The night was abnormally cold for this time of year—not quite freezing, but cold enough that everyone’s breath hung in the air. Standing lights illuminated the yard between the remnants of the processing building and the main house, offering an unobstructed view of the workers as they cleaned, sorted, and packaged the fresh fruit.

  The work was neat and orderly. The raw fruit was stacked in crates. Crates became troughs. Troughs became clean fruit. Clean fruit became sorted rows, then preservatives, packing, and shipment.

  The rest, bruised, stunted, or misshapen, went into barrels to be processed into cider, medicine, or whatever else the Coalition felt like extracting from it.

  Hand-processing was Morel’s stubborn hope. Luke had wanted rental equipment, fast, efficient, cold. But she’d proven something he couldn’t argue with: Grey Rock would bleed for them if asked.

  When the workers and volunteers returned a few days after the fire, Morel posed the question of around-the-clock work: some would work the fields during the day as they had been, and the rest of the group would be split into shifts for processing.

  There was no hesitation from the volunteers. They were more than willing to do whatever they had to do to save Golden Fields.

  Luke yawned and rolled his shoulders. Cold water slid down his spine, and the shiver he’d fought for hours hit him hard enough to make his teeth click. Those few drops chilled him to the bone, causing the shivers he had been suppressing to amplify, making his efforts to return to work almost impossible.

  “You gonna survive, cowboy?” Brukus asked, resting his bandaged hand on Luke’s shoulder.

  “Y-yeah,” Luke managed, fumbling for another apple in the icy water. “Only an hour till lunch, right?”

  Brukus laughed. “Try three.”

  A groan escaped not only Luke but all the workers along the trough. They were living proof that hard work can make for long days. As far as they knew, nearly five hours had passed.

  “Oh, don’t you all cry. I’m doing my best to make sure you all have hot food ready to go. And coffee is already hot and on the porch,” Brukus said, gesturing to the steaming pots with mugs ready for anyone to use when they needed a break.

  “You and I both know that’s not going to make them feel any better,” Keyil said, fluttering down from her most recent flight pattern over the boughs of the orchards. “They could use some music.”

  A murmur of agreement welled up from the workers, all more than happy to have something to distract them from their menial but essential labors.

  “That is a good idea,” Luke replied. “Keyil, can we borrow your speaker?”

  “Of course. It’s in my room,” Keyil replied.

  “Brukus, go get that while Keyil updates me on the skeleton crew,” Luke instructed, takingoff his gloves and tucking them into his pocket.

  Brukus did not argue with the instructions. With him being injured, anything he could do to assist was appreciated by the man. Brukus arrived looking like a wounded hero. Then his mother arrived, and he became a child again.

  Arenyol, a woman Luke had met several times before but never knew to be his friend's mother, spotted her son pouting about not being able to use his big muscles for labor and whipped him into shape.

  The look of horror and shame on Brukus’ face when the equally large woman grabbed Brukus’ ear and dragged him into the kitchen to aid her with cooking the night shift's meals was uncanny. Luke had never thought about it, but apparently, regardless of species, a mother had an almost supernatural ability to humiliate their son into doing the right thing.

  As Luke and Keyil neared the coffee dispensers, Arenyol stepped out of the house, a plate of cookies and other treats in hand. She, like all others of Morel’s species, was bovine-like, but unlike Morel and Brakus, the weight of age had softened what were once undeniably seductive curves.

  She leaned down and pulled her red hair back, keeping the strands out of the food. “I hope that good-for-nothing boy isn’t giving you trouble.”

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  “No. Ma’am. He is fine,” Luke replied, pouring a cup of coffee while Keyil stealthily nabbed a few treats.

  “I’m not a ma’am,” she said, flipping her hair. “Look at me. I still have it,” she finished, flipping her hair and doing a little twirl.

  Luke agreed with her, out of politeness, and did not mention the streaks of silver running along her snout and hair.

  Once Arenyol had returned to the kitchen, Luke and Keyil leaned on the railing, looking out at the harvest. The trees extended as far as the eye could see. Their leaves and fruits shimmered in the moonlight.

  Keyil did not give her report for a minute, allowing Luke a moment to enjoy the bitter sanctuary of coffee. Its warmth was one of the few things in this most trying of nights that was assuredly only a boon.

  “Alright, lay it on me,” Luke said, lowering his cup back to the nozzle and refilling it with the black gold.

  “Everyone out there is doing alright. We have no injuries, and with the bots Hank lent, we are currently estimating a seventy percent production tonight,” Keyil said flatly.

