Ainsel stared at the Admin, wondering what came next now that he’d accepted her impromptu challenge.

The Admin waved languorously at the Quartermaster, without taking his eyes off Ainsel. “Leave the cart, man. Our guest will be turning it into something far more appetizing. Through alchemy, I imagine.” He gave another toothy smile. “Or wishing.”

“Well then,” breathed Remy into Ainsel’s ear. “Is this what you were hoping for? Because I don’t have a way to get you out of this.”

Ainsel, frozen in shock by her own audacity, recovered quickly at the tickle of Remy’s words. “It’s fine.” She straightened her shoulders, her brain spinning into overdrive. “I know something better than alchemy. I know how to bake. Don’t go anywhere yet,” she called to the Quartermaster. “I’ll need some things that I know you already have. And some utensils, which I guess we might have to improvise.” She gave the Admin a fierce glare, silently daring him to try to restrict her.

He leaned back. “Do as she asks, Quartermaster. Our challenger must have her weapons.”

The Judge rolled his eyes. “This is a waste of time.”

“Oh hush, Steel. Let me have a bit of amusement. After we’re done here, we can ship her off to Prime just as you wish. I can’t imagine it will take long.”

“Just you wait,” snapped Ainsel. She turned back to the Quartermaster, who was watching her with a strange strained look. “Where does that warm drink we had in prison come from?”

“It’s sap from a plant in the wastes, Lady. We dilute it with water, it’s okay.”

“Bring me as much of it as you can. And that fruit. Also from the wastes?” When he nodded. “That, too. Is there anything else you eat? More food you gather?”

Guardedly, the Quartermaster said, “Bit o’ this, bit o’ that. Just the blacksap and the spikefruit on the books.”

Ainsel watched the Quartermaster’s face. He had things he wasn’t willing to share, or knew others who did. She’d have to make it worth his while. “All right. Bring me all of that. And the utensils…” She listed off what she’d need: bowls, pans, heat sources. “If you shape metal here, I bet you can find most of that stuff at the forge.”

The Quartermaster looked insulted. “I know my business, Lady. I’ll have the supplies brought in soon.”

As he left, Ainsel went over to the cart and picked up one of the rounds of tasteless bread and bit into it. It continued to be the most depressing thing she’d ever put in her mouth but this time she gave it technical attention. Then she crumbled the rest of it up into a powder, rubbing it between her hands to make it as fine as she could.

While she worked, Jim, who had been standing quietly, suddenly moved toward the Admin. His voice hoarse, he said, “I want to look at that console.”

The Admin blinked slowly at Jim. “You are the human. Why are you interested in my console?”

Jim swallowed. “I used to be an admin myself before I moved into software development. I’m curious.”

With exaggerated graciousness, the Admin moved his long legs aside. “I’d say don’t break anything, but there’s not much chance of that. Do try to at least make it interesting,”

“Galbaric,” growled the Judge. “The thunder shield is currently keeping a guardian insect out. If your new pet drops it, we’ll all be very unhappy.”

“Nonsense,” said the Admin cheerfully. “It’ll give the men some exercise.”

Jim studied the console carefully. “I’m not going to break anything, unless this is a really terribly designed piece of technology.” He poked at some switches and tapped some flat sections.

Remy sidled over to Ainsel, watching Jim, and asked in a low voice, “Is he going to break things?”

Ainsel crumbled more terrible bread, making a little pile on the floor. “I don’t know. Not on purpose. He likes gadgets. I don’t know him very well.” She glanced at Remy, somebody she barely knew at all. He’d been completely relaxed when provoking the Admin, but now he seemed on edge. “Are you worried about getting home?”

He darted a look at her. “I’m worried you’re going to get yourself killed, actually.” Then he took the round of bread from Ainsel. “Let me do that. How much do you need?”

Ainsel assessed the cart of bread. “All of it? More than all of it, actually.”

“It’s strange,” mused Jim, apparently to himself. “We speak the same language, but the written language is incomprehensible.”

“Not so strange,” drawled the Admin. “Most of the men shifted over from your world and speak your tongue, while the apparatus of Bone Station was designed for the use of the Prime Imperium and thus uses Archic.”

Ainsel scooped up some of the crumbled bread and squeezed it together again. When she opened her hand, it remained stuck in a clump. “This bread really is nutritionally complete, isn’t it?”

“We all eat it,” said Steel, who had been watching her as if he expected a trick.

