Sera did not leave the next morning either.
This was not because she couldn't walk. She could walk. She could walk better than she had walked in months. She stood up, took a few experimental steps, and then stood very still for a long time.
Her brain was trying reconcile with the fact her leg got cut off.
And also got healed by a glowing plant.
She didn't leave because she had nowhere to go.
This was not a new feeling. She'd had nowhere to go since the mana storm hit her column and scattered three hundred soldiers across the Expanse like dice across a table. She'd had nowhere to go since she'd watched her sergeant get swallowed by a patch of ground that opened up without warning and closed again without apology.
But now "nowhere to go" felt different. Because "nowhere" currently included a shack with a dirt floor, someone who healed legs with flowers, and a field of plants that glowed like captured sunlight.
"Nowhere" had never been this warm before.
Arthur was already outside when she woke up. He was kneeling by the irrigation basin, muttering to himself and making adjustments to the copper pipe with a small hammer. The pipe had developed a slight leak at one of the joints overnight a thin trickle of greenish water seeping through a gap in the copper fitting and Arthur was treating it with the grave, focused intensity of a surgeon performing a surgery.
Sera watched him for a moment. He hadn't noticed her. He hadn't noticed anything that wasn't a plant, a pipe, or a problem related to a plant or a pipe. She had been watching him for two days now, and she had developed a theory about Arthur Pendelton.
The theory was this: he was not pretending to be oblivious. He was not secretly wise. He was not a god in disguise, or a powerful mage hiding his abilities probably, or a hermit who had retreated from the world after some great tragedy. He was just. A tired, slightly odd man who wanted to grow plants and had an unreasonable amount of knowledge about how to do it in a place where plants should not grow.
The problem with this theory was that it made no sense.
People did not accidentally cure septic wounds with houseplants. People did not accidentally build mana filtration arrays out of fence paint. People did not accidentally purify the most toxic river on the continent using a length of copper piping and forty seeds. These were not things that happened by accident. These were things that required genius, or power, or both.
But Arthur didn't act like a genius. He didn't act like he had power. He acted like someone who was annoyed that his pipe was leaking.
"Good morning," Sera said.
Arthur looked up from the pipe. He had a smear of chalk on his forehead and a piece of copper wire between his teeth. "It's not morning," he said around the wire. "It's mid-morning. You slept late."
"I was recovering from a near-fatal infection."
"That was yesterday. Right now you're fine. Lingering in bed past sunrise is just being lazy."
Sera blinked.
She was beginning to understand that conversations with Arthur were not like conversations with other people. Other people had subtext. Arthur had none. Other people said things they didn't mean and meant things they didn't say.
"Can I help?" she asked.
Arthur looked at her. He looked at the leaking pipe. He looked at her again.
"Have you ever worked with copper pipes?" he asked.
"No."
"Then you answered your own question," He turned back to the pipe. "You can make breakfast if you want. I have hardtack in the trunk by the door. Don't eat more than two pieces. I've calculated my rations for the month and I'll probably run out soon, if I don't start conserving."
Sera stood there for a moment. Then she walked to the shack, found the hardtack, and sat down on the cot next to the mushroom colony, which had grown again overnight and was now beginning to resemble a small city.
She ate her hardtack. It was terrible. She had eaten army rations for three years and she was fairly certain this hardtack was worse than army rations, which was an achievement in itself.
Through the shack's one window which was less of a window and more of a hole in the wall that someone had optimistically left unfilled she watched Arthur work. He fixed the pipe in ten minutes, tested the flow, made a satisfied sound that was almost but not quite a hum, and then walked to the far end of his fenced-in area with a shovel.
He started digging a new trench.
Sera watched him dig for a while. He dug with the same focused intensity he'd applied to the pipe. Each shovelful was similar in size and depth. The trench was perfectly straight. She'd seen combat engineers who couldn't dig a straight trench, and they'd had magic to help them.
Arthur did not have magic. Arthur had a shovel with a cracked handle and a bad attitude about soil health.
She finished her hardtack, brushed the crumbs off her uniform what was left of it anyway and stepped outside. She didn't approach Arthur. She walked to the fence instead, and stood by one of the chalk-painted posts, and looked out at the Expanse.
The mist was closer than they had been yesterday.
She could see shapes in them now. Not clearly. Not well enough to identify. But shapes. Human-shaped. Moving slowly, carefully, in the general direction of the fence. They weren't charging. They weren't fleeing. They were drifting. Like leaves caught in a current.
"Arthur," she said.
Arthur did not look up from his trench. "Mm."
"There are people out there."
"Mm."
This did not get the reaction Sera had expected. She had expected alarm. Concern. At minimum, a pause in his digging. She got a grunt.
