Just as she handed Booker his fork and was about to head for her favorite chair outside, Desi came galloping into the kitchen.
“It worked, it worked!” She cried in delight. “My project worked!”
Booker frowned. “Your what?”
“My special project!” She ran over, grabbing him by the arm. “It worked, come see!”
“Whoa, alright, hold on Des, don’t make me spill…”
Following them down the hall to the girls’ room, Caitlin furrowed her brow at Scott who was beaming proudly, standing in the doorway.
“Special project?” She asked him.
Scott winked. “I’ll let Desi show you.”
“Look,” she exclaimed, pointing to a contraption set up in her windowsill.
At first, Caitlin didn’t understand. A flat board with squares of something dark—shiny like metal or glass, but not reflective enough to be a mirror—was propped up, and delicate looking wires tucked all around, leading to…
A light bulb.
A single, glowing light bulb.
“See?” Desi called over her shoulder, rushing to her invention. “I made a solar panel! Dad, look!”
Booker had stopped seeming so bewildered by the name a long time ago, but every time Desi called him ‘dad’ Caitlin’s heart swelled.
Squatting down to examine the bulb and panel it was attached to, Booker whistled low between his teeth.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he breathed. “You sure did.”
Twisting to look up at her, he smiled.
“How’d you know how to do that?”
Full of excited energy, Desi bounced on the balls of her feet. “I read about it in the books Scott found for me,” she said. “And he helped me with a few of the wires.”
Leaning against the doorframe, Scott shrugged. “Really I just screwed a few pieces in that were a little hard for her to reach. Desi figured out the rest. Even found the panel material in some of the construction stuff Nate brought back.”
“I bet there’s more at that development,” Desi announced. “If I can get more, I can make bigger panels to put on top of the house, and then—”
“We’d have electricity,” Caitlin finished for her, smiling proudly.
The rest of the evening was spent parading people through Desi’s room to look at her DIY solar panel, telling everyone that their little genius could get them up and running with actual electricity.
Functioning lights. Possibilities for refrigeration.
No more fuel runs for generators or working by candlelight.
Booker of course, promptly teased Desi that she’d need a tiny lampshade for her bulb, and she dissolved into a fit of giggles.
* * * * * * *
Holding the porch rail flush with the support piece, Booker twisted the screwdriver in his hand.
“A’ight, read it to me again,” he said.
Desi ran her finger over the page. “Given two sets A and B, a set with elements that are ordered pairs (x,y), where x is an element of A and y is an element of B, is a relation from A to B. A relation from A to B defines a relationship between those two sets.”
Booker grunted softly. “So, when do the two trains catch up to each other?”
“That’s physics,” she sighed, rolling her eyes for dramatic effect.
“Oh, then what’s that?” He asked, pointing to the book with the tip of his screwdriver.
“Calculus,” she said, showing him the cover. “Functions, specifically.”
“Ah, I see,” he said, nodding. “And what specifically are you havin’ trouble with?”
“I keep mixing up the formulas when Scott quizzes me.”
Testing his repair job, Booker tilted his head to get a better look.
“Well, keep tellin’ ‘em to me ‘til it gets easier,” he said.
Desi frowned. “You’re not bored?”
“You bored of talkin’ about math?”
She glanced down at the heavy textbook in her lap. “No.”
“Then I ain’t bored of listenin’,” he said, picking up another rail to replace. “Go on. Teach me somethin’ new.”
With a slight smile, Desi continued reading from the pages, stopping occasionally to reword something so they could both comprehend it. Booker mostly hummed or grunted in response, but every so often he knew the answer to a problem or had a real-world application to offer her, telling a quick anecdote of his time in the service and needing to be precise with calculations.
Caitlin simply watched and listened while she stitched patches into the knees of Desi’s favorite overalls.
She’d gotten better at sewing but her line stitch still needed work.
Glancing up, towards the edge of the property, she swore she saw movement.
Geeks still wandered by, but the desert heat and arid conditions made them stiff and brittle, slow to react and laughably easy to kill, especially with reinforced fencing keeping them at bay.
But this wasn’t a Geek, or even a small herd of them.
“Booker, do you see that?” She asked, jerking her chin towards the shifting silhouettes gathering at the front gate.
Turning, Booker lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the sun.
“That a car?” He asked.
“And people,” she said, setting her sewing down. “Desi, go inside and tell Nicole.”
“Okay,” Desi said, knowing this wasn’t something to drag her feet on.
“Rifle’s inside,” Booker admitted.
“I’ve got the revolver,” she said, the constant weight of the gun at her low back a comfort now.
“Jeep?”
“It’ll get us there quicker,” she said, standing up.
Brushing dust and paint chips from his hands, Booker said, “I swear, if it’s more Scavengers…”
“The last ones just needed water and then they left,” she said.
“Still, they always try to fight first,” he said as they strode to the Jeep parked down where the dirt road began. “None of ‘em ask nicely.”
Caitlin smirked. “Offends your southern sensibilities, huh?”
“Offends my right to keep what’s mine.”
Climbing into the Jeep, Booker grabbed the keys off the dash and turned the ignition.
“Goddamn, Cae, how far d’you move the seat,” he muttered, legs jammed into the steering wheel.
“Not that far.”
