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When you come back, I’ll go out in her with you.”
    Great.
    â€œDon’t you want to know what all you have now? What’s yours?”
    Nona shook her head. “Not yet. First I want to go see a fucking sky.”
    This time her swear word got a reaction. Maybe entertainment moguls didn’t curse.

CHAPTER THREE
    CHRYSTAL
    The bold beat of drums filled the observation bubble above Testing Meadow Three on the station High Sweet Home. Chrystal Peterson struggled to keep the tempo. As usual, Katherine, Jason, and Yi tolerated her periodic mistakes. The drums had been her idea even if they were Jason’s handiwork, and yet she struggled more than the others to maintain cadence.
    Incense, baking bread, and cooking spices mingled in the warm air. Sweat ran down between Chrystal’s shoulder blades and dripped off her chin. Jason’s dark purple hair bounced as he moved. He raised his hand higher than usual and brought his hide drumstick down hard on the wide, painted drumhead. The others followed a half-beat behind him, even Chrystal. Three more beats, hard and slow and all together, and they stopped, faces flushed.
    Jason gave Chrystal a beseeching look and nodded toward the kitchen.
    She smiled. “Shall we eat?” Her cooking skills far exceeded her ability to keep a steady beat on the big drum. She ladled stew into deep bowls and poured fresh water for everyone while Yi sliced bread and piled it on a plate.
    They ate together, the testing meadow spinning ever so slowly around them, meadow above and below and to each side as if they hung suspended in a can with a garden planted on the inside of the walls. The meadow itself was a beautiful swath of delicate grasses in shade after shade of pastel: sweetgrass and tall grass and yellow grass and moss grass and more. Here and there copses of trees stood amid faux rocks. Thin surface streams broke up the grass next to the trees, yet even these seemed like accessories for the grass.
    They fell into companionable silence as they ate.
    â€œPerfect dinner,” Jason told her, leaning in to plant a vegetable-stew-flavored kiss on her lips. He started clearing the table. She stood up and Jason took her plate from her. “You and Yi can leave us to clean up.”
    Yi had been her sous chef for dinner, cutting up the root vegetables and crushing spices. A tall thin man with a dark mop of hair, Yi was all angles and bones with intense black eyes. He had always lived in the far stations like this one, and he was the oldest partner by at least ten years. She went to sit beside him, watching the meadow for jalinerines. They spotted a small herd above them. The grazers moved together in a group, nuzzling each other from time to time. “I really can’t believe they earned approval on the first pass.”
    Yi, who never doubted anything, put an arm around her and pulled her close. “Of course they did. We did.”
    The new animals had progressed through approval in two years less time than they had expected. The grazing herd produced milk with perfect protein balance and none of the allergens that made dairy hard on some humans. In addition, they thrived across a wide range of gravity changes and created a very useful fertilizer as long as their diet included grasses the four had modified.
    In spite of their success, Chrystal worried. “They came out exactly to spec, but will that be enough?” Katherine had led a clever marketing effort, but there were a lot of designer animals the last few years. “Will they stick?” she asked Yi. “Really?”
    â€œWe have good numbers.”
    They’d taken over three thousand orders for jalinerines and grass seed—enough to take three or four years to fill. They’d labored over design, creation, birthing, and testing. They were almost ready to turn the day-to-day work over to a manager they’d handpicked to run the distribution company.
    â€œI like them” she