Far off in a distant solar system, Noah was walking shirtless through a bush with a handmade hardwood container in hand.
The container was rough work, admittedly, three days of whittling with a knife he'd fashioned from a piece of scrap metal off Storm's old crash site, but it held water without leaking and that was the only standard that mattered out here.
He moved through waist-high scrub, brushing aside branches heavy with clusters of small orange fruit, the skin thin enough that his thumbnail split it clean without any effort at all. He'd learned three days in that the orange ones were safe, sweet, almost citrus. The purple ones two clearings over made his stomach cramp for six hours and he had learned that lesson exactly once.
He picked six of them, dropped them into the container, and kept walking toward the stream.
