The Underline, Run Three. Lapwai and Pullman, November 2071.
Previously: In Toppenish, Washington, Cass sent two pounds of amaranth seed down the relay, the hand-to-hand chain that moves seed around the basin. The line belongs to Fern, who spent two seasons selecting it on a dry slope in Oregon's Grande Ronde valley, and nobody knows of any other stock. Cass kept the other four pounds and didn't ask Fern first (Inventory). In Lapwai, Idaho, Dez took the seed in, sprouted a few on a wet paper towel to see if they were alive, and kept it cold in a clinic cooler that was losing the fight (The Canister). Then he sent it north at night to the regional seed station in Pullman, Washington, a working cold-storage seed bank less than an hour up the road. There, curator Noor Sadeghi filed it under an old code that tells auditors a record is finished and needs no looking at (Marked Complete). Everything the station files now goes to the regional office in Spokane, where an analyst has ninety days to read all of it. Spokane has already frozen every tree seed in the building with a single rule. Fern, somewhere up in the mountains, doesn't know her seed has left Toppenish.
Lapwai. 6:14 a.m.
Dez keyed the handset a minute before the quarter hour. At 6:15 the morning net belonged to every rain gauge between Orofino and Asotin, and he had no patience for men who needed the whole valley to know they'd gotten a tenth of an inch.
"Toppenish, Lapwai."
The hiss went on long enough that he figured the repeater on Craig Mountain had dropped out again. Then Cass came through, two hundred miles west, sounding the way she always sounded, like a woman reading off an index card.
"It's six-fourteen."
"I know what time it is."
"You always know what time it is. It never seems to change anything." Paper moved near her microphone. "I ran the four pounds."
He'd guessed as much when she asked for the call. Cass didn't ask for calls. She kept appointments.
"A real test?"
"A hundred seeds on blotter paper, in the incubator that holds its temperature, seven days." A pause. He knew it was Cass deciding whether to say a number on an open channel where anybody with a scanner could hear it. "Seventy-one came up."
The coffee can sat on the shelf above the radio, lid on, where he'd put it three weeks ago. He didn't reach for it.
"It was ninety-one in May," Cass said.
"I read your card. I've got your card taped to my fridge."
"What did you get?"
"Six out of ten."
"Six out of ten what?"
"Six out of ten seeds, on a paper towel, on the counter by the stove. Which I know is not an incubator. I'm saying it first so you don't have to."
Somewhere out in the Waha country a dog was barking through somebody's stuck microphone, and it kept on barking the whole time Cass said nothing.
"You opened it," she said.
"I opened a very small amount of it."
"I wrote nobody opens it."
"You wrote that a week after I opened it. And I put 'indicative only' in the notebook. I underlined 'indicative.'"
"Dez."
"It's going the same direction in both places, Cass. Yours and mine, about the same speed." He looked at the window. Gray out, the color of a dirty sink, not light yet. "That cold room in Pullman slows it down. It doesn't stop it. The only thing that stops it is putting it in dirt and taking new seed off the plants. I want to do that. This winter. Here, under plastic."
A shorter silence.
"That isn't mine to agree to," Cass said.
"I know whose it is."
"Have you talked to her?"
"Have you?"
He heard her breathe out hard through her nose, which was about as close as Cass came to swearing on the air. "Reyes says she's up above Anthony Lakes until the snow pushes her down. My letter went with the relay on Thursday."
"So she reads it when? Christmas?"
"If Reyes gets up there before the pass closes."
"Then I'm not asking you."
"Then what is this?"
"It's six-fourteen," Dez said. He let that sit a second. She deserved more than that, so he added, "It's so you hear it from me before I do it and not after."
She didn't answer. When she came back her voice had gone quick and flat, her packing-list voice.
"Don't sow it thick. Crowded seedlings rot at the stem and you'll lose half to mold before you know there's a problem. Put the seed on the surface and barely cover it. It wants the soil warm to start, warmer than wheat, warmer than you're going to think is reasonable. Keep the first leaves dry. If it comes up tall and stringy, it isn't getting enough light, and in a plastic greenhouse in December it will not be getting enough light."
"Okay."
"And write all of it down."
"I write everything down."
"You wrote down ten seeds," Cass said, and the channel clicked off before he could answer.
A man's voice cut in almost immediately. "Lapwai, Toppenish, are you two done? Some of us got actual weather."
