“How did you learn so much about foreign herbs?” August asked Luna Belmont. The medicine had been applied half an hour prior, and he was up and at it already. The strange tingling sensation had gone, he had complete control of his muscles, and the numbness around the puncture eased away.

The medic chuckled. “I assume by foreign you mean anything that grows outside the dome. I hate to imagine what our ancestors might think of us.” Her expression softened. “My granny taught me everything I know to answer your question.”

She’d been foraging the field for more sweet stems the moment the general had finished his berating. August felt he owed her. He’d offered his help as soon as he’d regained control of his legs. They’d been picking stems in silence together ever since.

“Was she a scientist or something?” August asked.

Belmont cackled at that. “Far from. Granny and scientists didn’t see eye to eye. Granny was an herbalist—and alchemist, some might say. Granny was a smart cookie, and you couldn’t find a kinder soul.”

The way she spoke suggested to August that Granny had passed. He didn’t know how to ask it, so he kept his mouth shut.

“Her mama taught her everything that had been passed down from her mama,” Belmont said. “Of course, my mama didn’t wanna hear anything about it. Mama listened well in school. ‘Too well,’ Granny used to say. I’d never seen a bigger smile on Granny’s face than that first time I asked about her little garden in the apartment. That smile was probably the reason it stuck with me. I’m sure I asked out of the same curiosity that drives little ones to ask about everything, but that smile sparked something in me. Mama didn’t care enough either way. She didn’t encourage it. She didn’t forbid it.”

“I thought it was illegal to grow plants in your apartment,” August said. He’d grown up in a different lower district than Belmont, but he assumed the laws had been the same in Lower Pomlia, where her accent suggested she’d grown up.

“It is,” Belmont sighed.

He pulled a stiff piece of grass from the ground and added it to his handful. Belmont approached and plucked it from the bunch with two fingers like an unwanted hair. “This here is just another part of the grass family.” She rolled the blade into a ball and flicked it into the night. She plucked another stem from his hand and lifted it to his eyes. “See here. Hard to tell in the dark, but there’s a faint yellow line that climbs up the stem. That’s the stuff that turns to medical mash, and it’s how you can distinguish the sweet stem from plain old grass.”

August noted it but wondered when the information would ever be helpful again. He didn’t plan on spending too much time outside the dome after this mission. They separated and resumed their foraging.

“Illegal, indeed,” Belmont said after a short bout of silence. Soft voices had been coming in on the breeze. The rest of the squad had reformed a circle around the firebox—about twenty yards north of the dolorium corpse.

“Did she get caught?” He wasn’t sure if he read Belmont’s previous statement correctly, but it sounded to his young ears like she wanted to be asked for elaboration.

“She had turned every closet in the apartment into a garden,” Belmont said with a proud smile. “You’re from the lower districts. I don’t got to tell you how small those closets are.”

August blew an agreeable laugh from his nose.

“One closet was for food,” Belmont almost sang as she bent to gather more stems. “One for medicine and she even had one for miscellaneous type plants. Textiles, and even poisonous stuff.”

“Why would she want that?” August asked. Suddenly, the image of this cheerful ‘Granny’ had soured into a sneering, vengeful old lady.

“The poison?” Belmont asked, even though it was obviously what he was referring to. “She liked to experiment. She wasn’t just an herbalist. Like I said, some might’ve called her an alchemist. Some even called her ‘witch.’ I called her Granny.”

“What kind of experiments?” He was beginning to side with the faction that dubbed her ‘witch.’

Belmont sent him a knowing smirk. “You aren’t alone. A lot of my friends hated coming over because Granny freaked them out. They just never saw the cookie baking side of her, is all.”

August forced a smile. He was ready to drop the subject and return to the squad. Granny might have been witch-like and strange, but there was no question that Belmont was alright. She’d saved him from the poison. At the very least, she’d earned a good amount of leeway before he could judge her negatively.

“She’d use the poison plants on rats and mice,” Belmont said. “Vanno knows we had enough skittering through the bones of the building to spare.”

“Oh,” August said, relieved. “It was just her way of taking care of pests?”

