A/N: Day 3 (Snow) of the 25 Days of Fic Challenge. The characters and setting of Wither are owned by Lauren DiStefano.
1
Bare feet tingle on snow as we run through the orange orchard. If I hoist myself up onto a branch, I could climb straight through the blossoms to the stars.
2
"Why can't a girl be a Housemaster?"
Too many people react to disaster by wanting to watch the world burn, that's why. They lock us up to keep us safe, and so there's nowhere safe that's not locked up.
3
Snowballs are just the size of oranges, but they land with a softer splat.
4
I bite an orange before he can swat it from my hand. The peel is tough and fibrous, but the interior spills juice down my jaw, turning my face and hands sticky.
"Not like that," he says. "People used to peel it and eat just the insides."
The insides are so bitter they pucker my mouth. I can't imagine why anyone bothered.
5
Oranges are sweet. The books in the library agree on this. People wanted to drink the juice so much that Florida and another place—California—were planted from end to end in orange orchards.
I trace the crannied outlines on the map with my finger, trying to make Florida match the glimpses of coastline I've seen. Maybe it all looks different when you're nearer the stars.
6
Snow sifts through the orange trees in a fall of icy petals. I reach for the snowflakes to weave them into a garland, but they dissolve on my fingers like tears.
7
"Oranges can't live in the frost. The books say so."
Of course these aren't oranges. The real oranges—the sweet oranges—are dead. First they were spliced with spinach genes to survive the bacteria Candidatus liberibacter asiaticus.
Nobody can tell me what liberibacter means. It sounds like liberator. The bacteria sets the oranges free. Only what it does is make sure that the oranges never turn orange. They wither on the branch, still green.
8
There wasn't snow here when they burned the old orange groves to stop the spread of the liberator.
9
The perfect new oranges—sweeter and seedless—proved especially vulnerable to the citrus tristeza virus. The little brown aphid that spreads it is tiny and everywhere. The only thing that stops the aphid is a bigger bug.
The first-gens tried to recreate the orange from healthier stock. Poncirus trifoliata isn't a real orange. It's tougher and hardier; it'll survive where oranges can't; it'll even cross with them. It's the perfect breeding stock for a new world, except that its bitterness can't be tamed or sweetened or bred out.
10
"Why can't I be a scientist?"
If we were useful as more than bodies, they'd have to mourn us as more than pets.
11
In the old books, people cried when a pet died, then they got another.
12
I bite the snowball before he can swat it from my hand. The cold burns my chin and makes my teeth ache. The taste is pure nothingness. The emptiness between the stars must taste like this.
"Not like that," he says. "People used to pour flavored syrup on it to make it sweet."
"I don't want that." I can tell by the warmth in his eyes that he isn't listening. His mind's on what he can give me and how much I must love him.
I bite deeper into the snowball, swallowing ice like rage and death and hope. Then I take off across the snow, barefoot, daring him to catch me.
A/N: Candidatus liberibacter asiaticus is a real bacteria that currently threatens Florida's orange crops, and the most likely solution is splicing with foreign genes, including spinach. Citrus tristeza is also a real citrus virus that is really spread by aphids. The connection between the virus and the bacteria, however, I frankly made up, probably to the dismay of the people working on citrus gene-splicing. Poncirus trifoliata is a cold-resistant but inedible citrus that's currently being crossed with other forms of orange to create hybrids that can survive as far north as Zone 5.