Dez hung the handset on its hook and took the can down after all. The towel inside had dried stiff and brown at the edges, with six sprouts stuck to it, pale threads gone to paper. The other four seeds hadn't done anything. They were still round and whole, which meant they were dead, or it meant his kitchen had been cold that week. The towel couldn't tell him which.
He put the lid back on.
Lapwai. 7:40 a.m.
In every photograph his father ever took of it, the slope behind the house was winter wheat. Dez grew wheat there himself for ten years after the old man died. Then wheat stopped paying for the water it took, so he tried barley, then grew nothing for two bad years, and now it was sorghum, short rows of stiff stalks with rust-red heads that came off in October and dried on a tarp in the yard. The co-op combine worked its list in order of acreage, which put him somewhere after Thanksgiving. He was threshing by hand instead, beating the heads with a two-foot length of irrigation hose, when Nell's flatbed came up the drive.
It was November and he was in a T-shirt. Down along Lapwai Creek the cottonwoods had put out a second set of leaves in October, soft and bright green, the way they'd done every fall since before Nell could walk. Nell thought that was just something cottonwoods did.
She climbed down from the cab. The clinic decal was on the door and her mother's spare badge was clipped to her jacket, because the clinic truck didn't leave the lot without somebody from the clinic in it, and at sixteen Nell had decided she counted.
"They got my picture at Colton," she said. "Both ways."
"They get everybody's picture at Colton."
"They got mine a little before one in the morning and again a little after six. Lapwai plate, clinic decal. The toll bill went to the clinic account." She picked a sorghum head off the pile and rolled it between her palms, the way she'd watched him do since she was small. Seed popped loose into her hand. "Mom asked me what the clinic truck was doing in Washington at one in the morning."
"What'd you tell her?"
"Pullman. I'm not going to lie to a nurse. She'd know in about a second." Nell tipped the seed onto the tarp. "She didn't ask what for. She just looked at me. Which is worse."
Dez handed her the hose to free up his hands. "I need that woman's number. The one at the station."
Nell stopped rolling. "Why?"
"I'm going up there to take some of it back."
"Back where?"
"Here."
"You just sent it there. I just drove it there. My face is on a toll camera for driving it there."
"Not all of it. A little bit." He held up a thumb and finger with almost no air between them. "About a teaspoon."
"For what?"
"To plant."
She looked at the sky like it might have an explanation for him. "In November."
"In Ruth's hoop house." The community garden's greenhouse, plastic stretched over a row of steel hoops behind the food bank.
"Does Ruth know that?"
"She'll know at four."
"Does Bertie know?"
"Bertie's coming at four too."
"Bertie is going to kill you." But Nell already had her phone out. "Her name's Noor. She gave me the number so I could text once I was past Colton. She said don't ever call it unless I had to."
"I have to."
"That's what everybody says." His phone buzzed in his back pocket. Nell put hers away and dropped the sorghum head back on the pile. "I'm not driving."
"Nobody asked you to drive."
"You were about to."
He had been. "My plate this time."
Nell held his eye a beat longer than she needed to. Then she picked up the second length of hose without being asked and went at the heads on the far end of the tarp, a lot harder than the sorghum required. The chaff went up gold in the low sun and came down on both of them.
Spokane. 11:15 a.m.
The building's heat came on at seven and held the fourth floor at seventy until four. After four it slid a degree an hour until the floor setting caught it in the low sixties, unless someone had filed an after-hours comfort request. Bennett Vale had never filed one. The request went to facilities with your name on it, and he did not want to be the name.
He was the analyst on the Pullman seed station review, and he read its filings in the order they'd been filed. The rules didn't require that. They only required that everything be read within ninety days. But he'd learned on an earlier review that every station had its own private habits about what a field meant, and if he skipped around he lost the thread of those habits and started reading the manual's meaning into the station's words. So he was in the second week of October: incoming seed, holds on outgoing shipments, and the long tail of the forest amendment, the rule that had stopped every tree seed in the building from going anywhere.
Pullman's building logs for the review period had come in as a batch the afternoon before. They were short, so he read them before lunch. On the night of October 21 the vehicle gate had opened at 01:09. It had opened on battery, because the station's grid feed was cut that night, and no staff badge was attached to the opening.
