Beginnings

The Inventive Patissiere knows that baking is the most important thing. It's not that everyone should be baking. She has the sense that there are other tasks people do which she doesn't find interesting but probably need to be done, like fighting the other side on Skaia. But if there wasn't any baking -

Baking is the most important thing. Someone has to bake, so when the Inventive Patissiere walks downstairs to her shop she does it with all the reverence and attention her heart can hold.

She has always been a baker. She knows every recipe, not simply the list of instructions, which she can recite more easily than she can speak, but what it's like to make them, the heaviness of pouring flour and the way dough gives against the softer carapace of her palms.

When the Inventive Patissiere opens the cabinet above the pristine counter, she sees rows and rows of flour lined up neatly, each full and sealed. She takes the first one down. She fills the shiny measuring cup and pours it into the equally shiny bowl. They're both made of soft metal, the sort that seem to pick up nicks and scratches just by being held, but both are perfectly smooth.

Hours pass. She sets out all the things she's made in the storefront, and other citizens with other jobs come to buy them. Their conversations are simple. They ask what she has, and she tells them what, and how much. Then they pick one and hand her the money, and she hands them the pastry, and they leave. She isn't sure what else she could say to them, and apparently they feel the same. The money goes into the the chest by the wall. She drops the coins in, hearing the thump thump of them hitting the wooden bottom. As time passes the sound becomes clink-thump sometimes, then most of the time, and finally just clink as metal hits metal.

By the time she closes she's sold most of the day's baking. There are no nights on Derse and no one closes at the same time, any more than they sleep at the same time. A steady flow of people is always moving through the purple streets, and she joins them now.

She can't see Skaia, but she can see the Veil and, if she squints, small things that must be transports taking off from the larger asteroids. It's impossible to make out the color at the distance, just movement, but she hopes they're purple. Winning the war is important.

The Inventive Patissiere can picture the transports in her mind. Their shape isn't that complex. She wonders if she could make cakes in their shape.

Days pass. The Inventive Patissiere's equipment picks up scratches. She's running low on blue coloring and she gets a request form from the drawer in the corner. She colors most things purple, but she's found blue can be used by itself as well. So far she's only used it as a frosting highlight, but she wants to try layering cake colors in stripes, purple and blue, in the same way their uniforms alternate black and white, and that will take more blue. She fills out her designation smoothly but pauses for thought when she reaches the item section. She adds in a request for two bottles of yellow.

Someone dies.

The Inventive Patissiere takes this in stride. Every time she looks at the Veil she sees ships heading inward toward where Skaia must be, and although she holds a patriotic surety that Black is superior to White in all ways and are winning, still, with every breath she knows people have died, and some of them had the same dark carapaces as her. The body looks like bodies look like, limbs at odd angles and oozing red where it cracked in a way that reminds her of a broken yolk.

What bothers her is the replacement. The replacement calls herself the Skilled Filer, one of the many cogs in the glorious bureaucracy of Derse. The Inventive Patissiere likes the bureaucracy a great deal. It's theirs, for one thing, and so must be the best way of doing things, and she has no complaints with the steady stream of deliveries for each requisition form. She's started talking to the bureaucrats who come into her shop, just short exchanges about their jobs, which she's realizing are, though not as important as baking, are more important than most things, because without them she and the rest of the bakers would run out of ingredients.