Juno Dax's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Juno reached the ration post with the beetle still clinging to her tin. The old stone stood ash-stained and cracked, its two spigots dry. She set the shoots on the shelf and stared at the crystal creature. Every hour it fed. Two of her six stems were gray now, stiff with frost that spread from where the beetle touched. She had her water. She would have nothing to pour it on. "Stop eating them," she told the beetle. Her voice cracked. The frost was killing her plants. But the frost was also the only thing she had ever seen survive out here without shelter. The beetle carried cold in its body. Her shoots died in cold. If she could learn how the beetle's frost worked, she might breed a crop that lived through it. She needed to study the beetle without losing more stems. A girl dropped from the roof of the post. Wiry, goggles pushed up, a salvage tool over her shoulder. Juno had seen her before, stripping the harvester past the dunes. Gael Ashby stayed clear of most people, and most people stayed clear of her. "That's a hive beetle," Gael said. She didn't come closer. "They nest in sealed cold. Touch a plant, it dies. You need to cage it, not carry it." "I can't lose more shoots," Juno said. "But I can't let it go either. It's the only cold thing alive out here." Gael looked at the gray stems, then at the beetle. "Cage it in something colder than a plant. It'll leave the leaf and go to the cold." She unslung her tool and pried a dented metal box off the post's lower wall. Frost still ringed its seam. "Ration coolant chamber. Dead, but the walls hold cold." Juno pulled on her patched gloves. She pressed her palm to the box. It bit like ice through the layered leather. She held her breath, gripped the beetle's crystal shell, and lifted. It clung to the third stem. The leaf snapped off gray in her hand. Then the beetle felt the box's cold and let go. It crawled inside on its own. Gael slammed the lid. Four stems left. Two dead in Juno's palm. But now the beetle sat sealed in the box, and Juno could open a slit and watch it feed on frost, safe from her plants. "Why keep it?" Gael asked. "Because it lives in cold that would kill everything I grow." Juno turned the box in her gloved hands. Through the slit, crystals bloomed and melted along the beetle's legs. "If I can find how it does that, I can put the trait in a seed." Gael studied her a moment. "Then you'll need power to keep that box cold. It won't hold long dead." She nodded once and climbed back up the wall. Juno looked at the box. The frost inside was already thinning.