He pulled the curtailment notice for the twenty-first. Lapwai council night. Pullman feed cut 22:00 to 06:00. Routine. On council nights the Lapwai crews worked the gates at Lower Granite Dam, and the line that fed Pullman went dark while they did it.
He opened the station's incoming-seed records for that date. One entry, status COMPLETE. He didn't click into it. It was eleven days ahead of where he was reading. He'd get there Thursday, if the forest amendment didn't eat all of Wednesday, which it might. He wrote Pull. 10/21 Thurs on a sticky note and stuck it to the bottom edge of his monitor.
Then he drafted the query. Please explain the irregular vehicle gate actuation at 01:09 on and he stopped, and took out irregular, and then took out explain. Please confirm the purpose of the vehicle gate actuation at 01:09 on 10/21 during scheduled curtailment. This is a routine facilities query. He left the response window at the default, five business days, and sent it.
At 11:52 the Lapwai curtailment schedule for that night landed in his inbox. A power cut at a station under review counted as a facility event, so the schedules came to him now. Council night. Pullman feed cut at 22:00. The council minutes were attached, four pages, mostly gate positions at Lower Granite and a paragraph about a culvert on the Sweetwater road. One line noted that the Army Corps of Engineers had not yet responded to the council's notice of spillway work. That was a sixth-floor problem. He signed the acknowledgment.
He ate a pear at his desk and wiped the juice off the keyboard with his cuff.
Lapwai. 3:55 p.m.
Ruth's hoop house sat at the back of the garden lot, sixty feet of plastic film over steel hoops, patched in three places with packing tape gone the yellow of old teeth. Inside it was eighty degrees and smelled like wet peat and soft cardboard. Four benches ran the length of it. Three were packed edge to edge with lettuce starts and kale. The fourth was half empty.
Ruth had run the garden and the free-food line for twenty years. She wore her reading glasses on a cord, had dirt in the creases of her knuckles that never fully washed out, and could tell you to the household how many people ate out of this plastic in February.
Dez set the coffee can on the empty end of the fourth bench.
"Is that a towel?" Ruth said.
"It's a test."
"It's a towel in a can."
Ruth's handheld was propped against a flat of chard, tuned to channel nine. A woman's voice came out of it a little too loud. "Is that Dez? Hi, Dez. Is that the towel?"
Marcie ran the extension seed library up in Colfax and was the nearest thing the valley had to a plant scientist who'd answer a radio.
"Is this channel private?" Nell said. She'd come because Dez told her she was helping Ruth with benches. Ruth had not asked for help with benches.
"No channel's private, hon," Marcie said. "Nine's just boring. Nobody listens to nine because nine is me talking about squash."
The door flap opened and Bertie came in sideways, already in her council jacket, a tablet under one arm. Bertie sat on the Lapwai council and kept the town's power schedule. On her way past the second bench she pinched a leaf off a lettuce start and put it in her mouth. Ruth slapped the back of her hand without looking up. Neither of them slowed down. They'd been doing that since the third grade.
"I've got until five-forty," Bertie said. "Then I'm in chambers until the gates are set, which means tomorrow morning. Go."
Dez went, and kept it plain. Cass's four pounds in Toppenish were at seventy-one out of a hundred. His own towel was six out of ten. Two pounds sat in Cold Room B at the Pullman station under a code nobody up there opened. He wanted to drive up tonight, bring back a teaspoon, sow it here under plastic with a little heat, and have fresh seed off the plants by March.
"Why can't it just sit in their freezer?" Ruth said. "Nell says it's a real freezer."
"It's a real freezer," Nell said. "The shelves have scales in them. It weighed the bags when she put them in."
"Because it's still dying in there," Dez said. "Slower than in my chest freezer, but it's alive, and alive things die. You keep a seed line going by growing it and taking new seed off it. Every seed bank in the world, that's all they're really doing."
"That's the dirty secret of my whole career," Marcie said. "A seed library is just a very, very slow garden. Dez, can I ask a question?"
"You're going to anyway."
"Two pounds of amaranth is somewhere around a million seeds."
"Okay."
"You had a million seeds, and you tested ten."
Nell made a noise into her collar.
"I didn't want to use any more than I had to," Dez said.
"Out of a million."
"It isn't mine."
