Eyas stopped spreading compost and turned her head. A man was there – younger than her, but not a kid, either. She looked him in the eye, thrown by his question. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘Do you need a hand?’ he asked again in an accent she couldn’t place. It was rough and bright and thick as pudding. He gestured to her cart. ‘Looks like you have a lot to get through. I can’t say I’ve ever really gardened, but I’m sure I could chuck dirt around.’

Eyas slowly brushed off her gloves and stood up. ‘I’m—’ She tried to straighten out her baffled brain. ‘You know this is compost, right?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

They stared at each other. ‘You know what compost is, right?’

‘Sure.’ His face suggested he was starting to doubt that.

‘Are you a trader, or—?’

The man laughed. ‘No. The accent gave me away, huh?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. That, and other things. She knelt back down to the compost she’d been distributing, waiting for him to leave.

He did not. ‘Do you sell it?’

‘Do I what?’

‘Do you sell this stuff? Or is it just something you make at home?’

Eyas lidded her canister, walked to the edge of the planter, and looked seriously at the man. ‘These are Human remains,’ she said in a low voice. ‘We compost our dead.’

The man was mortified. ‘Oh. Wow, I’m . . . jeez, I’m sorry.’ He looked at the cart full of canisters. ‘These are all . . . people? Like, individual people, or . . . oh man, are they all mixed together?’

‘If you have questions, I’m sure someone at the Centre would be happy to give you a tour.’

‘The Centre. That’s where you . . .’ He gestured vaguely to the canisters.

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s . . . your job.’

‘Yes.’ She threw a pointed glance back at the plants. ‘Which I am not doing.’

The man held up his palms. ‘Right. Sorry. Really sorry.’ He turned to leave.

Eyas turned back to the plant and began to crouch down. For reasons unknown, she turned back. ‘Where are you from?’

The man stopped. ‘Mushtullo.’

‘And you’re not a trader.’

‘No.’

She squinted. ‘Do you have family here?’

‘Heh, everybody asks that. No, I’m just trying something new.’

Oh, stars, he was one of those. She’d heard others complaining about said same, but never encountered it herself. Young grounders had made a thing of showing up on the Fleet’s doorstep hoping to find kin or connection or some other such fluff, succeeding at little except treating everyone’s home like a zoo before learning there wasn’t any romance in it and heading back to cushier lives where every problem could be answered with creds.

Except here was this one, standing there with his hands in his pockets and an irritatingly eager smile. She should have let him walk away, but . . . he’d asked to help. He’d offered to help.

‘Do you have work?’ she asked.

‘Not yet,’ the man said. ‘I went to the job office and everything, but they said the only openings they had were for sanitation. And not to be picky, but—’

‘But you were picky.’

The man gave a guilty shrug. ‘I’m just hoping something else will open up. I’m good with code, I’m good with customers, I could—’

Eyas removed her gloves, folded them over her belt, and sat at the edge of the planter, bare hands folded between her legs. ‘Do you understand why they tried to give you a sanitation job?’

‘They said—’

‘I know what they said. There were other openings, I promise you.’ Lots of them, she knew. ‘That’s not the point. Do you understand why they tried to give you that job?’

The last traces of his easy grin evaporated. ‘Oh.’

Eyas sighed and ran her hand through her hair. He thought this was a matter of bigotry. ‘No, you still don’t get it. They tried to give you a sanitation job because everybody has to do sanitation. Everybody. Me, merchants, teachers, doctors, council members, the admiral – every healthy Exodan fourteen and over gets their ID put in a computer, and that computer randomly pulls names for temporary, mandatory, no-getting-out-of-it work crews to sort recycling and wash greasy throw-cloths and unclog the sewage lines. All the awful jobs nobody wants to do. That way, nothing is out of sight or out of mind. Nothing is left to lesser people, because there’s no such thing. So you, coming in here at – how old are you?’

‘Twenty-four.’

‘Right. You’ve got ten years of potential sanitation shifts to make up for. You’re here eating the food we grow, sleeping inside a home somebody worked hard to maintain, drinking water that is carefully, carefully managed. The people at the job office knew that. They wanted to see if you were actually willing to live like us. If you were more than just a tourist. They wanted to know if you were serious.’

The man straightened up. ‘I’m serious.’

‘Well, then, go muck out a sewer like the rest of us have to. Do that, and they might let you put some code to use.’ Eyas was sure they would. There was need for that kind of skillset, no question. It just needed to be in the hands of someone with the right principles.