking?” Micah asked.
“Please don’t stop them,” Sailor said quickly. “That coconut cake she made, and her sourdough? I mean—wow.”
“It didn’t occur to me that I should stop them,” Micah said. “As long as Frida wants to keep doing it, that is.”
“I’m sure Anika has a whole baking regimen in place—kneading, baking, calisthenics,” August said. “Poor Frida, I wouldn’t want to work for that woman.”
Cal wanted to say that his wife enjoyed her baking sessions with Anika, but he held himself back. Frida hadn’t had a friend in so long, not since Sandy Miller, and it was obvious that her time in the kitchen had helped her. To Cal, Anika seemed stiff and humorless, but Frida could draw out the fun in anyone. Hell, she’d done it with him.
“Makes me nervous,” Peter said, and Micah looked up at him quickly. Cal thought he detected a slight shake of Micah’s head, or maybe in his eyes, a speechless no. He wasn’t sure what they were worried about: that Frida would tell Anika about her pregnancy?
August changed the subject so deftly, Cal hardly caught that he was doing so. In moments they were onto other mundane matters: who wasn’t cleaning up after themselves in the Bath; what still needed to be done for winterizing; if there was enough meat on Snorts, one of the pigs, to butcher him.
When they got to questions of agriculture, Cal leaned forward. These past few days, he’d found himself loving this part of the meeting. It made him think of his job back in L.A., working with the volunteers to make sure the crops they’d planted were thriving.
“We want to reorganize the garden next spring,” Peter said, “but we have no real plan of action.”
Cal realized that everyone was looking at him.
“It’s a mess,” Dave said, and Sailor groaned. “If we lose another crop of lettuce, I’m going to—”
“Plus, the seeds,” August said.
“Sailor,” Micah said. “Tell Cal what you’ve got.”
He had heirloom seeds, Sailor explained, from his uncle in Charleston, South Carolina.
“Stuff you haven’t ever seen before, stuff that hasn’t been grown commercially for three, four hundred years,” he said. “He gave them to me when I left for Plank. I hoarded them when I first got there, don’t know why. But I brought them here. We should use them.”
Cal couldn’t help but feel giddy. He’d read about seeds like these.
“I’d be happy to take a look.”
The men, even Micah, beamed. That was it then: they needed a farmer for their Village People. This was why Cal had been invited into the circle of power.
They’d moved onto plumbing. There was a question of making the work mandatory for everyone, including themselves. “If we do it without complaint,” Peter said, “it’ll set an example.”
All the men begrudgingly agreed.
“The truth is,” August said, “the job can’t be voluntary anymore. Nobody wants to do it.”
“Latrine digging isn’t that bad, especially compared to maintaining the outhouse,” Dave said, and Micah held up a hand, wincing.
August turned to Cal. “This is glamorous, isn’t it?”
“Certainly is,” Cal replied, and August laughed.
Cal was relieved when the meeting ended. Even the discussion of security, plans to build three more Forms, and adding another man to the night shifts proved a snore. Part of him was glad the meeting had been so boring; he wouldn’t be compelled to talk about its tedium with Frida. When he’d finally learned about Pines two days earlier, about how August traded with them, Cal had been glad for the keep-quiet rule. It kept him from repeating to Frida what she might not be able to hear. It had been a relief.
Before Cal left the meeting, Micah winked and said, “Fun, right?”
Micah had used that word, fun, so carelessly. The meetings weren’t about fun. They were an opportunity: Cal had been invited to peer behind the curtain. At least Cal was learning how the Land worked. Frida didn’t seem that interested anyway.
The truth was Cal was biding his time. He had plans to ask about the recruitment process. It seemed a harmless topic, outdated as far as he could tell, since the Land’s philosophy was about containment, not expansion. He wanted to know who had lured Dave and Sailor here and why.