Shionne was young, and she was having a good day.

She didn't put it that way in her mind, of course. For one thing, she wasn't quite clear on what a "day" was. They only let her out of the lab on special occasions, and when they did the hard white light that filled Lenegis during its waking hours seemed more or less the same as the light inside the lab. But nobody had run any tests on her since she woke up, and it had been a week since she had hurt anyone with her thorns, and she was generally being left alone to do what she wanted in her little room. And best of all, somebody had given her a box of crayons and some paper.

Shionne screwed up her eyes in concentration as she held a crayon in a fist poised over the page. Images flashed through her mind as she tried to settle on an artistic subject. It had to count, whatever it was. She only had a few sheets of paper, and the people in the lab would probably take away the crayons if she drew on the walls again.

With great care, she placed the crayon back in the box and turned to the shelf that held her other worldly possessions: an old doll, sitting comfortably on a chair she had made for it by stacking together her small library of picture books. She picked up the doll, and apologized for disturbing it as she moved it over to the bed. The books liberated, she opened them one by one and began searching for inspiration.

She found it, on one of the earlier pages of one of the books. It showed a house, on Rena, where the sky was blue and everything was lit up in yellow and the ground was covered in green, instead of hard white training down to a chrome and black horizon. It was a house in a world full of color, and it told Shionne she already knew what she had to draw.

The picture book showed a nice house, after all. But Shionne could certainly think of a nicer one.

She took all the crayons out of the box and laid them in a neat row. The picture would use all of them, somehow, even if she had to find a way to work in the creepy pink one. Her tools prepared, she only hesitated for a moment before beginning her illustration.

Her home would not be on Lenegis, of course. She wanted it to be on Rena, but she had learned from the lab workers that nobody but the Sovereign got to go there from Lenegis, and she was dimly aware that whatever her future had in store she would never be the Sovereign. Dahna, then. She knew plenty of Renans lived there, and she had seen images from places that looked almost as nice as the drawing in her picture book. She would have a house on Dahna, all to herself, but that was just the start.

Here was the front door, and the bathroom, and the bedroom. There would be no laboratory room, of course, so that about covered the extent of her personal experience. But she had plenty of ideas left over. So here was the grand library, and the zeugle petting room, and the room where it did nothing but rain down candy all day. Here was the observatory, with its own radio so she could hear and see anyone on Lenegis if she wanted to. Here was the wardrobe, as big as the bedroom, where she could get fancy clothes like the people in her picture books. Here was another bedroom for her doll. Here was the outside, a brilliant yellow just like the sun. And here was Shionne, standing out in front of the house where she would live.

Once every inch of the picture was covered in color, Shionne picked it up and smiled. It was everything she wanted. With great care, she placed it between the pages of one of the books, so she could take it out and look at it whenever she wanted. Then she turned back to the remaining blank sheets of paper. There were still so many ideas that couldn't fit into one drawing.

Shionne was older now, and she was hungry.

It was only ordinary hunger, of course, so it barely registered at this point. She had gotten a full stomach only two days previous, and yesterday she had gotten two apples and a potato. She never got used to hunger, but there was a difference between the intense terror of days without food and the mere discomfort she was feeling now.

She still wasn't sure why they had brought her down to Dahna for the Crown Contest, and nobody had been eager to tell her. She secretly hoped it was because her thorns were the sign of some hidden power that could turn the contest in Balseph's favor, something that would make her important and valuable, but if there was some sort of hidden power nobody seemed to be keen on using it. She mostly seemed to have been forgotten. She didn't know if she liked that more or less than the days in the lab on Lenegis.

She laid down to take a nap, out of a lack of anything else to do. It was a basic pleasure that some mild hunger couldn't take away from her. But just as she was about to drift off, she felt her body seize, and her vision went dark as she felt something writhing within her. She bolted back upright as soon as her body would listen.

