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as I stood in the corridor, the real pain just starting to creep intomy hand, I realised that for the first time, I wanted to get back in.
    It didn’t last. My mom begged them to let me come back, and after a while they did, but I just couldn’t concentrate. Prakesh was friendly, and we started spending more time together, but it wasn’t enough. When my mom died, a fewdays after my fourteenth birthday, I told Prakesh I was finished. Not surprisingly, the school didn’tcome looking for me.
    I didn’t see him for a long time. It’s funny the way this place works. We’re packed in so tight, a million people in this little steel ring that was only designed to hold half that, but you can go years without seeing someone. And then, a few months ago, a woman asked me to deliver a package to her son in Gardens. I almost didn’t recognise Prakesh at first, but he rememberedwho I was. He was just a food tech then, another guy in a white lab coat. But he showed me around, gave me some water and some fresh, crisp beans to eat, told me about his work. I realised how much I’d missed him.
    Prakesh comes back, bearing a thick plastic flask. He mutters something under his breath when he sees me sitting against the tree, but doesn’t protest. Instead, he drops to one kneeand hands me the bottle, and I raise it to my lips, drinking deeply. The water is deliciously cold, so cold it almost stings, and before I know it I’ve drained the bottle.
    “You’re not done yet,” he says, digging some baby tomatoes out of the pocket of his lab coat. As he passes them to me, our hands touch, the warm skin of his fingers brushing mine.
    I eat two tomatoes before I stop suddenly,another halfway to my mouth. “This isn’t the genetic stuff, is it?”
    “Genetic stuff. I love how your mind works sometimes, Riley,” he says, and takes a bite himself. “No, this is good old natural veggie. We won’t have results on the genetic stuff for another year at least. But once we do—”
    “You’ll be able to grow millions of plants in a nanosecond and feed the entire station in a day and useyour science skills to give me biological rocket boosters so I can fly away. I know, you’ve told me before.”
    He scratches the back of his head. “Well, we did have a breakthrough yesterday. We actually got an entire soybean plantto sprout in twenty-four hours. Of course, it would have killed anyone who ate it, but it’s a long way from the kids’ stuff they were doing before. And gene work isn’tthe whole picture – the plants need the right minerals to grow. It’s been months since we had an asteroid catcher bring back a haul, and the stuff we got from Mars and the moon isn’t doing the job.”
    “Forget the minerals, then. Start doing the genetics on human beings. We don’t need minerals to function.” I hold up the last tomato, then pop it into my mouth. “Just give us the odd tomato to eat,and we’re good to go.”
    “Yes, because hominid genetic modification worked out
so
well last time. Or don’t you remember school history?”
    “I think I missed that class.”
    He looks down, then back up at me, his eyes clouded.
    “What?” I say. And then, annoyed: “What?”
    “What really happened, Ry? On the run?
    “What do you mean?”
    “So you managed to fight off an entire crew by yourself? In an ambush?Bullshit, Ry. You got your ass kicked, and now you’re lying to me about it.”
    “I’m not.”
    He raises his eyebrows. Usually, I laugh at him when he does this – it makes him look like someone’s just told him a rude joke – but this time, I can see the frustration in his face. His one hand is digging in the soil, and the dark grains are squishing out from between his fingers. I don’t even think herealises he’s doing it.
    “Why do you always do this?” he says. His voice is quiet, but there’s no mistaking the anger. I always forget how quickly his mood can change. He may have stopped me from smashing the tab screen, back