We didn't even bother taking the mechsuits back to Building 14, we just had Ava drive the rover back to Building 3, and walked into the War Room still wearing them. They were all very excited to see us still alive, and I think it may have made it all a bit more impressive that we walked in wearing mechsuits two and a half meters tall. Noah was looking pretty rough, with this line of frostbite diagonally across his face, and all the mechsuits were at least banged up, but we were all back, and even Noah managed to smile a bit when everyone gave this big cheer. We opened up the mechsuits and climbed down, leaving them standing against one wall, and they sort of loomed over the rest of the conversation that night. The sun was just setting as we got back, and there wasn't any food ready yet because of all that had happened. Charlotte led us in a singing recipe, while Olivia, Liam, and Noah watched. I thought about how our number of injuries was starting to add up, but hey, at least they were all still alive. It was another day where there wasn't much need for status reports in our Circle discussion, because we all knew what everyone had been doing. We did have to talk some, though, about what had just happened, and what it meant. When it came time to talk about what we actually found in Building 10, for some reason it was my job to do the talking. It was difficult to talk about. I had a cup of water in my hand, and I discovered something then. If you feel like you're about to cry, and you take a tiny, tiny sip of water, it helps to calm your throat. That allows you to take a not-quite-so-tiny, but still small, sip of water, which calms your throat some more. Repeat this a couple times, and you're able to talk fine again. I don't know if I really fooled anyone, but in any case it helped me to avoid setting off a big crying storm for the entire Circle. But it was hard to talk about seeing mom and dad lying dead there, and I think a lot of the other kids were imagining their own parents buried in the rubble back there. But I told the basics of what we had seen, and then spent more time talking about what happened after the quake hit and the building came down. After I got past that part, the others started to chime in again with what they had seen and heard, and the mood lifted again. Elijah was still negative about the geothermal, and maybe Charlotte too, but at this point we didn't really have much choice. The batteries we had would not last forever, and there was now no realistic prospect of being able to make new ones any time soon. This meant that we could still maybe keep making solar panels, which would help during the day, but could not be our only source of power; it was geothermal or nothing at night, eventually. None of us felt great about this, since by this point it seemed pretty clear that we had a quake problem, and it was starting to look like maybe the geothermal setup was at least part of why. After we had discussed our options, there was a point when things got pretty quiet. "Soup's on," said Charlotte, and her voice never sounded better. We piled around the biggest table and started wolfing it down. I was glad to see that Noah, despite how banged up he was, in his face especially, was able to slurp it down with enthusiasm. He caught me looking at him, and probably guessed what I was thinking. "So, Oliver," he said, "I got good news for you." "What's that?" I asked. "I just took a look at myself, and it looks like for the next few weeks, you might actually be better looking than me. But don't get used to it." If Noah says something silly and kind of obnoxious, that's a good sign. "Hey Oliver," said Lucas, "have you looked at that tablet your dad had?" "Not yet," I said, "I've been kinda busy." "Can I see it?" I almost said no, because I thought maybe he might do something wrong and break it. But I was tired, so I just pointed out to him the bin on the outside of the mechsuit where I had put it. He left his soup at the table and went to go look at it, and was still sitting next to my mechsuit looking at it when I got up from the table at the end of the meal. I was sleepy by then, and didn't bother trying to get it back from him. It didn't seem as important to me, at that moment, as it did later. It was my dad's, but as far as I knew or expected it just had things like reports to Earth, negotiations over what resources they would send next, that sort of thing. Important, I suppose, but not interesting. If I had been more awake and alert, of course, I might have thought of the fact that a lot of that was precisely what was most important to us now. But, I was neither very awake nor very alert, so I ignored it and went to sleep. We awoke early in the morning to the blaring sound of the solar flare alarm. It jolted us out of our sleep in an instant, so loud and harsh that it instantly sent adrenaline into our veins. This was one bit of safety training that we had paid attention to, I suppose because we had also done a drill once a year. I sat up, quickly threw off my sheet and slipped into my shoes, and got ready to head into the rover. Looking back, I saw that some of the kids were awake but not moving yet. Benjamin, Amelia, Ava, Henry, James. "Come on guys, we have to go quickly," I said. "Do we really?" asked Ava, who was grumpy first thing in the morning on a good day. "Why? There aren't any adults here to make us do it." "It's not a drill, Ava, it's a real solar flare," I said. "If we stay here we'll get too much radiation. Come on, let's get moving, we have to hurry." Ava gave me a look that suggested she was about to argue, but Emma spoke up. "Ava, can you help Olivia out of bed? She needs her crutches." Ava was quite willing to argue with me, but being asked to help Olivia was a different story, so with a moan she rolled out of her bedroll and started moving. Liam and Elijah helped to get the little ones moving, Sophie talked Amelia into hurrying up, and we all shuffled off to put on our suits and tumble into the rover. Noah and Liam and Olivia were all wounded now, so it fell to Ava to drive the rover. She and Noah had the most practice, when they were doing their covert runs to restart the geothermal power station. Liam was getting pretty good at reading the maps, and we made it to Building 12 in good time. Building 12, because it is where the servers are, was almost entirely underground; only the entrance was above ground. The most sensitive electronics in all the other buildings are set to shut down automatically within 5 minutes of when a solar flare alarm sounds (they don't shut down instantly so that we have time to get to Building 12's basement). But the servers cannot (or