"Did you hear me? I said there are people out there. In the mist. Dozens of them. Probably more."
Arthur drove the shovel into the ground and leaned on it. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, leaving a streak of dirt across his brow that joined the chalk smear in what was becoming a comprehensive facial decoration. He looked in the direction she was pointing.
He squinted.
"Oh," he said. "Yes, those are people."
"And?"
"And what?"
"Aren't you going to do something?"
"Like what?"
Sera stared at him. "Like— I don't know— find out what they want? Prepare a defense? Acknowledge that a large group of people is approaching your property in the middle of a cursed wasteland?"
Arthur considered this. He looked at the people in the mists. He looked at his fence. He looked at his plants.
"My fence keeps out things with hostile intent," he said. "They're not showing hostile intent. They're not my problem."
"How do you know they don't have hostile intent?"
"Because they're still forty yards away and moving slowly. Things with hostile intent in the Expanse move fast. It's the few reliable facts in this place. Speed means predation. Slowness means desperation or they're confused. They're moving slowly, so they are probably desperate and or confused. Either way it doesn't require my attention."
Sera opened her mouth. Closed it. She looked at the shapes in the mist. She looked at Arthur, who had already gone back to digging.
She'd felt it when she'd stumbled through it two days ago. Not a barrier, exactly. More like walking through warm water. A sensation of being assessed, measured, and found her unthreatening. It had let her through without resistance because she hadn't been a threat.
She thought about what would happen if someone with actual hostile intent tried to cross.
She decided she didn't want to know.
By midday, the shapes had resolved into people.
Sera counted them from the fence line. Twenty-three. Then thirty-one. Then forty-seven. They came out of the mist in ones and twos, stumbling, limping.
Some of them were soldiers she could see the tattered uniforms, Vaeloric green and Aintherpian blue and the dark gray of the Free Cities militia, all mixed together, enemies reduced to identical exhaustion. Some of them were civilians. Women. Children. An old man carrying a boy on his back who couldn't have been older than six.
They stopped at the fence line. Every single one of them stopped.
Sera watched them watch the fence. Some of them reached out and touched it. When they did, their expressions changed. Subtly. The way a person's face changes when they step out of the cold and into a warm room. A loosening.
None of them crossed.
"Arthur," Sera said again.
Arthur was still digging. His second trench was now half as long as the first, the second trench, aimed at a point on the river where the current was slower and the green glow was slightly less aggressive.
"Arthur."
"What."
"There are forty-seven people standing at your fence. They're not crossing. They're just standing there. Some of them are children."
Arthur stopped digging. He looked at the fence. He looked at the people.
"Yes," he said. "I can see that."
"Aren't you going to—"
"No."
"No?"
"No. If I go over there, they'll want to talk to me. If they talk to me, they'll ask questions. If I answer the questions, they'll misunderstand the answers and build some kind of story around them. Then they'll want things. Help. Food. Shelter. Protection. I don't have help, my food is rationed to the piece, my shelter has a dirt floor and a mushroom infestation, and my protection is a fence I built out of chalk and optimism."
"Going over there creates problems. Not going there doesn't."
Sera stared at him.
"You can't just ignore forty-seven people," she said.
"But I can?"
He went back to digging.
Sera stood at the fence for a long time after that. She stood there while Arthur dug his trenches. She stood there while the people at the fence sat down. Gradually. First the children, because children will sit down anywhere eventually. Then the elderly. Then the injured. Then everyone else.
By late afternoon, there were forty-seven people sitting in a rough semicircle outside Arthur's fence, and they had built a fire.
Sera did not know where they'd gotten the wood. There were no trees within sight. The Expanse didn't have trees. It had skeletal, gray things that might have been trees once, but were not trees now and did not produce wood in any usable sense. But there was a fire. It burned with a clean, steady flame.
That was the strangest part. They did not speak. Forty-seven people, soldiers and civilians from at least three different nations, sitting around a fire in a cursed wasteland, and none of them were talking. They were just sitting. Looking at the fence. Looking at the golden glow. Looking at nothing.
She went back to the shack. She found the hardtack trunk. She counted the pieces. Twenty-eight. Arthur had said he'd calculated his rations for the month. She did the math. Twenty-eight pieces, one per day, was twenty-eight days. Arthur had been here for seven days, which meant he'd started with thirty-five pieces and eaten seven. That checked out.
Twenty-eight pieces of hardtack. Forty-seven people. Twenty-eight days.
She looked out the window. Arthur was still digging. The people were still sitting.
She looked at the hardtack. She looked at the basin of clean water.
She looked at the hardtack again.