“You poor people.” Ainsel shook her head. She had an obligation to help them.

With a rattle and a clatter, another cart rolled into the audience chamber, followed by a man carrying two covered buckets. In the cart was a half-barrel of the spiky fruit, and a selection of rounded metal bowls, sheets and stirring implements.

“Yay!” Ainsel inspected the supplies, then frowned. “Oh. And I need water, too.”

On cue, water gushed from one of the pipes near the wall. “Oops,” said Jim, and the water slowed to a trickle. Ainsel ran over with one of the bowls and caught what turned out to be quite hot water.

“How did you do that?” demanded Admin.

Remy laughed. “Don’t you know? Some Admin.”

“Don’t sass me, boy, or I’ll spice up my dinner my own way,” said the Admin. “I know how I’d do it. What I want to know is how this… man… did it.”

Ainsel let the others talk become background noise and concentrated on her work. The metal bowl got hot quickly and Ainsel sat it on the floor to continue filling as she added ‘hand protection’ to her mental list of further requests. Then she stalked alongside the pipe, looking for sources of steam.

Several of the larger pipes near the ground had chimneys the width of both her hands together, from which steam vented through a mesh grill. It was so perfect Ainsel clapped her hands.

“What?” barked the Admin. “What’s going on?”

“She’s found some steam vents, and now she’s dancing,” said Steel, who had followed her. “I think she’s mad.”

Ainsel ignored him and dashed back to the pile of supplies. After looking into one of the buckets and tasting the thick, sweetish liquid within, then inspecting one of the spiky fruits, she beckoned to the guard who had been loitering the whole time. “You, what’s your name?”

“Nabi, ma’am,” he said, stepping closer and saluting sloppily. He had dark skin and curly black hair with laughing brown eyes and a hard mouth.

Ainsel gave him an earnest, hopeful look. “Nabi, would you help me?”

He blinked and then his mouth softened. “You have to face the challenge you made, ma’am.”

“Oh, I’m going to make something delicious, but I need more hands!” Ainsel wondered why everybody thought she was going to run away. Did they not understand what a crime the terrible bread was?

Nabi relaxed. “Oh. I can provide those.” He hesitated. “As long as you’re not intending to cook them.”

“No, no,” Ainsel said. She thought of something. “But— do you all eat meat if you can find it? Oh, and is there any reason the bread is so flat?”

“I love meat when I can find it,” said Nabi reverently. “Got nothing on the flat bread though.”

Anxiously, Ainsel asked, “You don’t… like the flat bread, do you? You’d like something better?”

The nod Nabi gave her was so small as to be unnoticeable, but his widened, hungry gaze was a complete answer. She nodded back. “All right. Go fill up a few of those bowls with hot water, then come back to me.”

She turned to Steel. “Do you know of any reason the bread is flat?”

The dwarf gave her a blank look. “Rations are flat.”

That was probably all she was going to get, so she accepted it. If they’d had a reason for avoiding risen bread the way some cultures did on Earth, they would have told her. She’d take that risk to give them something better, anyhow.

She rubbed her hands together, excited by the prospects ahead of her. When she looked over at the pile of supplies again, she caught Remy watching her, a small smile on his face as he rubbed yet more bread to crumbs. She smiled back, and got to work.

First, she put each of the implements the Quartermaster had provided over a steam vent for a few minutes, until she figured they were probably clean enough. Then, with Nabi’s help, she started soaking one batch of unsliced, unpeeled fruit in a cooling bowl of water and filled another bowl with blacksap and set it to simmer over a vent. Next, she took all the finely powdered crumbs Remy had generated, mixed them with the water in another large bowl until it was milky, then set that bowl to simmering, too.

After that, she and Nabi got down to peeling and slicing more of the fruit with the small knives he carried in his boots, near where Remy continued his tireless work generating more crumbs. Meanwhile Jim worked on getting information about the console out of the Admin. He’d clearly learned that questions wouldn’t get answers, but if he declared something to be true, the Admin’s reactions would be informative.

Ainsel wondered if he really understood where they were, or if everything seemed like a dream to him. He was utterly fixated on the console. Maybe it was the only thing he felt like he could understand in this strange world.

Glancing down at her juice-stained fingers, Ainsel sympathized. Working on her cookery plan was the most in control she’d felt… not just since she got here, but since Remy had shown up in her life.

