Neon Soil

Lina kept her palms in the dirt until the neon in the sky blurred into a smear of blue and magenta. The rooftop garden was a rectangle stolen from the city — corrugated metal, a tangle of rusted wire, a single solar panel scavenged from an old advertising drone. She worked by the light of a cracked holo-lantern, fingers moving with the kind of sure, small choreography that had become her religion. The plants answered with a whisper: leaves furtive against the wind, bioluminescent veins threading the dark like veins of a sleeping creature. The air smelled of oil and rain that hadn't fallen recently, of garlic from the neighbor's synth-stew, and the metallic tang that clung to the city like a skin.

“Careful with the root here,” Min said from where he sat against the air duct, ribs visible under a too-thin shirt. He coughed once, a dry sound that stabbed Lina every time. He was seven years old in a body that had already learned to make a room's worth of compromises. A child's laugh would have been a scandal on this roof; instead, there were the steady breathing sounds of someone who had been taught to wait.

Lina eased the plant back into the soil and touched the pendant hidden beneath her collar — a tiny vial with a speck of living green inside, suspended in amber gel. Her mother had braided that vial into a string of memory the night they left the river flats. Lina's thumb rubbed the cool glass while her other hand closed the torn sleeve of Min's jacket. The vial was a secret seed, illegal in the eyes of the towers: a strain that could split city pavement and drink the chemical soup the smog left behind.

A truck passed below, its advertisement hologram folding and unfolding like a paper flower. Across the street, a corp-billboard renamed the weather in nine languages. The city celebrated itself at every elevation; drones sang policy in a honeyed voice. Lina thought of the distribution centers, the water-tokens that tasted like plastic, and the license chips that kept the old seedvaults closed. The word 'Chrysalis' had the softness of a promise; it also had teeth.

“You're still awake?” called Mrs. Hae from the adjoining rooftop, her voice carrying over the metal ribs. She had been a seamstress before the towers took the work out of hands and put it into machines. Now she mended clothes with stitches the city couldn't buy, tucking small fortunes into hems.

“Just checking the glowroots,” Lina answered. The roots pulsed faintly under the lamp, light like distant city windows. “They're getting stronger.”

Mrs. Hae's laugh was short and wet. “Strong enough to feed an alley or two?”

“Strong enough to keep one little throat from rasping,” Lina said. She didn't say whose throat.