Leta had confided in a nervous whisper, “Different is why I’ll fail Appraisal.” If she could fail and be rejected simply because her mind worked differently, the whole system was broken.

The aerator’s oscillating unit was defaced with Caiden’s labels and drawings where he’d transformed the bulbous foreign script into imagery or figures. Recent, neatly printed labels stood out beside his younger marks. He hesitated at a pasted-up photo he’d nicked from the Stricture: a foreign landscape with straight trees and intertwined branches. White rocks punctured bluish sand, with pools of water clearer than the ocean he’d once seen. It was beautiful—the place his parents would be retired to when he replaced them. Part of the way things had always been.

“Yes, stop everything.” His mother was speaking to his father, and her voice echoed from below, muffled and rounded by the tube. She never visited during work. “Stop, they said. No more repairs.”

His father responded, unintelligible through layers of metal.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “The overseers ordered everyone to gather at the Flat Docks. Caiden!”

He wriggled out of the port. His mother stood below with her arms crossed, swaying nervous as a willow. She was never nervous.

“Down here, hon.” She squinted up at him. “And don’t—Caiden!”

He slid halfway down the aerator’s side and grabbed a seam to catch his fall. The edge under his fingers was shiny from years of the same maneuver. Dangling, smiling, he swung to perch on the front ledge, then frowned at his mother’s flinty expression. Her eyes weren’t on him anymore. Her lips moved in a whisper of quick, whipping words that meant trouble.

Caiden jumped the last couple meters to the ground.

“We have to go.” She gripped a handful of his jacket and laid her other hand gently on his shoulder, marshaling him forward with these two conflicting holds. His father followed, wiping soot and worry from his brow.

“Are they sending help?” Caiden squirmed free. His mother tangled her fingers in his as they crossed a causeway between green pastures to a small door in the compound’s side. “New animals?”

“Have to neutralize the disease first,” his father said.

“A vaccine?” His mother squeezed his hand.

Outside the compound, field vehicles lay abandoned, others jammed around one of the Flat Docks a kilometer away. Crowds streamed to it from other compounds along the road grid, looking like fuel lines in an engine diagram. Movement at farther Docks suggested the order had reached everywhere.