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He'd taken it home. Whoever it had belonged to was gone, the uneaten food proved that. No one would claim it. Finders were keepers. Late at night he would turn the stained and fragile pages and frown over the pictures, trying to make sense of the oddities they displayed. A ritual, each turn of a page leading step by step toward the centerpiece, he could not hurry it, every time had to be the same, deliberate and measured. A metal box with fat wheels, some kind of transporter? Some kind of street, but open to an impossibly bright sky. A woman staring out of the page, her lips so red they had to have artificial colour on them.
Image after image marched before him, his dream-eyes distorting the memory until they began to move of their own accord. Each picture a step toward the glorious conclusion. A tree.
Like the plants in the air processing centre but much, much bigger. It was old, age was etched on it's surface like the long slow story of it's life written as cursive script in the bark.
It stretched it's limbs out and up into a clear blue sky. Each branch dividing and subdividing into an edifice so complex it mocked the most intricate constructions of the Hirise.
And green. The terminus of every detailed twig ended in a flurry of leaves. Small green tickets of life, each with a place, each with it's part to play in the organic symphony of the tree. As dream-Stock pored over the picture in his cubicle, he heard his mother unfolding her bed in the living area, and the hissing of the inflating mattress became the gentle rustle of an impossible breeze through the leaves.
But not impossible. Stock was a man again and he was lying on the lawn of the Project's garden. He was lying under a tree, his tree, the tree he'd made for the Project and for himself. He stared up through the branches of his tree and though he could see not a blue sky but the domed roof of the Projects biosphere, and though he knew the air that stirred the boughs was moved by the Project's ventilation system and not the imagined breeze of his childhood picture-book, it was enough. Enough, he thought contently.
She came toward him across the lawn. She'd taken her shoes off as they all did, to feel the blades of grass beneath their feet. She smiled down at him and he smiled back. He closed his eyes and listened to the breeze in the leaves and sighed.
"Night, night." she said.
Darkness now, and heat. Awful, suffocating heat. He was back among the pipes, dream-child-Stock, he was lying very still. Above him was one of the hot pipes and he was pressed beneath it, hiding in the dark, daring not to breathe and trembling as the pipe began to scald his back through his tunic.
A man had come running through into the maintenance shaft, he clutched to his chest two food packets, colour-coded red for the upper levels. Forbidden food on level seventy. Two Mercymen had pursued him, their weapons drawn. They stalked the thief in the dark, scanning the shadows with their heat detectors.
Stock lay as still as he could. The heat from the pipe would mask him until they had gone, as long as he could stand the pain boring into his back.