The radio went quiet. When Marcie came back the bright voice was gone. "All right. That's a different problem, and it's not my department. Here's what is. It's in a real cold room with a real compressor. At seventy-ish it'll hold fine until May. In May you plant it outside like a normal person, full sun, long days, and you get big healthy plants and a pile of seed."
"In May I need the ground for sorghum."
"You need it for sorghum either way."
"In May it's out in a field," Dez said. "Paper bags tied over the heads, stakes with numbers on them, Fern's line in a row next to mine. Everybody on the Lewiston road can see it, and the second person who drives past wants to know what it is."
"So the problem isn't the seed," Marcie said.
Dez didn't answer.
"The problem's Spokane," said Bertie, who hadn't sat down. She was reading her tablet with one eye.
"I want a teaspoon back down here before anybody in Spokane gets to that entry," Dez said. "Once somebody does, they can freeze that whole shelf with one sentence, and then it's not coming out for anyone."
"That's a guess," Marcie said.
"It's what they did with the trees," Dez said. Nobody had an answer for that.
Ruth had picked up a flat of kale and was turning it in her hands, checking leaf undersides for aphids. "How much bench?"
"Half."
"Half a bench is February lettuce for a hundred households."
"Marcie," Dez said, "how much room do a hundred plants need?"
"Under a tent? About a card table. And you want at least a hundred plants. Every time you grow a line out, you lose a little of what was in it. Fewer plants, more you lose."
Ruth set the kale down. "Then why did you say half a bench?"
"Negotiating."
"With me?"
"I've seen you negotiate."
Ruth looked at him over her glasses for a long time and then said, to the radio, "What else, Marcie?"
"Short days," Marcie said. "December light tells amaranth it's running out of season, so it flowers early and small. You'll get plants up to your ankle with a seed head like a bottle brush. That's fine, you'll still get seed. But it'll be seed off plants that grew up in a Lapwai greenhouse in winter, which is nothing like the slope she bred it on. You'll have pushed her line a whole generation under conditions she never picked it for. I'm saying that out loud so nobody can tell me later that nobody said it."
"Noted," Dez said.
"I'm going to say it again later."
"I know you are."
Bertie turned her tablet around and laid it on the bench beside the coffee can. It showed the garden's power line: one entry for the hoop house heater, one for the well pump, one for the coolers in the food building. "Daytime is mine," she said. "Ordinary nights are mine. I can run your heater on those and nobody blinks, because it's garden power and the garden draws what it draws. Council nights are different. Ten to six, everything that isn't the clinic or the water plant gets shut off so the line can carry the crews at the dam. That isn't me deciding. That's a vote, and they're voting it again tonight."
"So on council nights the heater's off," Dez said.
"On council nights the heater's off. Unless I make an exception. If I make an exception, it goes in the minutes."
"And the minutes go where?"
"Where do you think minutes for a dam schedule go?" Bertie said. "Out with the schedule. Every week. Including to Spokane."
Ruth spoke to the radio. "Will a hoop house stay above freezing without heat?"
"Most nights," Marcie said. "If you put up a second layer of plastic and lay frost cloth over the bench. Most nights. Amaranth seedlings handle cold about as well as a tomato does, which is to say not at all. A frost kills them. A few hours just above freezing stunts them so bad it hardly matters."
"How many council nights in January?" Dez said.
"Depends on January," Bertie said.
"Last January."
"Nine."
"Ten," Ruth said. "The night the transformer at Sweetwater blew."
"That was an emergency session."
"Was it dark?"
"It was dark."
"Then it was ten."
Nell had been standing at the end of the bench with her arms crossed. "Can I say something?"
"No," said Bertie.
"Whatever you all decide, I'm not going back up there."
"You're not," Dez said. "I'm going. Tonight."
Bertie looked up from the tablet. "Tonight's a council night. Pullman goes dark at ten."
"I know."
"You want to drive into their blackout."
"It's their blackout because of your council."
"Our council," Bertie said. She'd been correcting him on that word for thirty years. Then she was angry for real, quietly, the way she got in chambers once she stopped raising her voice. "Our clinic cooler. Annie moved the insulin to the back of the pharmacy fridge at midnight to make room for it." Annie was Nell's mother. "Our truck. Her kid. And when our cooler wasn't good enough, you drove it up the hill to their building. And now you need our power to get it back out of their building."
"Our cooler wasn't good enough," Dez said.
