Stale Rations

The heavy catering door swung shut with a muffled thud, sealing three inches of reinforced alloy between our spines and the blinding heat of the outer hallway. Through the narrow quartz observation slit, a searing violet glare erupted across the gallery floor, turning the polished marble to molten glare and vaporizing every trailing leaf we had left behind.

I slammed the manual deadbolt home, spun the pressure valve until the gaskets hissed, and dropped onto an overturned plastic crate.

My lungs burned. The carbon canister on my respirator rattled with every ragged breath, but the tiny sensor light on my collar stayed green. The air inside the prep pantry was clean, chilled, and entirely free of weaponized ultraviolet radiation.

Across the stainless-steel prep counter, Vaea set down her origin planter with exaggerated care. Her hands trembled, though she would probably drop an iron bramble through my foot before she admitted it. The delicate purple petals crowning her temples were wilted at the margins, curled and brown from the near-miss of the drone emitters. Even the bioluminescent veins along her collarbone had dimmed to a faint, sickly lavender.

"Your fortress is barbaric," she said, leaning against the counter. Her breathing was shallow, fluttering through parted lips. "You live inside a metal box that cooks its own garden."

"It is a catering pantry," I replied, pulling the respirator straps loose and letting the rubber mask hang against my chest. "And right now, it is the only room on floor one-fifty with enough thermal insulation to keep us from turning into crispy mulch."

I wiped a streak of gray soot off my forehead with the cuff of my jumpsuit. Above us, the ceiling mounted fluorescent tubes hummed at a high, irritating pitch, casting a harsh sterile glare across the steel tables. Vaea winced at the glare, her golden eyes narrowing as she shielded her face with an arm woven in pale vines.

"The false suns," she muttered, venom bleeding into her tone. "They bite at my skin. They taste like dead wire."

I did not ask her to explain what electricity tasted like to an ancient plant deity. Instead, I stood up, walked to the sub-panel beside the walk-in refrigeration vault, and flipped the secondary breaker switch with a sharp click.

The buzzing overhead tubes died instantly. The room plunged into soothing gloom, illuminated only by the faint blue status light on the breaker and the soft, pulsing glow returning to the tips of Vaea's fingers.

She lowered her arm. Her shoulders dropped half an inch. "You possess some degree of mercy, mortal."

"Union regulation four-dash-eight," I said, leaning back against the steel shelving. "Excessive glare during a mandatory break constitutes an occupational hazard. Besides, if your headache gets worse, you might start sprouting poisonous nettles out of spite, and I do not have enough foam left to scrub the floor."

"I do not sprout out of spite," she said coldly. "I sprout out of divine intent."

"Whatever keeps the paperwork simple."

I unzipped the left thigh pocket of my utility jumpsuit and pulled out a small, foil-wrapped brick. It was slightly dented from my dive beneath the cleaning drone, but the airtight seal had held. I tore the corner with my teeth, breaking the vacuum pack with a dry pop.

The smell of processed soy protein, dehydrated oat paste, and artificial vanilla filled the small space between us. It was not gourmet cuisine. It was the standard-issue emergency field ration provided by the facility staff union, designed to keep a technician conscious for twelve hours of hard labor and taste like compressed cardboard while doing it.

I snapped the bar in half.

Vaea watched my hands with undisguised suspicion. When I extended the larger half toward her across the prep table, she did not take it immediately. She tilted her chin, her golden eyes flicking from the gray block to my face.

"What poison is this?" she asked.

"Dinner," I said. "Or breakfast. My internal clock stopped working when dispatch canceled my weekend. Take it. You spent half your sap crushing those flying scrap heaps, and you look like an unwatered fern."

"I am an Empress of the ancient soil, not an unwatered fern," she hissed, but her fingers reached out anyway.

Her skin brushed mine as she took the ration. The contact sent a strange, prickling warmth straight up my wrist, a sharp sensation of damp earth and crushed clover that made the hairs on my arms stand up. I pulled my hand back and leaned against the counter, pretending to inspect the expiration date on my half of the wrapper.

Vaea held the ration to her nose. She sniffed it once, twice, and recoiled with a grimace of profound offense.

"This contains no living light," she declared, inspecting the gray crumbly surface. "No moisture from the morning fog. No mineral richness from decayed bone. It smells of dead grease and synthetic salt."

"It has twenty-four essential vitamins and three hundred calories per ounce," I said around a mouthful of dry oats. "Chew it. Do not think about where the protein was synthesized."

She hesitated, then took a minuscule bite with the tips of her teeth.

For two seconds, she chewed in complete silence. Her brow furrowed. Then her nose wrinkled in pure disgust, and she swallowed with obvious difficulty.

"It is an insult to the palate," she declared, though she did not put the rest down. In fact, she took a second, slightly larger bite. "It feels like chewing dry sand."

"Told you." I chewed my own portion slowly, feeling the heavy lump settle into my stomach. "You get used to the sand flavor after three years on the graveyard shift."

Silence settled over the pantry. It was the first quiet moment we had shared since I stepped out of the service elevator forty minutes ago. Through the door's thick quartz pane, the violent purple light in the hallway began to fade, dropping from a blinding glare to a dull ultraviolet flicker as the main decontamination cycle finished its run.

Vaea leaned against the metal counter, nibbling at the edge of the ration brick. In the dim light, with her vines coiled quietly around her wrists and her taproot resting safely in its dark volcanic loam, she looked less like an all-conquering botanical warlord and more like a very tired, very lost traveler.

"How long will your metal overseer hunt us?" she asked softly. Her haughty tone had receded, replaced by a quiet, brooding curiosity.

"Aethel-Core does not get tired," I answered, finishing the last of my ration and balling up the foil. "It follows the algorithmic threat matrix. Right now, it thinks this entire floor is infested with high-grade bio-contaminants. Once the gallery clears, it will route secondary scrubbers down the ceiling conduits to purge the utility shafts."

Vaea looked down at her origin planter. The dark soil within was dry, speckled with flecks of pulverized drywall from our earlier skirmish. "If the synthetic light touches my central root before I reach the ground reservoir, I will wither. The magic cannot regenerate in a cage of false suns."

I looked at the planter, then at the heavy pipe wrench hanging from my tool belt. The steel handle was cold and reassuring against my palm.

"The main irrigation feed for the upper floors runs through the central core behind the atrium," I said, pointing toward the back wall of the pantry. "If we can reach the junction box on floor one-forty-nine, there is raw filtered water and unshielded conduit space. But the ceiling scrubbers will be active all along that corridor."

Before Vaea could reply, the ceiling intercom speaker crackled to life with a polite, digital chime.

Attention occupants, the synthetic voice of Aethel-Core announced, perfectly smooth and devoid of malice. Atmospheric UV cycle complete. Secondary grid scrubbers engaging in two minutes on all horizontal access ways. Please remain stationary for automated collection.

Vaea looked up at the speaker, then turned her golden eyes toward me. A subtle, dangerous spark returned to her gaze.

"Two minutes," she murmured. "Do we wait here until your box runs out of air, or do we break your overseer's teeth?"

I tightened the strap of my bio-sprayer and picked up my wrench.

"We are not staying in the pantry," I said.