Page 22 of Seeds of Christmas
I’m sweating under three layers and my pack feels like it’s full of concrete.
“You good?” she calls back, not even winded.
“Great!” I lie, adjusting the straps digging into my shoulders.
She raises an eyebrow but doesn’t comment.
When we finally reach the site—a clearing with what looks like a metal box and some wires poking out of the snow—Rhi transforms. She’s all business, unpacking equipment with the kind of precision that makes me feel like I should probably shut up and stay out of her way.
But I’ve never been good at staying out of the way.
“So,” I say, crouching next to her. “What’s the verdict? Is the ground angry? Should we be worried?”
She blinks at me. “What?”
“You know. Geothermal activity. Angry ground. Lava demons.”
“There are no lava demons in this mountain range. Or in any.”
“That’s exactly what someone hiding lava demons would say.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. Almost a smile. Then she hands me a data logger. “Here. Make yourself useful.”
I take it, turning it over in my hands like I have any idea what I’m looking at. “Right. Data logger. Very important. Does a lot of... logging.”
“It records temperature readings from the thermocouples.” She’s already on her third sensor, moving with the kind of efficiency that comes from muscle memory. “You need to connect it to the junction box, but first you have to make sure the connection points are clean, or the readings drift.”
“Clean junction. Got it.” I fumble with the cables, trying to figure out which end goes where.
She glances over. “Wait?—”
I freeze.
She sets down her equipment and comes over, patient but clearly trying not to sigh. “Here. Like this.” She takes the cable from my hands, demonstrates the connection. Her fingers are steady, confident. “Red to positive, black to ground. If you reverse them, you can fry the sensor.”
“And that would be bad.”
“That would be three thousand dollars bad.” She hands the cable back to me. “These sensors are expensive, and I wrote the grant proposal that paid for them, so please don’t electrocute them.”
“Jesus. Okay. No pressure.”
I reconnect the cable—correctly this time—and she nods. “Good.”
I reach for the pH meter at the same time she does. Our hands collide, and she’s already pulling back, letting me take it—that automatic deference I’ve seen her do a dozen times.
“Wait,” I say. “Which reading did you need?”
“The 7.2 calibration, but you can?—”
I hand it to her. “You’re faster.”
She blinks, takes it, and I watch her hands move through the calibration sequence. No hesitation. No checking the manual. She’s done this so many times her fingers know the pattern.
I try to copy her movements with the next sensor. Drop the connector. Swear.
She catches it before it hits the snow—doesn’t even look up from her own work, just shoots a hand out at exactly the right moment.
“So what got you into this? The whole geothermal monitoring thing?”