"I know it wasn't. I'm the one who didn't fund a new one." She picked the tablet back up. "I had a culvert."
Ruth had gone back to the kale. Without looking up, she said, "Whose seed is it?"
"Fern's," Dez said.
"Does Fern know it's in Pullman?"
"Cass sent her a letter Thursday."
"So no." Ruth pulled a yellow leaf off a start and dropped it in her apron pocket. "Does Fern know you want to put it in my greenhouse?"
"It isn't in your greenhouse."
"Then here's my price for a card table. Half of whatever comes off those plants stays here. In the garden's seed box, in my book, under the garden's name."
"It isn't mine to split."
"You split it already when you sent it up the hill."
"Toppenish split it first," Bertie said.
"Then everybody's good at it," Ruth said. "Half."
"Half of what? We don't even know if we get anything."
"Then it's half of nothing, and you can afford that."
Marcie laughed through the radio and tried, badly, to turn it into a cough.
Dez looked at the coffee can for a while. "Half," he said. "In your book."
"And the heat," Bertie said. "Last offer. Council nights go in the minutes, or they don't happen."
"They don't happen."
"So you'd rather it froze than have somebody in Spokane read the word amaranth in my minutes."
"Yes."
"For the record," Marcie said, "as the only person here with a degree in this, that is insane."
"Noted."
"I'll be down Saturday with two isolation tents. They keep stray pollen out so the line stays true. They came from a grant that ended before Nell was born and nobody's ever asked for them back. Until then, clear plastic and clothespins, and don't let it touch the leaves."
Bertie checked the clock on her tablet. Five thirty-eight. She tucked it under her arm, went past the second bench, and took another lettuce leaf. Ruth slapped her hand. At the door flap Bertie turned around.
"Ruth. Don't let him touch the thermostat."
"I never let anybody touch the thermostat."
"I mean it this time," Bertie said, and went.
Colton. 8:44 p.m.
The Colton checkpoint was a steel arch over Highway 195 just inside the Washington line, cameras on both posts and a small screen at window height for anyone who wanted to dispute something. Dez slowed to the posted fifteen. The screen showed his plate, then his account, then his name, then the toll, which had gone up since spring.
This time the record would say Dez, not the clinic or a sixteen-year-old with her mother's spare badge. He let the arch read him and rolled on north with the heater off, saving the battery for the drive home in the dark.
Noor had picked up on the fourth ring. She'd listened to all of it without interrupting, then told him to come at nine, no later, because at nine the grid was still up and her badge would open the vehicle gate the way it opened for any late visitor. Park at the loading dock, she'd said. Not the front.
Pullman. 9:04 p.m.
She was waiting at the dock in a fleece with the station's name on it, holding a flashlight she didn't need yet. She was shorter than he'd pictured and looked like she hadn't slept properly in a month.
"I'm Dez."
"I know." She badged the door. "Come in before the lights decide to go early."
The corridor ran past a lab where a young man sat hunched under a magnifier lamp, working seed out of small conifer cones with tweezers and dropping it into glassine envelopes. Each envelope had a number penciled on it.
"Is this the guy?" he said, without looking up.
"Dario, go home."
"Can't. Cones." He held one up to the lamp. "Fourteen trees. The only fourteen that lived out of the whole planting. I'm allowed to collect every single seed off them and I'm not allowed to mail one envelope anywhere. Not even to my mother, and she has a really nice yard." He looked at Dez for the first time. "They let you take yours out?"
"Nobody let me," Dez said.
Dario nodded like that was about what he'd figured, and bent back to the lamp.
Cold Room B had a heavy door with a rubber seal that sucked when Noor pulled it. The air that rolled out made Dez's ears ache. She went in and came back with the amaranth, heavy and already sweating, and set it on the steel counter outside the door.
"It sits," she said. "An hour. Maybe more. Until it's room temperature all the way through."
"Otherwise the damp in here condenses right onto the cold seed," Dez said.
She looked at him differently. "You would not believe how many people don't know that."
"I put a bin of wheat in a cold truck once and opened it in a warm barn. Lost the whole bin to mold by April. My dad didn't speak to me until harvest."
"Did he speak to you after harvest?"
"About the weather."
That got something close to a smile. She pulled two stools to the counter. Through the plastic he could see his own masking tape and his own handwriting on it, and over that the record number she'd added in marker. He didn't look at it long.
