So after realizing what we were seeing, we decided to start sealing up the connections to that part of Building 3. Although it's sort of one building, it's also sort of several buildings, each of them geodesic domes, stuck together in a line. Wherever two domes connected, there was still a doorway which could be sealed up, although normally the doors were left open all the time. The dome at one end was where "new soil" was made, and the dome at the other end was where the War Room was. The leak was in the dome third from the "new soil" end, so we closed the doors on both sides of it, which split Building 3 into three sections. We were all kind of worried that night, even during the singing recipe; at least the older kids were, wondering what this meant for the future. The first question was, is it going to keep getting worse? Is it going to just split apart completely? How do we seal up the leak? Then, we talked about whether we should even try to fix the leak, or just assume that dome third from the end was a lost cause. I think eventually we decided to try to fix it, just because it felt like a bad precedent if we gave up on it. Like that meant that eventually every dome would go. It was sort of like the Monster shouldn't be allowed to enter Building 3, it may have taken Building 10 and Building 29 and some of the others but at least we should keep it out of where we grew our food and sleep at night. Whenever there were debates like this, it would end up with several groups. One, was the very youngest, who would either wander off or just sit and watch without saying anything, because either they didn't understand what we were talking about or they didn't know what to say or maybe they just didn't care. The second, was people like myself or Noah or Ava or Elijah, who would argue about what should be done or not done. Some of the other older kids like Charlotte would usually not take part, but that was probably just as well because somebody needed to watch the little ones, while the rest of the older kids were distracted. Then there were Olivia and Liam, the third group, who would usually stay pretty quiet until the end, when they would just sort of announce what we were going to do. Up until that point they would only occasionally ask a question or make a point, but they didn't usually take sides until near the very end. Which I guess was because, once they did take a side, that was the end. I don't know how Olivia and Liam kept from arguing with each other, but somehow they did, and maybe it helped because neither of them were very talkative normally, so they didn't get pulled into the argument early on like Noah or I or Ava or Elijah. Oh, and then there was Lucas. He was always sort of his own unique type. He would speak up, a lot, usually something that had nothing to do with what we were talking about, but then every once in a while he would make a good point. Which was kind of annoying when it happened, because just when you had decided you could safely ignore anything Lucas said because it would be totally off-topic, he would come in with something important that nobody else had thought of yet. Like in this case, when after interrupting our discussion by talking about what we were going to have for dinner, when we were going to go check out the server farm in Building 12, whether or not ash powder was actually good for the soil we were growing the crops in, and how the geodesic domes should have been made (which was kind of relevant but not something we could do anything about now), he pointed out that if we patched up the leak with something rigid that kept the dome from splitting apart there, it might split somewhere else instead, and that might be worse. So, we should try patching it with something flexible, so that we could add more later if it started leaking again but it wouldn't just transfer the stress to somewhere else. We all stared at Lucas for a few seconds, quietly annoyed, and also thinking something like, 'that's a good point'. "What do we have that's flexible but would still seal up the leak?" asked Olivia. "The 3D printers in Building 21 could probably make us something," said Noah, "but we'd have to figure out how they work. Which would be a good idea anyway." "Too much time," said Ava. "We need to do something today." "It's been leaking for a long time," began Noah. "No, she's right," I said, "the leak has been speeding up. We need a stopgap at least. We can 'seal it with fire' later." "Maybe just plastic sheeting over the seam, and rubber cement to hold it in place, until we get something better," said Ava. "It doesn't sound all that durable," said Elijah. "We don't want to have to do this every week." "It would buy us some time to figure out how the 3D printers work, though," said Noah, "and then we could make a seal to exactly the right shape and size. If it lasts a week or two that should be fine." "How are we going to even get up there to do this?" asked Elijah. "I think I know how, but first we need to empty this dome so we have room to work," said Liam, and he looked over at Olivia. They had some sort of nonverbal code that seemed to be one of them asking, "are we done debating yet?", and then the other one would either ask another question or announce what we were doing. "Ok then," said Olivia, "let's get everyone together and we'll move the plants out of this dome. Noah, Ava, Oliver, can you go get the rest of the kids in here? Liam, maybe you can figure out where it will all go?" So we spent the whole day, all of us, moving all of the plants out of that dome, trying to find ways to make room for them in the other domes. Basically any equipment or anything else that wasn't actually a plant in the other domes, got moved out of them and into the leaking dome, switching places with a bunch of the plants that we were moving out. That way, if the seam that was starting to leak did break open completely, at least the wouldn't be any plants in that dome to get killed by the cold (so long as the doors sealed off the dome on each side). But it made it a lot harder to move around in any of the other domes, which meant it would be harder to get to the plants to