“Hey, boss-lady,” said Nabi in a low voice, and Ainsel realized Judge Steel had moved over to join in the console wrangle, leaving them unobserved. “Are we making hooch?”

Ainsel blinked and reviewed what they’d done so far, then said, “No?”

The soldier looked at her curiously. “You sure? Because I’ve helped, uh, somebody before and we did a lot of the same stuff. Soaking the fruit, steaming the containers…”

Brightly, Ainsel said, “I think bread and beer start in the same way. Don’t worry. This will be a lot better than moonshine.” Her voice was too loud, or it came in a lull in the Admin’s conversation, because suddenly the Admin, the Judge and Jim all looked at her.

“Are you doing anything useful or just wasting time? Why do your hands look you’ve been in a slaughter? And why is my soldier helping you?”

“We’ve been slicing spikefruit, sir!” said Nabi. “I didn’t think it was wise to let her have a blade without supervision.”

“Slaughtering fruit, eh?” said the Admin. “It’s inedible, you know. Turns your mouth inside out.”

“I can fix that,” said Ainsel serenely. She washed her hands in one of the bowls of warm water, then went to inspect the bowls on the steam vents. “Nabi, can you find the Quartermaster for me? Tell him we’ll need more fruit and sap. And I’d like to speak with him myself.”

Nabi saluted again and ran from the room. Ainsel glanced at the Admin from under her lashes and saw he was still watching her, his eyes narrow. Nervously, she skittered over to Remy. “Come with me? You can come back to that after.”

“Yes,” said Remy, crushing his current round of bread. He’d been watching her, too, but it didn’t make her feel nearly as nervous. He felt positively safe compared to the Admin.

With Remy’s help, she combined the chopped spikefruit with some of the sap she’d boiled down. Then she set him to stirring that over the steam vent while she mixed the water she’d soaked more fruit in with some of the crumbled bread. She couldn’t quite get the mixture to the consistency she wanted: something doughy rather than mushy. But she knew her theory was sound, and it would be the taste that mattered the most. So she put another bowl over it and set it beside a warm pipe to ferment.

When she turned around, the Quartermaster had arrived with Nabi and several other people. He watched her impassively. Everybody was watching her. She suddenly knew what it was like to be on stage.

She hunched her thin shoulders. Then a memory of that hauntingly familiar, forgotten voice whispered, Be brave, my moonborn. The first step is the hardest.

Ainsel lifted her head, straining her ears to catch even a hint of the voice for real. Grief passed over her, and left resolve behind. Somebody had believed in her. She could do this.

Marching over to the cart of bread, she picked up a few pieces and said, “Quartermaster, I need your opinion on something.”

“Yes, lady,” he said, and followed her over to the pot that Remy was still stirring. Ainsel took the paddle from him and checked the consistency of the simmering liquid within. Thick enough to coat the paddle, which was good enough. She smeared it on one of the pieces of bread, let it cool, then took a bite.

A little tart. And smoky. Impassively, she passed the piece of bread to the Quartermaster. “Try this.”

The Quartermaster squinted at the bread, then took a very small bite. His eyes widened and he took another bite. “Jam,” he breathed.

“Excuse me, is that your challenge?” demanded the Admin. “Shouldn’t you be offering it to me?”

“Oh no, sir,” said Ainsel sweetly. “This is still early in the process. I wouldn’t want to offend you with something unfinished.”

The Admin furrowed his brow. “How is it, Quartermaster?”

“It’s—“ the Quartermaster began, and Ainsel cut him off.

“It needs something. Doesn’t it, Quartermaster?” She fixed the man with her most intense stare. “Doesn’t it?”

“Ah…” He swallowed. “Yeah, sure. It sure does.”

Ainsel clasped her hands behind her back. “If only I had a few more ingredients. I’m sure I could do something with those. Oh well. There will at least be better bread soon.” She crossed her fingers for luck as she said it.

The Quartermaster gave her a fixed look that she didn’t know how to interpret. “Nabi says you want more of our supplies. I wasn’t going to agree but I’ve changed my mind. I’ll send more carts.” Then, in an underone, he added, “Unpack them yourself.”

Ainsel gave him too brilliant a smile. He shook his head and tsked before bowing to the Admin and leaving the room. The Admin didn’t acknowledge his departure, continuing to watch Ainsel. His frown made her nervous again. She looked around the big chamber. Nabi and Remy had returned to the work she’d assigned and were talking quietly, supervised by Judge Steel. About half of the other soldiers who’d arrived with the Quartermaster waited around, gawking.

