So many years later, and it feels like nothing has changed.
As part of your job with the Restoration Comittee, you begin pursuing what comes to be called the New Land Initiative, to turn a wasteland into farmland. Or so you hope.
You remember more science than you thought. A long time ago you picked an Ecology major partially because you liked ecology and partially because you wanted to join the Land Revitalization Comittee after you graduated - the people who research ways to make the land outside of No. 6 viable again. Or now, what was No. 6.
Instead of researching, you're just out there, doing, and the dirt under your nails and the split skin from where your blisters pop makes you happy and feel alive with pain and grit and vigor.
It's a lot less organized in the beginning, when it's just you and Nezumi and the people who came from both sides to set up a plot outside of the ring and try to reinvigorate the soil there, but it's kinda fun, even though you have to put yourself in between people sometimes when they fight and when you turn your head you see Nezumi's shovel biting huge chunks out of the ground at astonishing speed.
The first year is hard - the soil is thin and without any cover it likes to blow away, ruining any chance of the rows you try to make staying or the soybeans growing. Irrigation is tricky, especially when people complain about water being used for experimental purposes that don't benefit what they still call "the city," and sometimes you wake up to a note in your mailbox telling you to cease the process and these you fold up neatly and leave them on the table for kindling for cooking.
People fall off and leave the project entirely; you still keep waking up and leaving before the sun rises, Nezumi padding behind you. When you have to go mid-morning for Restoration Committe issues, you leave him in charge and everyone gets curiously obedient. Somehow, a lot more work gets done during times when Nezumi is leading than when you are. You suspect that this is because the citizens of the former No. 6 are obviously afraid of him, but as long as Nezumi keeps his promise not to hit anyone with a shovel, you're okay with using this.
Things grow, against all odds. Spindly green stalks push out of the soil, and you take a picture with them to commemorate; Nezumi calls you a simpleton and says that the real work hasn't even started yet. You let him.
(The work doesn't bother you, not when you see people get excited about their work turning up fruits; not when people slowly stop sticking solely to their own home-groups and one day you look up and realize that people you knew from No. 6 are working next to people you knew from the West District and nobody seems to care either way; not when you go home with Nezumi and push his damp bangs off his face, lick the sweat off his neck, and pull at his clothes and he lets you.)
Your name is Sion and sometimes you wake up in the early morning, before the sun has risen, and you feel like nothing has changed before your senses clear and you feel someone sleeping next to you, and you roll over and curl against Nezumi's back, his hair loose and soft on your face.
At night your worries are a lot clearer: you're afraid that you're pouring so much time and energy into a project that won't work; that the hearts of two very different peoples will never fully heal; that Nezumi is less your partner and more a very carefully contained force of nature, and one breach will compel him to escape (and he'll leave you, like he said when he came back, that he wasn't meant to stay here forever).
You're not sure how it's all going to end, but for now you have the fields turning greener with every passing day, and the sounds of citizens of both groups calling to each other as they work, and Nezumi's voice as he quietly sings to himself as he works among the roots and leaves.
It helps you keep moving. It helps you fall asleep.