Then she picked up two pieces the two pieces Arthur had said she was allowed and walked to the fence.
Arthur did not notice. He was digging.
The first person to look up when Sera approached the fence was a boy. The same boy she'd seen on the old man's back earlier. He was sitting cross-legged by the fire, which was impossible because his legs were too thin and his face was too pale.
He looked like he should be dead.
He looked at Sera with the flat, dark eyes of someone who had seen things that children should not see and had processed them by simply deciding not to process them.
"Here," Sera said, holding out the hardtack.
The boy did not take it. He looked at it like he'd forgotten what food was. Then the old man next to him reached out and took it, broke it in half, and gave half back to the boy. He nodded at Sera. Just a nod. Nothing else.
Sera walked along the inside of the fence, handing out pieces of hardtack through the gaps in the planks. Twenty-six pieces left. She could give each person half a piece. That would feed fifty-six people. There were forty-seven. She had enough. Barely.
She handed out the hardtack. People took it. Some of them nodded. Some of them didn't. A woman in a torn dress held her piece to her chest and closed her eyes, and her shoulders shook in a way that Sera could describe but wouldn't.
When she was done, she walked back to the shack. She had no hardtack left. Arthur would notice, and be annoyed.
She did not care.
"Sera."
She turned. Arthur was standing behind her. He had stopped digging. He was holding his shovel in one hand and his notebook in the other, and he was looking at the fence with an expression that Sera had not seen on his face before.
It wasn't anger. It wasn't annoyance. It was something more controlled than that. More precise.
"You gave them my hardtack," he said.
"Yes."
"All of it."
"Yes."
"My calculated monthly ration. That I specifically told you not to exceed."
"I gave each person half a piece. There was enough."
"There was enough for you to not eat for the next twenty-eight days. That's not the same as there being enough."
Sera straightened. "They're starving."
"They're outside my fence which means not my problem. You gave away my food to people who are not my problem, and now I have no food, which makes them my problem. You see how you've created a problem where there wasn't one?"
Sera stared at him.
"Are you seriously—" she started. "They're children, Arthur. Some of them are children. They're sitting out there and they've got nowhere else to go and you're upset about hardtack?"
Arthur looked at her. His expression didn't change.
"Yes," he said.
Sera took a breath. Then another. Then a third, because the first two had not been enough.
"Fine," she said. "Then I'll solve the hardtack problem."
"How?"
"I don't know yet. But I'll solve it. And you can go back to digging your holes and pretending everything outside your fence doesn't matter"
Nothing grew except—
She stopped.
She turned around.
Arthur was still standing by the shack, watching her with the same flat, evaluating look he'd given the leaking pipe.
"The seedlings," she said.
Arthur blinked. It was the first time Sera had seen him blink in a way that suggested surprise rather than a normal blink. "What about them?"
"You said they're a self-sustaining optimization cycle. They grow, they filter mana, the filtered mana improves the soil, the improved soil makes them grow faster."
"Yes."
"How fast?"
Arthur was quiet for a moment. He flipped open his notebook. He ran his finger down a page of calculations. His lips moved slightly.
"If the current growth rate holds, and the feedback loop remains stable, and the mana density in the Expanse stays consistent which it should, because the war created a self-replenishing mana sink that won't deplete for another century then the original forty seedlings should reach full maturity in approximately eighteen days."
"And full maturity means what?"
"Full filtration capacity. Each mature plant could process roughly twenty gallons of contaminated water per day and produce enough purified waste product to fertilize a ten-foot radius of soil."
Sera did the math in her head. She was not good at math, but she had been a supply officer's assistant for six months, which meant she could do basic multiplication under duress.
"Forty plants, twenty gallons each, that's eight hundred gallons of clean water a day," she said. "And enough fertilizer for—" she did more math "—a circle about three hundred feet across?"
Arthur looked at her. Something shifted in his expression. Not approval. Not warmth either.
"Yes," he said.
"And the second batch? The sixty seeds you were planning to plant?"
"Same timeline. Eighteen days to maturity, but with the existing filtration infrastructure already in place, they'd grow faster. About twelve to fourteen days."
Sera pointed at the river. "Clean water. Fertile soil. The two things you need to grow food."
"The two things you need to grow my plants. Which are not food. They're for filtration."
"Are they edible?"
Arthur's pen stopped moving.
Arthur flipped to a new page in his notebook. He started writing. His handwriting, which was usually neat and small and aggressively organized, became slightly less neat. His pen moved faster.
"I don't know," he said, and the fact that he said it without hesitation without the usual pause he employed when he was unsure but didn't want to admit it told Sera more about his state of mind than anything else he could have said.
"Find out," she said.
Arthur kept writing.