"Spokane asked about my gate today," she said.
He waited.
"The gate opening at one-oh-nine in the morning on the twenty-first, on battery, during the power cut, with no badge." The night Nell had come. "They'd like me to confirm the purpose. Five business days."
"What are you going to say?"
"That a vehicle came through the gate at one-oh-nine in the morning," Noor said. "Which it did."
"That's enough?"
"For a building query? It answers what they asked." She rubbed her eyes with two fingers. "The analyst is a man named Vale. He reads everything in order, start to finish. I've never met him and I like him a lot, which is not convenient for me."
At ten the lights went out.
One second of total black. Then green emergency strips came up along the floor, and somewhere in the walls something clunked as the cold rooms switched over to their own backup. Down the corridor Dario swore at length and with real feeling, and his magnifier lamp came back on battery, a small island of white light at the end of the hall.
They sat in the green dark with the bag on the counter between them.
"I never found a species name for it," Noor said after a while. "For the record. I left the field blank."
"I don't know it either."
"Does Fern?"
"Fern knows what slope it came off and which plants she pulled out every year for two years," Dez said. "I've never heard her call it anything but hers."
Noor seemed to turn that over. Then she reached out and laid the inside of her wrist flat on the plastic, the way you'd check a baby's bottle. She held it there, moved it to the other side of the bag, and held it again.
"Okay," she said.
She found a headlamp in a drawer and put it on. She laid out a sheet of clean white paper, a small scoop, a glass vial, and a drying packet from her own desk. A little scale sat at the end of the counter, its display glowing on battery. She snipped the bag's corner, folded the plastic back, and dipped the scoop.
The seed spilled across the paper like coarse sand, cream-colored, with black seeds scattered through it like pepper.
"The wild half," Dez said. Fern had crossed her grain amaranth with a wild plant off the slope, and the black seeds were that side of the family showing up.
Noor zeroed the scale with the empty vial on it and tilted the paper so the seed ran in. "How much?"
"Marcie says a gram is more than a thousand seeds. Three grams. Enough to sow, and enough to sow again if the first round dies."
She added, took some away, added again. The display settled at 3.2. She capped the vial, sealed it in a small zip bag with the drying packet, and handed it to him. He put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.
She closed the big bag with tape, three tight wraps, and pressed the edges down with her thumbnail. Then she turned to the terminal, which was running off the backup and was the brightest thing in the building. She brought up the record. He saw the old code in one field, COMPLETE in another, and in the notes, per NS. Her initials.
Under it she typed: 3.2 g returned. D. per NS.
"Returned," Dez said. "It was never yours to return."
Noor didn't answer. She opened a second record, an old one, scrolled to its notes, and turned the screen a few degrees so he could read. Per WK. 40 g returned. M. Ruiz, spring 2056.
"Who's that?"
"Somebody's grandmother, probably. The way Lyle tells it, her field got hailed out one spring and she came up here and got her seed back so she could replant. Walt Kearney wrote that note. He ran this place for almost thirty years."
"Where's he now?"
"Eighty-eight, and twenty minutes from here," Noor said. "He's the man I keep not calling." She closed the old record. "It's his word. I'm keeping it."
"You could leave the line off," Dez said. "It's three grams."
"The shelf weighs itself. If three grams go missing and there's no note, that's a question somebody has to ask. If there's a note, it's just a note."
She pressed Enter. The screen told her the added note would sync to the regional office at 05:00 and could not be edited after that.
She carried the bag back into Cold Room B by headlamp, and the seal sucked shut behind her.
On the way out, Dario called down the hall from his island of light. "I wrote down that you were here."
Dez stopped. "Yeah?"
"I write down everything. It's the only reason they kept me." He held up a pencil. "I wrote 'visitor.' That's all I wrote."
Outside, the vehicle gate was dark, on battery like the rest of the place. Noor walked out ahead of the truck with her flashlight and held her badge to the post until it beeped.
"On battery it keeps the time and drops the badge," she said, and the gate began to roll.
Spokane. 5:00 a.m.
The fourth floor was at sixty-one degrees and dark except for the exit signs. At 05:00 the overnight sync from the Pullman station came in, as it did every night, and sorted itself into Vale's review queue by filing date. The newest item was one line added to a record dated October 21. It went to its place eleven days ahead of where he'd stopped reading, under a monitor with a yellow sticky note on its bottom edge.
