He stuck his head in each of the bedrooms, trying to determine a favourite. Each was the same as the last. He settled on the middle-left, and sat on the edge of the bed. The air filter whirred quietly. He could hear a faint rushing in the pipes below the floor, the odd click in the walls. But other than that, nothing. No drunk idiots out on the street, no skiffs zipping past at every hour, no delivery vehicles rumbling along. It was nice. It was odd. It would take getting used to.

His stomach growled. He reached into his bag and pulled out the bean cake he’d bought on his way. He was used to wrappers that crunched and rustled, but even the throw-cloth was silent. He took a bite. It was just a cheap sweet, but his taste buds bloomed with gratitude for something sugary. Take that, pickle bun.

Sawyer sat alone and ate his snack. Okay, so it wasn’t the first day he’d imagined, but hey, the sentiment held true. Everybody had a home, and nobody went hungry.

Kip

There was a delicate balance to getting the dishes done fast. Do it too quick, and a parent or a hexmate would make him do it over. Too slow, though, and . . . well, then you were still cleaning dishes. Nobody wanted to be in those shoes.

He picked up a plate from the eternal stack and scraped the food remnants into the compost bucket. Crumbs, flecks, whatever oil and sauce hadn’t been soaked up by quickbread. Kinda gross, but he supposed it could be worse. He remembered one time watching this crime-solving vid set on Titan – Murder on the Silver Sea – where some characters were at a fancy restaurant having this crazy smart conversation where the investigator and the informant both think the other one’s the killer and they were saying it but they’re not really saying it – and also they kind of wanted to bang each other? That scene had layers, seriously – and when the conversation was done, they just . . . left their food. Like, let the server come get it while they walked out of the place. The scene would’ve made sense if one of them wasn’t hungry or had a stomach ache or something, but if that were the case, then the other one would’ve reached over and eaten the leftovers. But no. Both of them left. They left half-plates of food on the table. It was the weirdest shit. He couldn’t imagine what cleaning dishes was like in a place like that. Dealing with half-eaten food sounded disgusting.

Scraps bucketed, he picked up the compressed air canister you could find in any kitchen and blasted away everything that wasn’t plate. He’d kind of liked that part when he was little. He remembered it being satisfying. But that had been about, oh, eleven billion dishes ago, and blasting away food bits had long since lost its charm. He looked over at Xia, who was helping him that night. She was seven, and hadn’t yet realised that getting to do grown-up things like dishes and pruning and floor cleaning was super boring. She stood attentively at his side, waiting for each plate he handed her, placing each one just so in the sanitiser. He had to admit, it was kind of cute.

He handed off the blasted dish to Xia, then picked up another dirty one, and scraped, and blasted, and handed off, and started again. Beyond the kitchen counter, everybody else from his hex was sitting in the same spots at the same tables, as they always did, having the same conversations they always had.

‘The new algae pumps everybody’s using, they’re no good,’ Grandma Ko said. ‘You can feel it on the ferry. Anytime we push past the slow zone, there’s this hum that starts up . . .’ Grandma Ko – Kip’s great-grandma, but that took too long to say – had been a freighter pilot back in the day and thought any tech that had been invented past, like, thirty standards ago was garbage.

‘I’m telling you, we’re going about the water budget all wrong,’ M Nguyen said, on a tear about some political thing like always. ‘If the other guilds got together and unanimously pushed for the growers to overhaul the farms, the growers would have to give in, and the council would have to fund it. But that’d mean the guilds doing something efficiently together, and we all know that’s not going to happen.’ Seriously, there was nothing more boring than politics.

‘Did you see that new planter they’ve set up over in 612?’ M Marino said. Kip took a wild guess that the next sentence would include the word imports or creds. ‘Imported seedlings, all of it.’ Bingo. ‘They’ve even got jorujola in there. It’s incredible – have you seen it? Those bio-luminescent leaves? But I don’t know where they get the creds—’ Double bingo.

‘I hear Sarah’s moved back in with the Zhangs,’ M Sousa said in an excited hush to Kip’s mom. ‘Now, it’s none of my business, but this isn’t exactly the first time she’s had things go south with a partner, and you have to wonder—’ Kip’s mom gave a nod that didn’t really confirm anything, and she threw in an ‘mmm’ here and there for good measure. Kip knew she didn’t care, and she didn’t even like M Sousa much, but she pretended to, because that’s how hexes worked.

‘That reminds me of the time me and Buster let a whole tank of hoppers out,’ laughed Kip’s dad, talking to the Mullers. ‘Have I told you this one before?’ Stars, Dad. Yes, everybody had heard this one before. Everybody had heard this story twelve thousand times.

Kip thought about Solan restaurants, where people talked about murder and sex and left dishes full of food for someone else to deal with. He thought about the university exams looming on the horizon. He thought about his score on the last practice exam. Ras had told him it was no worries, that he’d do better next time. But Kip knew what was what. He was going to fail, and he’d live here in the same hex forever, cleaning dishes and listening to his dad tell the same jokes over and over until one of them died.