So, we had known for a while that there were leaks, and we were losing water and air slowly.  At first, after the Evacuation, it didn't seem to matter as much as some of the other things because we had reduced the number of people so much, and the leaks were pretty slow, so it seemed like it would be a long time before it became a big problem.  There were a lot of things that were going wrong at once, and anything that could wait, got put off.  Then, between the Electrocution, when most of us lost our parents, and the trip to Building 29 when we realized even Charlotte's parents were gone, we were kind of in shock at how much was going wrong all at once.  If Charlotte's parents had been monitoring the rate of the air and water leaks, I didn't know about it, but I think they were trying to figure everything out themselves without worrying us, and they were just overwhelmed, so probably that didn't even register too much because there were so many other problems that seemed more urgent.

Once we knew we had to figure things out ourselves, though, we got around to looking at the meters for Building 3, where we were staying most of the time, and it was clear that things were going slowly down.  Building 3 is, by far, the largest of the buildings, and it's actually sort of a series of geodesic domes that are attached to each other, in a long row.  All but the one at the end (where the War Room is) are mostly transparent, so that the plants will grow.  So, it requires the most air and water, and therefore has the biggest reserve tanks (pretty much every building has its own reserve tanks for air and water, as backup in case of problems with the primary air and water lines).  But all those triangular sections in the geodesic domes mean there's a lot of seams, and that means there are a lot of places where it could leak out water or air.  Which means in turn that if you have to find where the leaks are, it could be just about anywhere.

I think, as a few of the items started to get marked off the list in the War Room, Olivia might have been under a lot of pressure to show some kind of progress.  Not pressure from us, but just pressure she put on herself.  It takes a while to tell, because her normal facial expression is hard to read, and she is a lot less prone to complaining out loud than Ava or Elijah or, well really almost any of us.  But, after a while, I started to notice her squirming a bit sometimes during the evenings after singing recipes and before eating, when we all talked about what and how we were doing.  She was always very positive in what she said about other people and how they were doing, but whenever something happened like Noah and William and Amelia and Henry successfully delivered the first batch of "new soil" from Building 2, or Liam's first crop of seeds started to appear as tiny green seedlings, or Emma told us she had figured out how to get the readout (from her mom's workstation) of what other buildings still had power, I noticed Olivia would kind of squirm a bit in her seat like she was restless.

I asked Emma to show me how her mom's workstation worked, and she did, and then I stupidly started bringing the measurements every day of how much air and water we had left in the Colony.  It took me a long time to realize why it was that Emma was trying to stop me from doing that.  I had asked her if she could, and she kept claiming every day that she had forgotten, so I started doing it myself, thinking that I was being helpful.  Then Emma seemed to be getting upset and saying I didn't need to do that, and I thought she was feeling awkward about having forgotten.  What I didn't realize, but Emma did, was that every time I read out how much the air and water reserves had gone down, Olivia felt more and more upset at herself for not having found the leaks yet.

In my own defense, I just want to say that I was clueless, not mean (is that a defense? anyway, it's the truth).  I wanted us all to know that we needed to be conserving air and water, and not wasting it, and I thought reading the levels out loud every day would help to keep us all focused on that.  I guess I had this idea that Olivia was beyond caring what I or anyone else thought of her, since she was older, taller than everyone except Liam, and seemed to always be calm in every situation.  In fact, I don't think anyone other than Emma was able to see that Olivia was more or less writhing in agony whenever I told everyone that our air and water reserves had gone down again in the last 24 hours.

Especially as it became apparent that the leaks were still slow, but getting less slow over time.  Whatever the problem was, it was getting worse.

At first, Olivia's method was just to go carefully inspect every triangle of every dome, hoping to be able to see some sign of a crack or hole.  Sometimes she would use an intense flashlight to see if it would reflect off of any damage in the translucent panels, which were a sandwich of multiple layers of glass and plastic.  After a few days, she realized this wasn't working, and started trying to put soapy water on each one, in the hopes that it would leak through and make bubbles on the outside wherever there was a leak.  When that didn't work, she got a temperature sensor that was meant for use in the sewage treatment facility in Building 2, and went Outside at night to see if she could detect warm spots where Inside air was leaking out.  She found a couple spots she thought might have had a small leak, and used the transparent patch film which was made for sealing up any leaks.  I'm not sure if there were actually leaks there that she fixed, but they were too small to really be the main source of the problem, or if she had been wrong about there being a leak in those spots in the first place.  Regardless, the air and water kept dropping, and she hadn't yet found a good way to discover where they were leaking out.

Then one day, for the first time, we saw Olivia and Liam have an argument.  I think they had both been trying to keep calm and not let anyone else see that they were stressed, because they were the two oldest and felt like they needed to look in control in order to reassure us.  But there was some kind of conversation about the plants, and Liam thought that they were having problems because it got too cold in Building 3 at night, and was wondering if it could be a clue as to where the leak was.  Olivia, on the other hand, was worried that we were using too much water, and was trying to convince Liam to dial back the irrigation some.  In theory all of the water that got used in irrigation, would get recondensed and reused, but since some of it was presumably leaking out with the air, she was thinking that maybe it was the same leak that was losing both air and water.  She wanted Liam to reduce the irrigation until she got the air leak fixed.

