Mika gives Nara a burner, and Nara recreates a Mars survival broth that exposes altered ration protein.
Mika's grocery kitchen had one burner, three chipped bowls, and a ceiling fan that complained like an old rover. Nara sat on an overturned flour bucket while Mika cleared onions from the prep table. The pan rested between them. Outside, dock families pressed faces to the shop glass, pretending to shop for cabbage while waiting to see whether the Mars chef would cook or faint. Nara understood both instincts. Hunger had made audiences out of kinder people.
"You do not owe anyone a performance tonight," Mika said. She set down a mug of broth made from Earth bones, rich enough to feel indecent. Nara smelled it and nearly cried. Instead she opened the red seed case strapped under her coat. Inside lay labeled packets no bigger than tea envelopes: dome basil, ironbean, gray yeast, emergency amaranth. "Not performance," Nara said. "Comparison."
She chose gray yeast, the meanest packet. It smelled like wet stone and stubborn bread. On Mars, they had used it to make bad protein kinder to exhausted stomachs. Nara crumbled a grain into warm water, added a shaving from the pan residue, then waited for the surface to shiver. Mika leaned close. "It is alive?" "Barely. We all were." The joke landed too near truth, so Nara reached for salt and kept moving.
The first boil split wrong. Good ration protein softened into a cloudy broth. This sample clumped into blue-gray beads that stuck to the spoon like melted plastic. Nara's hand tightened. She had seen that texture during the deep famine month, when children vomited after rescue packets and Voss blamed low gravity digestion. "They changed the binder," she said. "For shine, not stomachs." Mika's face hardened. "Can you prove that from soup?" "From soup, no. From soup plus hospital strips, lot code, and medical logs, yes."
Mika ran upstairs and came back with mineral test strips from her aunt's dialysis kit. Nara dipped one into the broth. The strip flashed blue where it should have stayed clear. The crowd outside made a sound through the glass. Someone had started streaming. Nara hated that, then needed it. Public taste moved faster than claims courts. She lifted the bowl, hands shaking so hard the spoon rattled. "This is why we watered meals until nobody felt full. This binder trapped iron and phosphate. It made the ration look complete while bodies starved beside full packets."
The broth made one dockworker step back with his hand over his mouth. "That smells like pennies." Nara nodded. "Bodies taste mistakes before boards read them." She made him hold the strip packet while Mika filmed the lot code beside the flame. If the sample disappeared later, the video would still show a grocer, a dockworker, and a dying yeast proving the same thing in a room too small for corporate language.
Mika made the dockworker taste the unheated sample too. He gagged at once. "Coats the tongue." Nara nodded and wrote that on butcher paper beside the strip result. Sensory notes were not law, but every kitchen knew bodies recorded fraud before forms learned how. She had built menus from worse evidence on Mars.
Mika tasted the cooled broth last and made a face so honest the stream chat exploded. "That is not food," she said. Nara took the bowl back. "It was, when we had nothing else." The room went quiet around the difference between disgust and judgment.
The burner flame guttered. Nara swayed. Mika caught her elbow without taking the bowl. Good ally. Good witness. A message hit Mika's wall screen from an unknown company account: unauthorized medical claim, remove broadcast. Mika read it aloud and turned the camera toward the blue strip. "Dockside Market will remove nothing until Voss Nutrition explains why a recovery meal behaves like famine paste." Nara looked at the opened yeast packet, now half spent. One tiny survival tool gone. In the pan, the broth cooled into proof that smelled like Mars rain they never got.