  “Well, the lack of injuries is good, but that production,” Luke said, biting into a cookie and chewing on it slowly, lingering on the amount.

  “It’s not ideal, but we needed to hit a sixty percent production to meet the tithe.”

  Luke hung his head and sighed, lightly kicking at the bottom of the railing. “Is it the best we can do?”

  Keyil paused and tapped the data slate, moving numbers here and factors there across the spreadsheet. After a few moments, she clicked her tongue. “Yeah. We can’t really adjust anything since we moved to overnight shifts. We just don’t have enough people.”

  “Well, that’s just great. All we need is one more accident, and it’s all over,” Luke grumbled and dumped the coffee into the dirt, already turning back toward the troughs

  “Hold on there, buddy,” Keyil said, holding a wing up, stopping the human.

  Luke glared at Keyil and grumbled in frustration. He needed to get back to work; their margins were too tight, and deadlines were too close for him to stop working for any longer than the few minutes he already had.

  “Oh come on, don’t give me that look,” Keyil stuck her tongue out at Luke, uncaring of him feeling any amount of pressure. “I just wanted to make sure you are alright, and that you and Morel are, you know, not planning on neglecting one another to get this done.”

  “We were planning on working day in, day out. She will handle the day shift, and I will get the night shift. And we were planning on having a passdown at the start and end of each shift.”

  “God, for such a smart man, you are dense,” Keyil teased. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  Without waiting for Luke to make an argument about what he and Morel were going to do, she hugged herself and started to make kissy faces. “ Oh, Morel. Oh Sug’ I love you. Harder Sug!!”

  Luke’s face flushed as Keyil continued teasingly quoting Morel and his most intimate moments in their bedroom.

  “Were you listening in on us?” Luke stomped his foot.

  Keyil tossed her head back and laughed. “Oh, I did not have to. Everyone in the workers’ cabin heard you two. You two sounded like a rodeo happening in the house.”

  “God dammit,” Luke groaned.

  “Hey, don’t worry, buddy. Anyone would love to have what you two have. And I’m not judging. I’m saying: don’t turn into coworkers. An hour together won’t break the farm.”

  Luke was about to argue, to tell Keyil she just did not understand what was at stake, but before he could, the chiropteran-like woman put a finger to his lips and winked. “Although from what I can tell, you guys might need a few.” She then flapped her wings and fluttered over to Brukus, who had returned to the workstation and was struggling with the speaker.

  Instead of immediately jumping back into work, Luke thought about what Keyil had said and pondered the idea deeply. He had assumed that once all this work was done, everything with Morel could hopefully return to normal, but now he was second-guessing himself.

  Morel was, in reality, the first woman he had ever been in a relationship with. Whatever he had with Jackie was nothing compared to what he had with Morel. Jackie was pre-planned, dictated; he had no real effect on what happened there. How that ended was only a painful reminder that he truly knew nothing about Jackie.

  After a minute of consideration, Luke went inside to ask Arenyol to prepare a vegetarian breakfast for Morel and Luke, setting it aside whenever she awoke. Arenyol looked at Luke like he was crazy, not for the desire to spend time with his love, but for the food itself. She argued about not having any protein and what they needed, something the older alien considered necessary for such laborious work.

  Their species were not vegetarian, but Morel was. Once Luke explained that, Arenyol agreed to do so and prepare the meal.

  When dawn finally bled into the sky, Luke left the workers to their music and went to find Morel. He found her feeding the bunnies and Ember. He walked up beside her and wrapped his arms around her waist.

  “Good morning,” Luke said softly.

  “Good morning to you, Sug’,” Morel replied, petting Luke on the head. “How was the shift?”

  “Not bad,” he replied, looking up at her, adoring her slightly messy hair and subtle smile. “Breakfast is ready for us.”

  They stole that morning for themselves. It was filled with breakfast, laughter, the animals, the small rituals that reminded them they were still alive, and had a future to look forward to.

  That reality had become their steady, unyielding existence for weeks. Life was constant work for everyone involved. Late nights, early mornings, with their breakfasts and the occasional escape to the bedroom, kept them grounded through the struggle.

  But before anyone had realized it, weeks of day-in-day-out work had passed. The fruit had been harvested, and the day of reckoning had come.

  The morning of the tithe had come. Luke and Morel stood on the porch as dozens of jet-black vehicles lumbered down the road. The Coalition had come, and all they could do now was pray that what they had was enough to meet the cut.