harvest, or do anything else that needed doing. It was a bit of a task to get everyone coordinated as to how to move everything, but once we did, the number of people involved made it move pretty fast. Too fast, maybe, since Benjamin tripped and fell when he and Isabella were trying to get past each other, and Benjamin dropped the plant he was carrying. It spilled all over, and then he and Isabella got freaked out as they realized that they had probably just killed a living thing, since we had put the plant back in soil but it was just a seedling and pretty clearly the damage from being dropped meant it was unlikely to recover. Seedlings that small aren't very rugged yet. Then Lucas had to point out to them that they kill plants all the time, because we eat them, and this led to a whole big deal and Elijah got mad at Lucas for making Benjamin and Isabella cry and then Noah came to Lucas' defense and it sort of derailed us for a while. But eventually, we got the plants in that dome all moved out, swapped for various equipment. Liam's plan was for us to go in the rover to Building 20, and load up a bunch of the shelving there. Most of it is made to be easy to take apart and put back together, because that would happen several times a year depending on how much needed to be stored, and how much room we needed for all-colony gatherings. So, we decided that the half-dozen largest of us (Olivia, Liam, Noah, Emma, Ava and I) would go, and the younger ones would stay in Building 2 and finish up the last of moving the plants. I noticed that Charlotte was kind of freaking out a bit, and didn't like the plan but wasn't sure what to say against it, until I realized that it all seemed a bit too much like the Electrocution to her. Her parents had been left with all the kids while they went off to another building, and they never returned, leaving her parents as the only adults. Now we were leaving her and Elijah with all the younger kids while we went off to another building. She couldn't exactly figure out what to say against it, though, to stop us. "Hey, Charlotte," I said, and handed her a tablet with the communication app brought up on it. "Check it out. I figured out how to let you listen in on the spacesuit channel, so you can hear what we're saying while we're gone." My hope was that hearing us talking would keep her from imagining some horrible fate for us while we were gone, like it would reassure her to hear us talking stil. She looked down at it, and then up at me, and her big blue eyes looked a little watery. She just took it and nodded and tried to smile. "Yeah, I tried to rig it so that you would be able to hear all of us EXCEPT for Noah," I continued, "but I couldn't figure out how to silence his channel, so I'm afraid you'll just have to take the rough with the smooth, there." I made sure to say this last part loud enough that Noah could hear it. "You're not the first one to fail at silencing my channel, Romeo," he answered back, and I felt a little bit warm and slightly annoyed that Noah had thrown the "Romeo" part in there, but I guess I had asked for it so I just put on my suit like the other five and we got into the rover and headed over to Building 20. Liam was pretty good at navigating this time, and Olivia knew to check that everything was as expected, with air outside the rover, before she opened the doors at the end of the trip. It is always reassuring to notice that you're at least not repeating the same mistakes. When we entered Building 20, it was a little weird to find that it was all still powered up, with air, and otherwise not a complete mess, even though no one had been in it since before the Electrocution, which seemed like a long time ago now. Before loading up enough of the shelving units (to be able to make a pyramid to climb on to reach the top of the domes in Building 3), we took a look around to see what there was still available. The adults had moved the most important stuff for immediate use to Building 3 shortly after the Evacuation, but we hadn't been here, and they hadn't said too much to us about what was left behind. There were a lot of spare parts that were good to know about, maybe, if we had known what they were, but not really useful right then. There were some boxes of things like clothes and blankets and light strips and cooking utensils and hangers and so on, stuff that you would maybe need when new people arrive and move into one of the new apartments in Building 29, if that weren't a complete disaster zone and there were ever new people showing up again. We looked around for a while, and Noah took some pictures of everything to help us remember. But there was a lot that needed doing, and so we soon started carrying some of the disassembled shelving units back to the rover. What we should have done, of course, was to assemble one of the units right there, in Building 20, so that we would know if we had found all of the parts. That would have been a much better idea than what we did, which was to just put the parts we thought we needed into the rover, take them back to Building 3 and unload them, try to assemble them there and discover that there was a part which we needed where the shelves attached to the vertical supports, in order to keep them from just falling down. Because we had done such a great job of waiting until we were all the way back at Building 3 to discover that we needed those, we decided to celebrate by shouting angrily at each other for a while, trying to figure out who to blame for this, or what to do besides what we had to do. Which, in the end, was to all get back into the rover again, drive back to Building 20, and find the missing parts. Then, having learned our lesson, we assembled one of the shelving units right there in Building 20, so that there was no chance we'd have to do this all again. No way did we repeat the exact same mistake by taking just the part we thought we needed back to Building 3, only to discover that it was not the right kind of part and it would not fit these particular shelving units because there were two kinds and the parts we had gotten were for the wrong kind of shelves. Good thing, too, because if