Lapwai. 6:30 a.m.
Ruth had beaten him to the hoop house. She had four trays of fine potting mix wetted down and warming on the fourth bench, a frame of bent wire with clear plastic draped over it, and clothespins in her apron pocket. The heater was ticking. The council-night cutoff had ended at six and Ruth had switched it on at six exactly. She was not a woman who took one extra minute of anybody's power.
Dez unbuttoned his pocket.
He sowed it the way Cass had said: on the surface, a few seeds to a cell, a dusting of mix over the top, a mist from Ruth's spray bottle. The seed was so fine it clung to his fingertips and he had to tap it off against the edges of the cells. Cream and black. He used less than a gram. The rest went back in the vial, and the vial went back in his pocket.
Ruth opened her book on the end of the bench, a green, water-stained, column-ruled thing with twenty years of the garden in it, every tray and every packet.
"Source?" she said.
"Fern. Grande Ronde."
She wrote that. Then she kept writing. "Via Toppenish. Via Lapwai. Via Pullman. Via Lapwai."
"You don't have to put all that."
"It's my book." She underlined it. "Half."
"Half."
The door flap opened and Bertie came in gray in the face, still in her council jacket, the tablet hanging from one hand. She walked past the second bench and didn't take a lettuce leaf. Ruth looked up at that.
Dez unscrewed the cap on his thermos and held it out without saying anything. Bertie took it, drank, handed it back, and sat down on an upturned bucket.
"Gates are set," she said. "They changed the schedule. The river's low at Lower Granite and the crews want to be in the spillway while it stays low. We're meeting four nights next week. Maybe five."
Four or five nights with the heater off, the first week the seedlings would be up. Dez finished the cell he was working on and wiped his fingers on his jeans.
"Put it in the minutes," he said.
Bertie didn't move. "You know where the minutes go."
"I know."
"Yesterday you'd rather it froze."
Dez buttoned his shirt pocket back down over the vial. "They're going to read it either way," he said. "Might as well be warm when they do."
Bertie looked at Ruth. Ruth went back to her book. Bertie woke the tablet, got up off the bucket, and stood in the aisle between the lettuce and the kale, typing with one thumb.
"Garden power," she said, reading aloud as she went. "Hoop house heater stays on, council nights, ten to six."
"Say winter greens," Ruth said.
"I'm saying amaranth, Ruth. If it goes in, it goes in right. I'm not explaining to Spokane in March why my winter greens went to seed." She typed it and read it over once. The schedule went out at seven. She pressed send.
Ruth had set the heater timer the night before, the way Bertie told her: off at ten on council nights, Thursday blinking on its little screen. Dez crouched in front of it, found Thursday, and deleted the shutoff. Then he went down the rest of next week and deleted those too.
When he stood up, Ruth was looking at the first line in her book.
"That letter Cass sent," she said. "It tells her it's in Pullman."
"Yeah."
Ruth didn't say anything else.
Dez picked her handheld up off the flat of chard and turned the dial from nine to the net channel. The rain gauges were still going. Orofino, a trace. Cottonwood, nothing. The man out in Waha was reading his tenth of an inch to the hundredth, slowly, like he wanted it on his headstone. Dez waited for him to finish, then keyed the mic.
"Relay traffic for the Grande Ronde," he said. "For whoever's going up to Anthony Lakes before the pass closes."
- When seed banks regrow: International genebank standards say a stored collection should be grown out once its germination falls below 85 percent of its starting rate, and they warn that each grow-out can lose rare traits, as laid out in the FAO Genebank Standards.
- Amaranth under plastic tents: Marcie's card-table plan has a real precedent: USDA researchers grew about 100 amaranth plants per collection under clear plastic tents held with clothespins, described in Brenner and Widrlechner's greenhouse regeneration paper.
- Planting for future climates: The frozen tree seed at Pullman echoes a live experiment, since the Forest Service has now planted all 32 sites in its assisted-migration trial network, which tests seed matched to future climates without moving it so far that young trees suffer cold damage now.
- Food sovereignty in Lapwai: The Nez Perce Tribe's own account of its 2017 food-sovereignty summit in Lapwai describes a community garden, a food-distribution program, and a climate coordinator's line that "having enough food is a kind of freedom."