That was happening more and more often; it was the second time this month. The researchers in the lab on Lenegis had always been interested in episodes like that, which meant tests, which meant unpleasant associations from her memory on top of the basically unpleasant sensation of her thorns stirring within her. The researchers hadn't worked out for themselves just what it meant, but Shionne knew the thorns better than them, and the feeling she got from them was something she just didn't want to think about.

She looked toward her possessions, trying to find something to distract herself. She picked up an old picture book, carried all the way from Lenegis, and smiled when she opened it up only to see one of her few remaining childhood drawings. Her dream house.

It was ridiculous, of course. It wasn't a real house, all just boxes and stiff open lines drawn by a child who had only seen houses in books, and otherwise only knew metal rooms on Lenegis. She hadn't even drawn in a kitchen or a dining room, and right now they seemed like the two most important rooms in a house. Though a room full of raining candy was also pretty appealing. She could do a better job now. So, she decided, she would.

She laid back down in bed, having found the perfect thought to distract herself. Her dream house, then. Bedroom, bathroom, living room, and of course kitchen and dining room packed to the brim with absolutely anything she wanted to eat. This was a dream house, of course, so it would have no problem providing an unlimited amount of food. But there was also the outside architecture to think about. She wanted something sweeping, magnificent, more of a castle than a house. Sweeping buttresses, spires and towers, and a pit full of spikes outside, why not? She wanted people to look at her house and know that Shionne Vymer Imeris Daymore lived there, and she was owed some respect.

It would still be yellow, of course. That was the proper color for a home. And a candy raining room would still be nice; she could have it as an annex to the pantry. And there would be a throne room, just off the entrance hall, but she would never have to sit in it because she would be too important.

Shionne drifted off to sleep, and dreamed of a place safe and full of food.

Shionne was older now, and the knot in her stomach had nothing to do with hunger.

They were camping in the deserts of Calaglia, making their way towards the only real lead they had on a spaceship that could take them back to Lenegis and the Renas Alma. It was an uncertain path, but they had done lots of seemingly impossible things in the past few months so this seemed almost trivial. They would find the spaceship. She would go to Lenegis. She would find the Renas Alma. And she would do what needed to be done. She looked up, around the other tired faces around the campfire, and once again she considered telling them. Telling Alphen.

She wanted to believe that they could help her, that they knew some secret other way of dealing with the thorns and she only had to bring it up herself. But she knew it was just a fantasy, and if there was any other way of doing this than she would have found it out herself. She had to go through with finding the Renas Alma. And she couldn't let any of them come with her.

Alphen and Kisara were deep in conversation, talking about something to do with how to ration the food they had bought in the previous town. Just for an instant, he looked back her way, caught her eye, and smiled. She felt herself flush, and looked away before she got drawn into the conversation.

She had trouble sleeping most nights; there was just too much to think about. But she knew she had to sleep, so she fell back on the old strategy of distracting herself. She decided to start early, staring into the flickering campfire, and fell back on an old favorite. What sort of house would she like to live in?

This was just a fantasy, she reminded herself. There would be no house; she couldn't pretend otherwise if she wanted to keep focused on the mission. But as long as she kept reminding herself that, it was fine enough as a distraction.

Multiple bedrooms, she thought. It was something she had never considered before, but it was important that if other people came to visit that they should have somewhere to sleep. She had gotten used to having conversations with her friends late into the night, and it wasn't a pleasure she wanted to give up. So it would have to be big enough to house anyone she wanted. And the kitchen would be big enough for multiple people, so everyone could cook whatever they wanted. And there would be a garden out back, so they could grow anything they wanted to put in that kitchen. And, of course, it would be yellow.

She wondered, briefly, where she would put it. Menancia seemed like the best option, full of green fields and blue skies like she wanted. Alphen might want to stay somewhere in Calaglia, but-

She stopped herself. Even in her fantasies, she couldn't let herself have thoughts like that.

She stared at the flickering flames, long into the night.

Shionne was older now, and the tomatoes weren't going to harvest themselves.

