Free On Whetsday by Mark Sumner

was also very hard. She came home at the end of each long shift aching from the work she had done all day, but sometimes she was allowed to bring some of the flour home with her. When she did, she and Yulia would use it right away to make flat bread. Which was somehow better than any other flat bread Yulia had ever eaten, even the flat bread made by Auntie Talla, which was very good.
    Yulia’s father had a different sort of job. He worked in building the city, but he didn’t work with a hammer or push a cart like most of the humans. Yulia’s father went every day to the place where the new city was being built. He helped the cithians in putting in pipes and in putting in wires. He knew a lot about how the city was to be built. Even the cithians said he was very smart—for a human.
    On Dimsday, when the cithians slept, the humans would keep working. On those days, the cithians would sometimes tell Yulia’s father what to do, and he would tell the other humans. Her father’s name was Bram, but people called him Uncle Boss. Sometimes, after Yulia had worked most of the day, her father would take her to see the new city being built. He showed her how the wires brought power through the city and how the pipes brought water. He showed her how to connect the wires, and how the water was controlled by valves. He showed her how stone and sand and water could go together to make concrete, which could make walls that would not only go up and down, but could also make curves and arches and domes. He showed Yulia how some of the buildings in the new city would be one shape, and some would be another. Together all the different shapes would form a unit, where all the buildings went together to provide supplies and workshops and places to sleep and places to do other things. Halitt would have two of these units, and when they were done it would be Halitt Plex—Halitt the city—and they would all have big warm buildings with lots of space.
    At the very end of Dimsday, when the sky was, Bram would take Yulia through the growing city to its south edge, where both of them would stand on one of the new dikes and look out across the swamp to where lights glowed on the horizon. The lights were from the crew laying tracks for the new ground train that would link Halitt to other cities. Every Dimsday the tracks were closer. Every Dimsday the buildings were higher. Every Dimsday the stars were bright overhead.
    Bram was very excited about living in the new city. Yulia was excited too. Where they lived was not big and certainly not warm. The cithians had long, curved-top buildings where they worked, slept, and did their planning. The humans lived under their cithians, in rooms carved out of the frozen ground that never melted. Yulia and her mother and her father lived with two other families beneath one of the cithian buildings, in a space so low she couldn’t stand up, even as a child. Because the cithians liked Yulia’s father, they had extra room. But not much. For sleeping they all huddled together, wrapped in many, many blankets. Even then the cold would soak in and in and in until by the time she woke Yulia’s hands and feet would ache, then burn, then ache some more.
    One Dimsday, when Yulia was twelve, her father came to the mine to find her. By then, Yulia didn’t work on the belt as a picker anymore. That was a job for small children. Instead she walked in and out of the mine, following the moving belt, making sure that no rocks got stuck inside all the rollers that made it go. Being a belt walker was an important job. If the belt got stuck, the mine would have to stop until it was fixed. Yulia’s mother and Yulia’s father were both proud that Yulia had been trusted to do such an important thing, even though working inside the mine could be dangerous.
    That Dimsday, Bram was even more excited than usual. The train had reached Halitt a few days before, and now train after train was coming, bringing all the supplies that a city