rather, we cannot afford to have them all shut down at the same time), so it is buried deeper underground than any other part of the Colony, with the hope that the soil and rock above it will block enough of the radiation to keep the servers from getting fried. All of the building materials, including the glass and polymer sandwiches that were used to make Building 3, give some protection from radiation, enough to allow for normal life. But when a solar flare happens, it won't be enough, and we have to go to the basement at the bottom of Building 12. We had actually done this a few times over the years, well all but the youngest had anyway. Of course, back then we had adults there to do things like figure out where Building 12 even was, which doors to go through, and how to open them. We had some trouble with all of that. Why hadn't we paid attention to where we were going? I had just kept playing games or watching videos on my tablet, back when the adults were there to lead the way. For about the hundredth time in as many days, I wished that I had paid attention, or that my parents had showed me more of how to do ordinary things in life. Once there, of course, we thought of all of the things that we should have brought with us. Like, say, bedrolls so that we could just go to sleep again. Then, there was a long debate as to whether or not we could go back and get what we had forgotten, but of course no one knew what the answer was since solar flares are not so predictable, so this discussion went on for a long time. Then, eventually, Noah looked up the readings from aboveground and it was already too late, things were pretty 'hot' up there, so there was no other option but to sit down on the cold concrete and wait. Or, in my case, sit next to Lucas and keep an eye on him, so he didn't break anything. Ava was there as well, and Mia. Three of us talked about what we would do when it was finally safe to leave, like eat or take a shower. I have to say, as a group, we were not maybe the best at remembering to shower. But then, from time to time, we would notice 'wow, I smell bad', and inevitably this would happen at some point like when you're inside a mechsuit in the rover, and it was not possible just then. Mia and Ava talked about what people had been doing back in Building 3 while we were on the trip to Building 10. Apparently it was pretty emotional and frenzied at times, especially when they could look over and see that Building 10 had collapsed with us inside it. "I think it's good that you and Noah were in Building 10 and not Building 3 then," said Mia. "Why's that?" asked Ava, but then Mia looked like she wished she hadn't said anything, and got very quiet. "Because if you'd been in Building 3 Elijah would have tried to kill you," said Lucas. "He was pretty mad. He didn't like the geothermal and he thought it was responsible for the quakes, and he thought everyone in Building 10 had just been killed. He was running around angry and crying and trying to figure out who to punch." Lucas, of course, said all this without looking up from my dad's tablet, as if what he was saying was not particularly important. I mean we had pretty much avoided any conflict beyond screaming up to that point, and I was hoping we could keep it that way. On the other hand, if I had thought someone had just gotten several of us killed, I guess I would be pretty mad. I looked over at Ava, trying not to be too obvious about it. "Well," said Ava, with a bit of a smirk, "I pretty much felt the same way at that moment. But now, I think we're in much better shape than if we had no geothermal, and also no way of making new batteries. Anyway I don't believe it really caused the quakes." "Oh, it probably did, though," said Lucas, not looking up from the tablet as he talked. Lucas is not much for eye contact, really. "Gerard said so." "Who?" asked both Ava and myself. "Gerard, the guy from Earth. He said that the geothermal energy frees a lot of frozen water from the regolith, that's the word for the soil near the top. So, the soil kind of settles, since all of the ice that was part of that soil is gone. Plus, sometimes there are underground veins of ice which start to melt when you are pulling up the hot water from further down. So it can cause settling and instability. Quakes." Ava looked somewhat stricken, as she realized that her and Noah's great achievement had maybe started the quakes, and Elijah might have been right. I, on the other hand, was focused on something else. "Who is Gerard, again?" I asked. "He's the guy on Earth who gets our messages," said Lucas. "I can leave questions in my home file, and he retrieves them and leaves an answer the next day. It automatically happens whenever you're contacting Earth, it pulls everyone's home file and sends them to Earth, and when you pull in Earth's response it copies the answers to the home files of anyone he wants it to. It's sort of piggybacking on your communications." There was a long moment of silence. "You've been talking to Earth?" I asked. "Well, Gerard anyway," said Lucas. "He seems to be the only one left on Earth, that talks to us, anyway." "Why is that?" asked Ava. "You didn't think to tell me about this before?" I asked, kind of stepping on Ava's question but I was pretty surprised and a bit upset. "Well I didn't think to ask him about it until yesterday, and I didn't get the answer until today," said Lucas, thinking I was asking why he hadn't told me about the risks of using geothermal energy. "No, I mean that you were talking to Earth!" I said, maybe kind of shouting now. I guess actually, yes, I was definitely shouting, because some of the others looked over at us. "How do you know his name is Gerard, anyway?!" "I asked. He knew my name, since I had been putting questions into my home file. He saw that mine was the only home file that was being changed, since the Electrocution. I think at first he thought I was the only one left, but I told him there were a bunch of us." I suddenly got very quiet, and even Lucas (who is not all that great at reading a room, you might have gathered by now) could tell that I was upset about something, or maybe afraid, or both. He looked up from my dad's tablet to look around; I guess he could tell I looked upset. "What?" he asked. "Lucas," asked Noah, who had not been part of this conversation before but had picked up by now what the general topic was, "did you happen to mention that there weren't any adults left?" Lucas looked thoughtful for a moment, as if trying to remember, then shrugged. "Not specifically, but since he knows which ones are left because I told him all our names, he can work that out for himself, I guess."