track. Above the track on East and West Slope rose tiers of Earthships, the best homes in all the world – Astra grew another metre taller as she surveyed them. Earthships hugged Gaia, Klor said. Their curved soilbag walls kept their interiors cool in the summer and in the winter stored the low rays of the sun that flooded in though their front greenhouse corridors, which grew fruit and vegetables all year round. Earthships also had colourful mosaic walls made of old bottles, roof cisterns to harvest the rain and flower-full botanical cells to treat the water for drinking, washing, gardening and toilet flushing. Earthships generated electricity from solar panels and wind turbines, and even in cold climates they were warm enough to grow mangoes inside. Everyone on the whole planet should live in an Earthship – but Is-Land was the only country in the world to make them the main rural habitat. Astra’s heart glowed as she picked out hers in the lowest ring on East Slope, a ray of pride smouldering like the amber sunlight striking the massive glass curves of Code House, Ahn’s prize-winning building and the jewel in Or’s crown. Code House sprouted out of North Slopelike an enormous shelf fungi, but today, for the first time, Astra didn’t feel tiny like an ant when she looked at it. She was a great Wise House scientist now, and a secret IMBOD patrol officer in the forest. Soon Or would need her to survive.
She and Hokma crossed the Kinbat track, avoiding a few sprinting Or-kids and jogging or wheeling Or-adults who were making their daily contribution to Or’s electricity supply. Back in Core House she moved as if in slow motion as she jostled for a seat at the Or-kids’ dining table, protected from pointy elbows and hard chair corners by an invisible aura of power and knowledge, as if she were suddenly a whole epoch older and wiser than all her Or-siblings. She might later tell Torrent and Peat about the worms – Hokma had said she could – but for now she just smiled as the older boys play-punched each other and squabbled over the bread-basket. Then Yoki peeled back his plaster and showed her the cut on his thumb from kitchen duty – a raw flap of skin exposing scarlet flesh – and of course she had to show him her bruised hand.
‘How did you get that?’ he asked, his eyes brimming with imagined pain.
‘I was chasing the Non-Lander girl,’ she boasted.
‘Oh, so she’s a
Non-Lander
now, is she?’ Torrent scoffed from across the trestle table. His nose, shoulders and chest were peeling because he always neglected to reapply his sun lotion like the lighter-skinned kids were supposed to. Before Astra could call him ‘Lizardman’, Meem whipped out Blotto, her Tablette.
‘I arrested eight infiltrators today!’ she crowed, shaking her big honey-coloured Afro. ‘A whole family and three loners.’
‘Hope you remembered to build a prison,’ Torrent teased.
Astra narrowed her eyes. Torrent had better not try to make Meem cry. Astra had already played Operation Is-Land straight through to Level Five, twice, but Meem was still a baby and you had to encourage her. She’d spent the last week helping Meem complete Foundation Level. Together they’d marshalled Meem’s starting forces of CONC officers and brave Gaian Pioneers into squadrons and put them to work establishing the Boundary, detoxifying the soil and rebuilding the infrastructure. Throughout the country, Meem’s squadrons had repaired roads, reintroduced rodents, reptiles and other small fauna, torn down unsafe buildings and retrofitted others with PV panels and rain vats. On the steppes she’d established solar panel fields, sited wind farms in locations free of batsand birdlife and sowed the first crops of nitrogen-fixer grains. In the ash fields Meem had built Is-Land’s first and largest geothermal plant, and the continental server it would heat and power. In the White Desert, she had established salt and crystals mines; in Bracelet Valley
She and Hokma crossed the Kinbat track, avoiding a few sprinting Or-kids and jogging or wheeling Or-adults who were making their daily contribution to Or’s electricity supply. Back in Core House she moved as if in slow motion as she jostled for a seat at the Or-kids’ dining table, protected from pointy elbows and hard chair corners by an invisible aura of power and knowledge, as if she were suddenly a whole epoch older and wiser than all her Or-siblings. She might later tell Torrent and Peat about the worms – Hokma had said she could – but for now she just smiled as the older boys play-punched each other and squabbled over the bread-basket. Then Yoki peeled back his plaster and showed her the cut on his thumb from kitchen duty – a raw flap of skin exposing scarlet flesh – and of course she had to show him her bruised hand.
‘How did you get that?’ he asked, his eyes brimming with imagined pain.
‘I was chasing the Non-Lander girl,’ she boasted.
‘Oh, so she’s a
Non-Lander
now, is she?’ Torrent scoffed from across the trestle table. His nose, shoulders and chest were peeling because he always neglected to reapply his sun lotion like the lighter-skinned kids were supposed to. Before Astra could call him ‘Lizardman’, Meem whipped out Blotto, her Tablette.
‘I arrested eight infiltrators today!’ she crowed, shaking her big honey-coloured Afro. ‘A whole family and three loners.’
‘Hope you remembered to build a prison,’ Torrent teased.
Astra narrowed her eyes. Torrent had better not try to make Meem cry. Astra had already played Operation Is-Land straight through to Level Five, twice, but Meem was still a baby and you had to encourage her. She’d spent the last week helping Meem complete Foundation Level. Together they’d marshalled Meem’s starting forces of CONC officers and brave Gaian Pioneers into squadrons and put them to work establishing the Boundary, detoxifying the soil and rebuilding the infrastructure. Throughout the country, Meem’s squadrons had repaired roads, reintroduced rodents, reptiles and other small fauna, torn down unsafe buildings and retrofitted others with PV panels and rain vats. On the steppes she’d established solar panel fields, sited wind farms in locations free of batsand birdlife and sowed the first crops of nitrogen-fixer grains. In the ash fields Meem had built Is-Land’s first and largest geothermal plant, and the continental server it would heat and power. In the White Desert, she had established salt and crystals mines; in Bracelet Valley
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