we had repeated that mistake and had to drive back to Building 20 a third time, we would probably have been sullen and tired and miserable. It sure wouldn't have helped when we got back from Building 20 to discover that we had missed the singing recipe that night, and they had food for us but we had missed the only fun part of the day. "I'm going to have to admit that the Monster might have gotten the better of us, this round," said Noah, once we were sitting down and eating our garlic and carrot soup, which was better tasting than I had expected from the name. "We'll get the better of it tomorrow," I said, trying to sound confident. I was, of course, pretty much entirely incorrect about that. So, we started the day reasonably early, finishing assembling a kind of two-dimensional pyramid of shelving units. By climbing on it, you could go from the floor up to near the peak of the dome. Olivia (who still seemed to feel like she needed to be the one to seal the leak because her name was originally put by that task on the to-do list in the War Room) was the one who actually climbed up there with rubber cement and some flexible plastic sheeting, and started gluing it to the seams where we had seen the air leaking. She had a bit of the ash powder with her, so that she could blow a puff of it into the air and shine a flashlight at it, to see if she had the right seams, but apparently once you were up there it was usually pretty easy to tell because that close up it was visible even without the powder. One thing we have learned since this time, is that whether or not you should be paying close attention to something, has no correlation with whether or not it is exciting to look at. We should have been all paying close attention to the structure we had made out of shelving units, and we should have assigned different people tasks as to which part to pay attention to. But after the first minute or two, watching Olivia gradually glue the plastic sheeting over the seam was not interesting enough, and most of us stopped paying attention. Noah and I started talking, Ava wandered off into another dome to get Lucas out of an argument, and Liam started paying attention to the plants that had just been moved out of this dome into the adjacent ones, seeing if they were getting enough water and light in their new positions. Fortunately, Elijah was there, and he kept watching Olivia. Unfortunately, he had only one pair of eyes, so when he could have been seeing that one of the bottom supports might not have been put together correctly, and was about to come apart, he was instead looking up at Olivia. He did, at least, see that the top of the tower (where Olivia was) was starting to sway, and gave a shout. Then he grabbed the only soft thing near to him, which was a big tub of ash powder, and shoved it forwards toward the spot where it looked like Olivia was going to fall. Amazingly, he was mostly correct, and as the tower of shelving units toppled one way, Olivia toppled and fell the other way, her head and torso landed in a large bin of soft powder. Unfortunately, it wasn't big enough to catch all of her, and her legs came down on the edge of the bin, hard. She broke bones in both legs. The sound of the tower of shelving units collapsing heavily onto the machinery which had been piled around it was extremely loud. Olivia screaming in pain was, nonetheless, heard clearly by everyone, including those who were in other domes, who all came running. So then next hour was filled with a lot of shouting and crying and running around, plus a (very) few people doing actually helpful things. Noah almost immediately started looking up on his tablet what to do for a broken leg. Liam and Elijah found something to use for splints for Olivia's broken legs. Ava held Olivia's hand as she screamed and cried at first, and then kept holding it as Olivia then tried to keep a stiff upper lip and put on a show of it not being too bad. Emma quickly appeared to hold Olivia's other hand, and looked so stricken and afraid that I think Olivia felt like she had to hold it together somewhat just to make Emma feel better. But anyone who had the stomach to look at Olivia's legs, could see that it was not ok at all. Lucas came up in the middle of this and pointed out that it looked like Olivia's leg bones had not been set properly, so we would need to take hold of both halves of each bone and make sure it was set end to end. Then he tried to step up and start doing that, and Elijah revealed that his parents had given him a very large vocabulary for emotional situations. We did realize that Lucas was correct, even if there was no way we were going to let him touch Olivia's legs, so we found a way to carry her, and Noah led us through a maintenance tunnel to Building 6, so that we didn't have to try to suit her up with broken legs in order to get into the rover. The maintenance tunnels were cold and the air was a bit thin, but it wasn't like Outside and Noah knew how to go from Building 3 to Building 6 pretty well. My contribution was mostly to act very upset and cry a lot. But I did open some of the doors for Elijah and Liam, who were carrying Olivia. Building 6 was one we had been to recently, when Elijah and Benjamin were checking its water reserve tanks. It was also the building where Elijah's parents worked, so he had been there a lot in the past. We found better splints, and also figured out how to turn on the scanner to look at Olivia's legs. Yeah, the bones weren't aligned. The screen, I later found out, was combining infrared, soundwaves, visual light, and a small amount of X-ray into one image, using a lot of image processing to combine them all into one view. Apparently Elijah had occasionally played with it when his parents were not looking, but it surprised even him when it flashed 'BROKEN FIBULA AND TIBIA', and then provided instructions on how and where to get the bones aligned, and then how to splint them. What it did not do, however, was provide a way to do this without causing Olivia to writhe in pain, so she had to prevent moving her legs by just grinding her teeth and breathing really fast and hard and closing her eyes and