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Ms. Moore. “Anything odd, or, um . . .” Rachel’s voice trailed off into nothingness. She risked another glance at Ms. Moore, and sure enough, the lady was regarding her with a quizzical look, head tilted to one side.
    Ms. Moore kept looking at Rachel for what seemed like a very long time. Then she turned her attention to the dendrobium Rachel was holding.
    “Do you see how that root is all dark and wilted? That one definitely needs to be trimmed.”
    That was as far as Rachel progressed in her quest for information, at least on that day. She could tell by Ms. Moore’s demeanor that more questions would not be well received. She wasn’t going to give up though. After all, Ms. Moore couldn’t have lived so close to the Line for so many years without knowing something .

CHAPTER 3
    R ACHEL AND HER mother had come to The Property after Rachel’s father was lost in the last war between the Unified States and Samarik. Rachel had researched it; she wanted to know what her father had died for. Vivian would never say much about it, but according to the net archives, Samarik claimed the U.S. was engaging in “cruel and inhuman” practices. Things like apprehending citizens and forcing them to work in government Labor Pools if they couldn’t pay random taxes. Samarik believed that citizens deserved public trials and reasonable sentences. The U.S. wanted Samarik to stay out of their affairs, and they sent troops to make sure the message was clear. The U.S. won, of course, but a lot of fathers died winning. When Rachel’s father was reported as a casualty, Vivian was left to figure out how to support the two of them.
    Rachel was little then, so she didn’t have any memories of it, but Vivian had told her many times the story of how she found The Property. Vivian kept a printout of the ad that Ms. Moore had placed in the Domestics section of the daily classifieds—a torn scrap of yellowing paper—tucked in her brown leather portfolio. The portfolio was where she kept things that were important to her: things like birth certificates and letters, and digims of them—Vivian, Rachel, and Daniel—when they were still a family.
    Rachel’s favorite digim was of the three of them standing in a room that looked about as big as Ms. Moore’s linen closet. Vivian was beaming, more carefree than Rachel had ever seen her look. Daniel was holding Rachel—a tiny baby at the time—and smiling. He had thick brown hair, which Vivian said was exactly like Rachel’s. He looked nice. Rachel didn’t remember him at all.
    When Vivian looked at that digim, her eyes would glow for a moment. That’s how Rachel thought of it—that they glowed. But the glow would soon fade, replaced by the sadness that Rachel was used to seeing. She was so used to that sadness she hadn’t realized that was what it was for the longest time. It had just always been there, a part of Vivian, like the tiny scar on her chin or the bump on her nose. Once, Rachel had found her mother holding that digim, crying. When Vivian realized she was watching, she had quickly dried her tears and smiled at Rachel. “It’s okay, honey,” she had said. “I still have you.”
    Rachel tried hard to be enough. She rarely disobeyed Vivian, and she always did her chores around the guesthouse. She had even begun to learn to cook, so she could make dinner sometimes. Still, she didn’t think there was anything she could do to make the sadness in her mother’s eyes disappear. And though she only had stream shows to use as comparisons, she didn’t think that most mothers looked at their children as though they were afraid they were going to break. Still, Vivian didn’t always act sad. In fact, most of the time Rachel couldn’t imagine a better mother.
    They were their own little family, with their own unique family history. Like the story of how they came to live on The Property. Retelling that story was one of their rituals; one of the things they did together, like some