The next day after Noah and Ava's announcement, it seemed like things had taken a turn for the better.  We had, for the first time in months, since well before the Evacuation, all the power and water we needed.  This was partly because we had fewer people and we had sealed the leak, but the geothermal station just kept producing electricity and water.  We talked about whether or not we should even be bothering with making flexible seam fillers using the 3D printers.

"We should do it," said Elijah.  "The way it's sealed right now won't hold.  Seal it with fire.  I mean, not literally, just fix it in a way that it stays fixed."

"It is kind of dangerous to be up there installing a better seal, even if we manage to make them," said Noah.  "There's other stuff we could be doing, and if this leaks a little bit of air and water, it doesn't matter so much, you know?"

Elijah grimaced, and looked mad.  He still didn't like the idea of using the geothermal station.

"It was kind of dangerous up there," I said, "and we can't afford to have Liam break his legs, or worse."

"But we know how to make sure it's safe now," said Elijah.  "It's not as dangerous now that we have done it, and know what to watch out for.  Whereas the geothermal..."

"We've got that working now, too," said Noah.

"So far," said Elijah.  "But I don't like it, and it could break soon.  We shouldn't just leave a leak in that dome when we know how to fix it.  Anyway, we want to be able to grow plants in that dome, and if there's a leak we can't do that, not if it gets very big."

It went back and forth a few times, until we kind of knew we had talked it out, and we started looking over at Liam and Olivia (who was still not standing any but was looking a lot better otherwise).  It was like we knew that we had said everything we could say in this argument, but we couldn't actually stop until the referees blew the whistle and declared a winner.  I think maybe Elijah and Noah didn't even particularly care by the end, they were tired of talking about it.  I realized that Liam and Olivia were uncertain, and that's why they were letting it go on so long.  Finally, Liam spoke up.

"Why don't we just do it," he said, "and then we won't have to think about it any more.  Oliver, can you print some flexible seals so that we can try them out?"

I had been the one going through the instructional videos that Charlotte's parents had made, and had found ones on using the 3D printers in Building 21.  Mia and I had been trying them out; there were different ones for plastic, metal, stone, or a kind of rubbery material that was what we were going to use for this.  Mia would have the video paused on her tablet, and show it to me when I wanted it.  I think she was starting to get pretty good at using the printers herself, actually.  It helped that what we were wanting to make, was essentially just a straight line, wide enough to fill the gap when we squeezed it in.  Each segment was as long as the side of one of the glass triangles that the geodesic domes were made of.  The seams that were already there were metal, and supposed to keep everything in place.  However, the domes were also anchored to the ground, and the stress had caused the metal frames to start to come apart in a few places, all along the center line of the affected dome.  It would have been nicer to be able to put metal over the gaps that were appearing, but we didn't know how to do that, and anyway as Lucas had pointed out that might have just transferred the stress to somewhere else.  Putting a flexible seal into the gaps seemed like the best way to make a lasting fix.

By now we had learned to try making just a single one first, then take it over to Building 3 and test it out in one of the lower down sections which were easier to reach.  We had to do this a few times to find the right way to make the seal, but once we had it figured out Mia and I printed out a few dozen more.

"We should ask Earth how we make the stuff that this printer uses for inputs," said Mia.  She was getting to be good at making a list of things to ask Earth.  I was hoping that they wouldn't say it was something we had to get from Earth.  I was becoming pretty certain that nothing but information would be arriving from Earth for a long time.

I made the first dozen or so, then let Mia do it.  She had to stand on a box to reach the controls and see what she was doing, but otherwise she was just as good at it as I had been, because most of the steps are automated so there's only a few commands you need to give.  Her big eyes in her tiny little face, so serious while she was working, made me smile a little.  Except, of course, that the reason a small child being serious is funny, is that they normally aren't really supposed to have to do anything that serious, so if they're acting deadly serious about piling up blocks into a little house it's funny.  In this case, she was in fact making something that we needed in order to keep the very air we breathed from rushing out into the Outside, so it wasn't really all that amusing.  Or, it shouldn't have been; I had to suppress a grin anyway.  Little Mia acts so serious sometimes, I have a hard time not laughing, but I try not to because I don't want her to think I'm laughing at her.  Although, I suppose I kind of am, but not in a mean way.

