Cass was not the only one who was tired of winter. In fact, the social committee’s first idea had been a cabin-fever dance, until someone suggested the more upbeat Valentine’s Day theme. There was romance to be found in New Eden, for some-different than Before, of course. Some kinds of human attraction thrived in an atmosphere of strife and danger. Others waned. Cass couldn’t be bothered to care.

It wasn’t the first time she’d ignored the social committee’s call for volunteers, though it wasn’t like she was swamped with work. The pruning was done. She’d sprayed the citrus with dormant oil she’d hand-pressed from kaysev beans, and she covered the thorny branches whenever nighttime temperatures dipped. A second round of lettuces and cabbages and parsnips were planted. Beyond weeding and the eternal blueleaf patrol, there would be little else to do until warmer weather launched the growing season into full swing. So Cass would have had plenty of time to join the other women in turning the public building into a party room, fashioning decorations from bits gathered from all around the islands. She’d declined to help as they set aside ingredients for special dishes and tested out cocktails made with kaysev alcohol, its gingery taste overpowering anything else they tried to mix it with. The committee had even talked the raiding parties into bringing home scrap wood for the past two weeks, enough for a bonfire to burn until the wee hours.

Cass watched them as she walked home across the narrow bamboo bridge from Garden Island, stretching her tired limbs and working the kinks out of her neck, sore from the backbreaking work of checking the kaysev for blueleaf every afternoon. The sun was still high enough to offer some warmth, so they’d thrown open the skylights and French doors to let it in on their party. Once, the building had been the weekend getaway of some tech baron with lowbrow taste, a man who preferred booze cruises and wakeboarding to wine tasting in Napa.