Dear Ms. Liu,

I’m looking forward to seeing you in a few days. The river here is very peaceful. There is a lot of jungle, but not a lot of people. We have our younger siblings well trained at this point, and they have been able to take care of all the filter installations. This lets the older siblings concentrate on clearing out landmines and unexploded bombs left over from the wars of the last century. We’re finding less of them on this side of the country than we did earlier in the trip, but every one we remove could be a life we save.

I’m excited to discuss our technology at the conference. The names you have mentioned all have very impressive reputations in their respective fields.

My sister Louise has been working on a couple of new projects which you might be interested in. One of them in particular seems useful to recovering cancer patients. It allows our nanobots to permanently reside in a patient’s bloodstream to monitor their health and make sure that tumors don’t reoccur. I don’t know if that’s an issue in your case, but if it is, we could make sure that you are taken care of.

How have you been feeling lately? Has your health been good?

Your friend,

Noah Kimball

Lin lost her unfiltered, unmonitored internet connection when she came down from Beijing, so we’re back to pretending like we’re just casual friends. It’s frustrating, but it also means we’re very close to getting to see each other again. The Chinese border is just up ahead and the estate where we’re meeting is just below the first dam inside China. We should be there this afternoon if we don’t run into any problems.

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I’m not on mine duty for half an hour and I need something to occupy my mind, so I recheck the specs on the industrial pollution scrubbers that we’ll be installing over the next couple of weeks. Assuming things go well with the General, that is. According to the notes in my index, we tested the scrubbers on the best duplicates we could make of the factories we plan to install them on, but you never know for sure with these things until you try them in the field. The plans are flexible enough that we should be able to adapt them up to whatever we find. That was the idea, anyway. I guess we’ll see how well we did once we reach the first install site. We kept the schedule loose in case it takes longer to customize things than planned.

It’s hard to focus on work with my reunion with Lin coming up. We’ll definitely have company the first time we meet again, including her father, so I’m trying to decide on the best way to greet her. I’ve decided on something along the lines of “Lin, it’s so good to see you again,” with a double-hand handshake. Warm, but not overly familiar. Then we try to act as casual as we can until we can get some time alone, when we hopefully make out like crazy. Her last message mentioned that she asked for a tour of the estate’s security office and was very thorough in checking to make sure we would all be very safe there. If I’m reading the implications in her message right, she’ll have checked the place out and figured out where all the blind spots are for their security cameras.

“Come on, brother,” Evan says, pulling me from my reverie. “One more flyover then you can go see your girl.”

“Right, let’s go then.”

We suit up and head out to the east, spreading out so that our clouds just barely overlap. At this point, there’s not a lot of mines or unexploded bombs to find, since not much got dropped here. I get a couple of hits, but they’re both just old shrapnel. I grind it all to fine dust.

The Chinese border curves south to where it’s only a dozen klicks away from the river in this section. We’re not authorized to fly in Chinese airspace, so today’s cleanup is a pretty short flight. I turn around to cut one last swath through the jungle on our way back and Evan follows behind me.

I’m so excited to see Lin.