Shine Read Free Page B

saw my face. The squad leader nodded his respect.
    Papa might have been in the Administrators' offices or he might have been in bed. Both huts were inland, but home was closer. I glanced across the water at the Whale and picked up my pace, drawing a dozen confused gazes in my wake as I jogged toward our house on the hill.
    The door was locked. I groped for my keys, shoved the door open, and stumbled inside, where a dozen rattling fans twisted around to cool me. The lights were off, and the doors between each partition were open. In the study, Papa's favorite dishes lay dirty on his desk, and a yellowed novel sat half-open on his seat. I was certain now that he wasn't home, but I called out his name nonetheless: an impropriety that would have earned me a lecture in the best of times.
    There was no response.
    I hissed a curse and made to leave, then stopped short. The smart-fans squeaked, surprised by my sudden stillness. On my eyelid, the prompt flashed: Link to device "XiXi" for data transfer? The same prompt I'd gotten every day for the past week. I wasn't sure where Papa had hidden Xiaohao's wi-mo, but that didn't matter, did it? I was in range. I agreed to link, and Xiao's unit asked me for a password.
    "Garden," I said. The world changed.
    I had only fleeting memories of my grandfather's garden, but those scraps were vivid. Sunflowers like bright, tremendous trees, the space beneath their canopy a secret yellow sanctuary. I squatted in the soil with my worn, creaky kitty until Xiao, a few years older, fell onto me in a spray of dirt and battle cries. He whipped the stalks of the great golden flowers with some uprooted weed, sent me wailing out of the garden to the farm proper. I got lost in endless rows of sorghum, and when I found Papa at last, he nearly beat me for running out of sight.
    Now I stood in the garden again. Sunflowers towered over my head, five or six meters tall, brighter than ever, brighter even than the flowers of memory. Birds chirped somewhere just out of sight. Up the hill, between the stalks, I could see my grandfather's house, intact and even renovated.
    Yunhe. The real Yunhe, back from the dead.
    This can't be fake , I thought. Sims always left me with this jarring sense of absolute credulity. The wi-mo fed me my home through the roof of my mouth, and I couldn't help but believe it. This can't be fake , I thought, though I knew that it was. I can smell the dirt.
    I made my way out of the canopy of monster flowers and gasped. "Oh, Xiao," I murmured, and struggled to remind myself that nothing here was real or meaningful, that my home was still buried beneath the black flood. Grandfather's house was beautiful, and larger than it had ever been in real life: a multi-wing, three-story complex with something like an observation deck on the roof. I followed a stone path--flanked by more traditionally proportioned blue roses--from the garden to the house. The front door was unlocked, and I stepped inside.
    It wasn't the home I remembered. Somehow it was more than home, the idea of grandfather's place writ large. There was space for dozens in the dining room, seats arrayed around three beautiful wooden tables. On the ground floor alone there were two kitchens, a full bar, and a game room. Xiao had connected a library to grandfather's study; Papa's favorite painting of the War Above held a position of honor over the reading couch. The house's additional stories were given over to bedrooms, enough to sleep our entire extended family and several more families besides.
    It's a dormitory , I realized. Grandfather's house transformed into a dormitory. Was this how citizens of Ecclesia lived? Like wealthy college students?
    I took the elevator-- the elevator-- to the roof. Lawn chairs encircled a small herb garden, and at each edge of the roof, telescopes gazed off into the distance. The day was preternaturally clear: no smog, no fog, and not a single cloud in the sky. I could make out individual trees on the blue