Ainsel prepared a few more pieces of terrible bread with spikefruit jam and gave it to the observers, saying loudly, “Just testing it some more. Wouldn’t want to poison you, sir.” Despite her words, nobody refused the sample, and two of them looked at each other and then trotted from the chamber.

Then she circulated through the room, stirring and testing and rearranging some of her stranger experiments. Some of them were best to work on without observers. Deliciousness often started out disgusting and people more used to eating than cooking could be bothered by the raw materials.

Over at what Ainsel now thought of as the grinding and chopping station, Nabi shrugged at Remy. “The food is mostly the same in both worlds, at least for us. More scraps on Prime, but here on Shell we are free instead of slaves.”

Remy raised his eyebrows, glancing up at Nabi from under shaggy hair. “Free to serve here or head into the wastes? Not much of a choice.”

Nabi grinned crookedly. “There is a town a full day’s journey away. Those who cannot stand the Forgelord or the Thunder Kings can risk the trip. No pazozz—the terrible bread—there, though. No protection from guardians either. They are all very scrawny!”

Remy smiled back, but it had no humor in it. Nabi caught that the boy didn’t share his amusement and sobered. “Anyhow, we serve here for a while, which is not much hardship. Most of the time, anyhow. And then we go back to Prime and take a wife and retire to the Golden City. Not bad.”

“But you speak English,” said Ainsel. It took some getting used to, but it was definitely English. “Don’t you ever want to go back to…” She stumbled to a stop, unsure what to call the world she’d arrived from. She’d almost used the real world but that was so wrong.

“The Middle World? No, no,” said Nabi. “The pazozz is terrible, but it is always available no matter what. I was born a slave, but I have heard from others that in the Middle World and beyond, many starve. If I’m not brave enough to risk Freetown, no way would the Middle World call me.” He reached out and pushed juice-covered fingers through some of the dusting of crumbs on the floor. “Very interested in what you do, though. Changing the pazozz? Could be good.”

Something clanked up above and Jim once again said, “Oops. Hey, Gal, does this really mean your machines can bake insects as well as bread?”

The Admin turned his head to stare at Jim like it was on a slow crank. “Gal?” he asked. Ainsel’s hair rose in the sudden sizzle of electricity. She suddenly started thinking hard about how to get Zoë’s father out of trouble before the Admin had him zapped by one of those awful guns.

Jim brazened it out. “That’s your name, isn’t it? Galbaric? I’m sorry, we tend to go by first names where I work.”

“Jim,” called Ainsel urgently. “I could use your help over here.”

“I think I’m more use over here,” countered Jim, using the same absent voice he used when she greeted him while visiting Zoë. “You know how useless I am in a kitchen.”

“You’re fired,” snapped the Admin. “Get away from my console. Stop breaking things.”

Ainsel noticed from her peripheral vision that both Judge Steel and Nabi had gone very still. She ran over to the console and grabbed Jim’s arm. On the plus side, that served to interrupt whatever catastrophic thing Jim had been about to say. On the negative side, she’d transferred the Admin’s attention back to herself.

“You! What are you playing at? When will your so-called better food be ready? I’m getting very hungry. And I think you’re stalling.” The Admin’s eyes were wide and inhuman, leaking white radiance under the lids. Suddenly he seemed like a terrifying explosion contained in a man’s skin.

“This isn’t a sword fight,” gasped Ainsel. “It takes time to make good food, especially from scratch.”

“What good is it, then? If you spend all your time between meals preparing the next meal, it hardly seems worth it.” The Admin flexed his hands as if he was digging claws into the console surface.

Remy came over and pulled Jim effortlessly away from Ainsel and the console. “Be patient and you’ll find out, big guy. Though if you want to go a few rounds in order to kill time, I’m game.”

Somehow, while Jim’s casual treatment had infuriated the Admin, Remy’s sass made him exhale and the light dim behind his eyes. “That would only be depressing.” He looked around, then announced, “I’m going to take a nap. You have until I awaken, and then I taste what you have and decide whether or not to eat some of you as well.” He turned away, then turned back, gave Jim a chilly look, and smacked his palm on the console. A cage of white light crackled into place around the console. Then the Admin turned away again and vanished through a narrow door previously concealed by some of the billowing steam.