“Not exactly,” Belmont said. “She liked testing her concoctions on her poisoned subjects. She’d poison the creature with this or that, then test all sorts of potions and tinctures on it to see what worked to cure it. She’d written her findings in a massive tome. I loved that big ol’ book of hers. I remember watching her scribble aggressive letters on brittle pages while the smell of baking cookies wafted from the kitchen. She always told me that book would be passed down to me after she died.”

“She didn’t yet?” Idiot. He wanted to split his bunch of stems in two and jab both halves into his eyes. Colonels still made him nervous.

“I wish.” Her voice took on a grim tone.

He quickly forgot about his blunder and let go of the next sweet stem so that he could give her his full attention.

“A nice old man from down the hall had been eyeing her when she’d go to the mail,” Belmont said. “He’d finally built up the courage to ask her out. She’d said yes. They started going on little dates here and there. He’d even started coming around to the apartment. I liked him. Things started to get serious between them—as serious as things could get between old folks. They weren’t talkin’ marriage or anything. He’d been saving up without her knowing and invited her to a nice day spent at Cloud Park in Upper Willow. She was excited about it. She’d never left the lower districts. She’d never even been in an aircar. None of us had.”

She stretched her back after plucking another stem from the ground. “That’s good. Should be more than enough for the rest of the mission.”

“What about the general?” August asked. “He clearly wasn’t too pleased with you using these on me.”

“I’ll make my mash when he’s asleep,” Belmont said. “Pour out one of his Slupman bottles and fill it with this. Don’t worry about the general. He says what he needs to say, but he pretty much lets you do what you gotta do. The only reason he grilled me a while ago was that it’s his job to do so. Once you understand ol’ Wolf’s mind, it becomes easier to handle him. He basically said all that stuff to me because if anything happens and we end up in front of a board, his ass is covered.”

August nodded. He wanted to hear the rest of the Granny story but didn’t know how to ask.

He didn’t need to. “Anyway,” Belmont said. “She wanted to go spend the day up there with Davis, but she didn’t wanna leave her garden unattended for a whole day. She’d never been separated from her garden for more than a few hours. I told her: ‘Granny, get your ol’ ass in that aircar and have yourself a nice day. I know enough to take care of the garden.’ She wasn’t so sure, but she agreed.

“She left. I sat on the couch, bored out of my mind as usual, and watched the screen. My friend called me up, told me another shipment of unsold goods came down from the upper districts. I’m sure I don’t gotta tell you what that meant.”

She didn’t. It was like a sporadic, unpredictable holiday for the low-livers, as the upper folk called them. Goods that didn’t sell in the sky would be shipped down and flew off the shelves at ground level. The popular girls could dress like their elevated counterparts, and the boys could use actual balls and actual roller skates for roller-hockey instead of flimsy baseboards and worn-out shoes. Adults raced to buy the best in home-managing technology and other things like certain food items, zygones, make-up, books, car parts—at least the parts that were compatible with their wheeled counterparts, and much more. Fights inevitably broke out whenever the shipments would come in, at least in his corner of the dome.

“I couldn’t pass it up,” Belmont said. “I was still wearing Mama’s high school clothes. This was my chance to finally look like one of the girls in the Mrs. Willow Pageant. But I’d promised Granny I’d take care of the plants.” She shook her head in the universal look of disappointment. “I overcompensated for the time I might be gone and gave the gardens too much water. I wouldn’t have done it if I knew as much then as I do now, but, you know. So I left, got skunked while shopping, came home with nothing, and the garden was fine by the time Granny got back, looking like a young girl in love.”

August furrowed his brow in thought. Had he missed something? The only tragic part of the story seemed to be her poor shopping haul.

“Inspectors came by a couple weeks later,” Belmont said. “Turns out my over-watering caused a leak through the floor. Downstairs neighbor called it in. Inspectors found the gardens, and Granny was taken away. Mama, too, even though she had nothing to do with it. They sent me for aptitude tests and found that I had above-average strength and athleticism. They also noticed my knowledge of herbs, and so they decided that the best course for my life would be army medic. I was shipped off to a MoShun academy, and here I am now.”

They stood in silence. August didn’t know what to say. What were the right words to convey: ‘Your story is a sad and unfortunate one. You have my sympathy,’ without coming off as some kind of robot?

Raised voices from the squad broke their silence.

“We better go check it out,” Belmont said.

August nodded and followed the colonel, still digging for the right words.