"Well how much longer is that going to be?!" he asked, raising his voice for the first time.

"I DON'T KNOW!" shouted Olivia.

Neither Liam nor Olivia are the kind to raise their voices very often, so when they did, it sort of paralyzed everyone in earshot.  When I think back on that moment, I see everyone except Liam and Olivia absolutely frozen like a statue, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.  I'm probably remembering it even more severe than it was, but for sure we were all shocked, and also scared.

Except for Lucas, apparently.  As Olivia and Liam started to yell back and forth at each other, both of them visibly upset, voices rising, eyes starting to fill with tears, Lucas walked up to Liam, apparently oblivious or unconcerned about what he was interrupting, and tapped Liam on the side of his leg to get his attention.  I'm not sure what Lucas was wanting to talk to him about, but it was probably something totally unrelated to what was going on just then.  Lucas is, shall we say, not great at reading a room.

"WHAT?!" shouted Liam, turning violently to look at who was disturbing him, and in the process accidentally (or at least, not entirely intentionally) shoving Lucas backwards away from him.  Lucas stumbled back, and fell into an open tub of fine ash powder that was sitting in the middle of the dome floor.  Liam had been adding it to the soil; I don't really know what it was for, but it did something helpful for the plants, I suppose.  Lucas nearly disappeared into the tub; when he came out, he was covered in a layer of silvery-gray ash powder.  Olivia and Liam immediately stopped shouting at each other and moved towards Lucas, Liam uttering the beginnings of an apology.  Lucas was having none of it, and threw a handful of the powder at Liam in retribution.

Or at least, he tried to.  He missed, for the most part, and hit Olivia full in the face instead.  Olivia howled in protest, and Lucas grabbed more to throw at Liam, and then Olivia grabbed some to throw at Lucas, and then some more to throw at Liam as well.  Little Harper, who had been playing on the floor nearby, misunderstood what was happening, and came running up to join in the "fun", grabbing fistfuls of the ash powder in her tiny hands and trying to throw it at everyone else, although for the most part she just got it on herself.  Well, she got it pretty much everywhere, including on Ava, who was coming up behind to try to get Lucas out of trouble.

From that point on, it was kind of a free-for-all.  I think everyone was petrified at the thought of Olivia and Liam having a huge falling-out, and immediately piled in to the idea of distracting them from that somehow by having a food fight, except with ash powder instead of food.  Once a few people started laughing, everyone was, and it was pretty much nervous and fake laughter at first but after not too long it was more like real laughter.  Poor Sophia and Amelia walked in unsuspecting to the middle of it, and got entirely powdered, from head to toe.  Sophia and Amelia actually look a lot alike, to me, both tan and thin and big blue eyes and dark brown kinky hair.  Sophia has a big nose and a small mouth, and Amelia has a small nose and a big mouth, which causes me to silently remember them as "Sophia smallmouth and Amelia amouthfull", which is not perhaps polite but it does help me remember which one is which.  Since we all basically dress alike, in the standard grey jumpsuits that everyone in the Colony wears, and they hang out together a lot, it can sometimes be hard to tell them apart.  Well they looked even more alike after getting covered with powdery handfuls of ash from all sides.  Though, to be honest, the rest of us didn't look too different by that point.

At some point Olivia, who had been joining in and laughing, maybe in relief at doing this instead of arguing with Liam, stepped away from the fracas and found some way to wipe the powder off her face, where it had been starting to get in her eyes.  When she looked up, her big eyes got even bigger than they normally are, and her mouth hung open for a moment until the taste of ash in the air made her close it.  Because, since it was a fine powder, the air was filled with ash, and it was starting to spread everywhere inside the dome.  It was late in the day, and the sun was low on the horizon, and the sunbeams came slicing across the air inside the domes of Building 3 and reflecting off of all that powdery ash.  It was kind of pretty, really, and at first I thought that was what Olivia was gawking at, that it was a pretty scene.  But, she was interested in something else.

Because, with the sunbeams of dusk reflecting off of all the fine powder that was in the air everywhere, you could see where the air was going.  In particular, you could see a place, near the top, where the powder that got too close to it was getting sucked up.  It was subtle, but it was a lot less subtle with a sunset through a cloud of ash powder, and Liam and Noah and Ava and I realized what she was doing, and we all looked up.  And then, we all stopped laughing.

The good news is, that we had found the leak.  Now that we knew where it was, we could fix it, and better yet we had a method that we could re-use if we really had to, next time there was a leak we needed to find.  The bad news is that it wasn't just one seam that was leaking.  It was a whole line of them.  In fact, it went all the way across the dome, from one side to the other.  Now if it had just been scattered seams here and there that were starting to leak, that would just mean a lot of work to seal them up, but now that we had a method to find them we could do the work.

But it didn't take too long looking at the pattern to see that it wasn't just random seals between the triangular sections that were starting to fail.  It was a very clear and obvious pattern, more or less in a line across the entire dome.  Which meant that the ground beneath the dome was starting to shift, and the foundation of the building was cracking.  Building 3, the place were we spent the most time and the place where all our crops were grown, was being very slowly torn apart.