What Remains Here

Chapter 6

October 26

"I'm sorry," I said to Mira. "It's not like I didn't think you couldn't control your emotions or anything. It's just–"

"It's fine," she said. "I'm just wondering whether the story about the lights you saw on the hill–"

"That story's real," I replied. "I really saw it. I guess that's why I left out the part about the looters. It's just that I didn't want that to overshadow what I was telling you, about the hope that everyone was coming back together. I guess I just didn't want you to lose any hope–"

"I'm not like Dad," Mira said. "It's not like one bad incident is going to scare me off because I know that there are raiders out there, and I know that everyone out there's not as friendly as Caspian and his family. But it's that I know that there are more than enough good people out there."

"I was just worried that if I said that the looters were real, that they'd actually be real, not just some imaginary threat, you know."

"I know that you have good intentions, but you can't keep these things from us," Mira replied. "I know you want to maintain this facade that everything is alright, but I think that knowing the truth about what's happening around us is more important."

"I'm sorry," I said because I don't think there was anything else that I could add other than this reaffirmation of my apology.

"I'm not mad at you," Mira replied, her voice softer. "I just wish you weren't afraid to open up. It's alright to tell the truth, even if it could hurt someone's feelings."

Even though I had sorted out everything with Mira, things were still tense between everyone, as we cleaned the inside of the greenhouse and began lining the bottoms of the wall, where the tarp met the ground, with styrofoam boards to make sure that heat wouldn't escape. Same thing with where the roof tarping met with the top edge of the walls, where we lined it with foam pool tubes. To be honest, it was so tedious, but I think it was working. The greenhouse certainly felt a bit warm with all of us working in it, though it was still too cold to comfortably wear a t-shirt.

Still, by the end of the day, we had finished the structure and interior of the greenhouse, and even though it was much smaller than giant ones outside of nurseries, it was something. We could probably fit close to five hundred cans inside on the shelves, less if we need to space them out.

That seems like a lot, but it's just the bare minimum that we'd need in order to avoid starvation in the short-term. If we're looking at the long term, we're going to have to produce more food than we need just for sustenance. Thinking about it like this makes it just so overwhelming, and it feels kinda impossible. But I know that we have no other options. We just got to make sure everything works.

During dinner, Mom, who was still barely talking with Dad since she was still mad at him for blowing up her plans, said, "I have a plan with the net. But, Mira, it involves you taking a bit of a risk."

"Whatever to make it work," she replied.

"Because it seems like we're worried about the night watch finding the net but at the same time, don't want the raiders to find it, what I was thinking is that we alter the night watch path so that instead of tracing the edge of the tidal boundary, we could move it a block back. With this, we would solve both problems."

"It's going to be tough," Mira said. "I want this to work, but Dean might get suspicious. If he sees what we're doing, he's going to go to the Shepards, and if they know that I've been trying to hide something from them, it might ruin our good relationship with them."

"I don't have any other ideas," Mom said.

"We can just put it up. It's better to come clean than looking like we're holding a secret," Mira said. "I just don't want to put ourselves in a position that'll make it difficult to expand."