gushing tears while she tried not to move and then, thanks goodness, passing out from the pain. She came to in a few minutes, with her legs set and splinted and a circle of several faces looking down at her and cheering and crying and laughing in relief that she wasn't dead. Which was, I like to think, encouraging to see as you wake up? All of this happened with a lot more shouting at each other, blaming each other, freaking out, and generally not staying cool, than I have made it sound like here. Liam was the only one who kept even mostly together, aside from Lucas who had tagged along because Ava was too busy holding Olivia's hand to stop him. I managed to keep him from trying to rummage through the medical tools, but he kept looking at them through the glass door of the case they were in, and then looking over at Olivia as if trying to decide which one he was going to use on her. I also kept Elijah from coming over to threaten violence at Lucas if he tried to touch Olivia in any way. We carried Olivia back to Building 3, and set her up in a comfortable spot in the War Room. Charlotte wasn't going to do a singing recipe that night, until we asked Olivia if she needed anything, and she said she wanted to hear Charlotte and the rest of us singing. So, we sang and chopped and clapped and stomped our way through a recipe for vegetable soup, and then it was time to sit down in a circle and discuss what we had accomplished that day. It was, uh, not great. We had accomplished almost nothing, and Olivia had two broken legs. Everyone was edgy and nervous and depressed, and there was a lot of arguing about what to do next. Actually, that's not quite true. Most of the arguing was about what had already happened, which was even worse because there wasn't even any possibility of changing that. Elijah and I were thinking that the whole idea of trying to patch the leak was not worth the risk of trying to get up there to do it, especially since we didn't even know for a fact that it would even work, and we might be risking somebody's life for nothing. Liam was defensive about his idea of using the shelving units to climb up that high, and Noah and Ava were trying to defend the idea of trying again. In the end, two things made us decide to try again the next day. The first, was that the numbers showed that air and water were still leaking out, even with the doors to that dome closed. Now one possibility was that there were other leaks, and that meant patching this dome wasn't going to help. More likely, though, was that the doors which separated the domes weren't a good enough seal, so if we didn't patch that dome we would have to abandon Building 3 entirely, and that meant we wouldn't be able to grow enough food because none of the other buildings had anywhere near enough glass to grow crops in. The second thing, was that near the end, Olivia actually spoke up to say that we should try again the next day. "I think I'm going to have to ask Liam to do it for me, though," she said, her voice maybe quavering a little more than usual because she was still weak and in pain. Liam and Olivia looked at each other, and I knew there was now no question, he was going to try to finish the job tomorrow, come Hell or high water. Although given how cold and dry it was on Mars, neither Hell nor high water was likely anyway. So, the next day, we reassembled the shelving units, having two of us inspect every part of it, and as each level was finished Liam got on top of it and jumped up and down. I didn't like the idea, but he said if it was going to fall under him he wanted it to happen when he was ready for it, and could jump to safety. I did manage to convince him to stop doing that once it got tall enough that jumping to safety was not necessarily possible. "We should have some kind of giant pillow or air mattress he could land on," said Lucas, looking up at Liam as he tried to finish the job Olivia had started. "Great idea, Lucas, if you happen to have one of those in your pockets let us know," said Elijah, not taking his eyes off of Liam. The rest of us were stationed around the base of the pyramid, watching that everything was stable and ready to act if anything seemed to wobble or slip. After about an hour, it was done. Or at least, we hoped it was. We left the shelving units as they were, in case we wanted to try again the next day. Plus, we still hoped that in a few weeks we could maybe make a better, more durable seal using the 3D printers in Building 21. That evening, after the singing recipe, when we gathered in a circle, there still wasn't too much to say that everybody didn't already know, since it had all happened in Building 3 where we could all see it happening. But the next day, I managed to slip away to Building 24 to look at Emma's mom's workstation, which had the readings for water, power, and air in all the buildings, so I had some news for them that evening. Building 3 air and water, had not dropped that day, for the first day in months. We had sealed it, we had chopped off one head of the hydra. When I announced it, everybody cheered, even Olivia, sitting with her legs propped up in front of her and looking bruised and battered still. Elijah and Noah stood up and held their arms up high and let out long, loud screams of victory, and then I joined them and pretty soon almost everyone stood up and made some noise. Olivia couldn't, of course, and Liam was too quiet by nature, but almost everyone else did. It was the first time we had fixed something that was broken already before the Electrocution, the first time we had proven that things could not just stop getting worse, they could actually get better. It wasn't just good news because it meant the leak was fixed, it was good news because it meant we could fix things, and that meant we maybe had a future. "I wonder why it started leaking in the first place," said Lucas, after everyone had quieted down again. "I wonder if the ground underneath the building is shifting?" He looked around, his chubby little face expressionless, while the smiles on everyone else's faces faded away, to be replaced by worried looks. "Goddamnit, Lucas," said Ava, quietly.