Once we had all of them made, we carried them back to Building 3 and showed them to Liam.  He seemed satisfied, so we gathered everybody together again and got ready to have Liam climb up onto the shelving stepped pyramid (which we had never disassembled because we know we would need it again pretty soon).  The older kids were all nearby, ready to act if we saw something sway or otherwise look unstable.  Not that we really knew what we could do, but maybe something.  Olivia couldn't stand yet, of course, so she was just sitting with a good view, ready to shout if she saw anything amiss.  Charlotte was watching the little ones in the War Room, which despite its nickname had become the place where we put the youngest kids when we couldn't have them accompany us on what we were doing just then.  It was the Peace Room, really, while we were off somewhere else at war with the Monster.

All told, it seemed like we had learned a lot about how to avoid trouble.  We had a plan, we talked it over beforehand so everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing and why and how, we had discussions about what to do if something went wrong, we tested out our plan on a small scale before trying the big project.  I was beginning to feel like we knew, more or less, what we were doing.

Liam climbed up the stepped pyramid of shelving units with his armful of seams, slowly pulling the temporary seal away as he went, using the handle of a trowel to help him push the new seal into the gap that had appeared.  It looked, from below where I was standing, as if the gap had gotten slightly larger, large enough to see from below.  He fumbled about awkwardly at first, but after not very long he became adept at it, and made rapid progress.  We all felt nervous when he was at the very top of the dome; every one of us was imagining him tumbling down from that height as Olivia had.  Elijah was breathing fast, and I think was maybe about ready to cry.  Olivia looked ashen, and I started to wonder if she had stopped breathing entirely.

But then, he continued on, and soon he was coming down the other side, sealing up the last few triangle seams that seemed to be leaking.  When he pulled down the last of the temporary plastic-sheeting-and-rubber-cement seal, and finished pushing the seam we had printed into its place, he turned and looked down at the rest of us, and held up his arms above his head and gave a little grin.  We would have probably all started cheering and shouting, except Olivia immediately shouted at him to come down before he broke his legs.  Liam smiled, nodded, and leaned down to pick up the bits and pieces of the materials and tools he had been using, when the ground started to move.

If we had been a bit luckier, Liam would have been down on solid ground when the quake hit.  On the other hand, if we had been unluckier, he could have been at the pinnacle, much higher up, and the fall would have been much worse.  As it was, he lost his balance and came tumbling down from about twice his own height, and landed in a way that disabled his right hand for a while.  For a moment I thought the entire stepped pyramid of shelving units was going to tip over and come crashing down on half of us.  Fortunately, they are pretty wide, and although they shifted a bit they didn't fall over.

Once the ground stopped moving, we all rushed over to see if Liam was badly hurt.  Well, all of us except Olivia, who was still chairbound.  I'm sure she wanted to check on Liam, but because she couldn't, she was the first to see the next danger, and she gave a loud cry.  At first I thought maybe the stepped pyramid of shelving units was going to collapse, but it was actually pretty stable now that we had learned how to put it together properly; the shelves are very wide, so they have a broad base which makes them less likely to tip over.  Then, I thought maybe the roof above us was getting ready to collapse on us, but to my surprise not even the seams were ripped open.  It turns out that geodesic domes are pretty good at quake resistance, and the seals that Liam had just put in were compressible, so if the gap changed size at all they apparently expanded to fill it.  So, instead of continuing to look around wildly in all directions to see what the problem was, I looked over at Olivia, to see what she was upset about.

She was, in fact, pointing off to the side.  Building 3 is mostly transparent, in order to give sunlight to the plants, so you can see a few of the other buildings from where we were.  Those other buildings, are not geodesic domes, they are more like boxes.  Olivia pointed towards one off in the distance, which had until very recently been rectangular in shape.  Now, it was more like a box that had been torn in two, with a pile of rubble in the middle.  The ends were still standing, but the ground in the middle had shifted, and it had brought that part of the building collapsing down.  We all got suddenly quiet, even Liam with his hurt hand.  The building which had just cracked open and crumbled in the middle, was Building 10.

The building that had most of our dead parents inside it.