The garden was positively overflowing, but the tomatoes were ripe right now and so came as first priority. The baskets Shionne was methodically filling would, in the next few days, become part of a stew, part of a roast dinner, and part of a dozen jars of sauce to be stored until the next harvest. And part of a salad, if certain members of her family could be persuaded to eat them. The garden didn't provide all of their food, but on some days it felt like it did.

She carried the baskets through the back door and into her kitchen. As she carried the last one through, she admired the paint trimming the doorframe. Law had given the house a whole fresh coat of yellow paint a few months ago after losing some bet to Alphen, and the house was still brighter than ever. The delicate white trimming on the doorframe still seemed something entirely unlike Law.

After she had put the last basket of tomatoes down on the counter, she turned her attention towards the dining room. There, facing away from her in a slightly worn dining chair, a small girl with long pink hair had been sitting quietly the whole time Shionne was in the garden.

Shionne hung up her gardening gloves and apron, poured herself a glass of water, and sat down opposite the little girl, who was furiously scribbling a crayon across a sheet of paper. The girl looked up, and fixed Shionne with a curiously intense gaze that Alphen swore came from Shionne but Shionne swore came from him.

"What goes in a house, mommy?" she said, with a slight frown.

Shionne leaned over to take a look at what her daughter was drawing. "What do you mean? We live in a house."

"Yeah but, I'm trying to draw a house and." She gestured around wildly, to communicate the futility of attempting to capture the complexity of the world around her in something as simple as a crayon drawing.

Shionne looked to either side of her daughter. On one side, a stack of blank sheets of paper; on the other, a pile of discarded creations. She smiled. "Well then. A house starts with the front door, and living room. Have you got that?"

"Yeah!"

"A kitchen?"

"Yep."

"A bathroom?"

She gasped. "Oh yeah," she said, furiously scribbling a new addition onto her drawing.

"Well apart from that, you need bedrooms," Shionne said. "Enough for everyone living there. Like in our house, we have room for your father and I, you, and your brothers."

"Where are they?" she said abruptly, putting her head down on top of her half-completed drawing. "Aunt Kisara came by this morning and took them away."

Kisara had taken her sons fishing. "Oh, they'll probably be back for dinner."

Unless they got "really, really close" to catching the big one, in which case they might camp out all night to try and catch it again at dawn. Shionne hoped they wouldn't be stupid enough to pull that stunt again, but it was only hope.

"So here's the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedrooms," her daughter said, looking back down at her drawing and jumping trains of thought without hesitation. "But what else?"

Shionne looked around at her house. Through the window she could see into their garden. On a pair of hooks across from it were a matching set of red and blue aprons, next to a shelf full of recipe books haphazardly assembled over the years. Behind her she could see into the living room, which had hosted everything from wedding receptions to baby showers to birthday parties. Across the walls sat pictures of every member of the family, biological and found, photographed and hand-drawn.

"Well we don't really need much more than that," she said. "The house isn't important; what's important is how you fill it."

"Yeah, but where am I going to put the pickle room?"

Shionne paused. "The what?"

"The pickle room!"

From the stack on her side came a cavalcade of discarded drawings. "This is the pickle room, where all the food is pickles and the windows are all glass like a jar. There's my secret bedroom, at the top of the tower with a secret passage. There's the spinning room. There's the fishing pond out back, and the waterslide so you can play with the fish."

Shionne laughed as she watched the parade of rooms march past. "Those are all wonderful ideas. What's the problem?"

"They won't fit with all the stuff I need," her daughter said, head back sideways on the table, eyes deadpan as they looked back up at her. Shionne looked at the page, and noticed that chunky and detailed as the artstyle was, it did already fill most of the page.

She got up, grabbed a roll of tape from the kitchen, and sat back down by her daughter's side. "Then let me help," she said.

With two strips of tape, four small pages became one big one. "There," she said, handing the crayons back over. "And we can make it as big as you want it to be. You ready?"

"Yeah!"

"Then there's just one question. What color do you want the outside to be?"