The Last Greenhouse

Ren Kato woke to the sound of water grinding through pipes like a tired animal. The morning light in Sector Spiral was always borrowed — a thin, recycled glow that slipped down the ribs of the tower and pooled at the lip of the greenhouse platform as if it could be coaxed into warmth. He sat up on the metal pallet, fingers going to the leather strap at his side where his trowel fit like a promise. The trowel had a nick in the blade from a winter when a pipe collapsed and he had dug for air until his knuckles bled. He could still smell that cold soil in the back of his throat whenever he turned the tool over in his hands.

Outside, the city coughed its daily announcements. A thin voice read ration tallies and new directives while humming drones hung like slow moths over the towers. The public screens on the next balcony flashed an official face in the square jaw of Director Vero: sterile hair, sterile smile, an oath to yield and efficiency. Below the smile the caption scrolled: SEED CONSOLIDATION — ALL PRIVATE VARIETIES MUST BE REGISTERED OR SEIZED. The voice was flat as ration paste.

Ren slid through the narrow greenhouse gate. He knew the plants before he saw them: the lean, bristled leaves of winter lettuce; the dense, stubborn veins of bean vines that held the faint dust of a season he had not lived through as a child. His fingers brushed a leaf and the skin on the back of his hand remembered the first lesson Lyle had taught him, years before: press, smell, listen. Lyle had kept the smallest strip of earth they called a root-bed, a stubborn rectangle of real dirt beneath the polymer trays. It had its own weather. He had taught Ren to measure the rising of tiny roots with his ear.

"Morning," called Mira from the bunkroom where steam fogged the small window. Her voice carried a thread of sleep and the patience of a sister who had smoked her youth away threading paste into other people's mouths. Tomo, Ren's nephew, coughed softly in the corner wrapped in a blanket too thin for the draft between the tiers. The cough had been there for two days; the ration doctor had dismissed it as a clearance tick. The canned medic she had scraped together smelled of metal and disinfectant. Ren's hands tightened on the trowel.

Lyle was already at the far bench, hunched under the low sweep of a desk lamp that made his face a map of lines. His hands were ink-stained from labeling seeds, and when he smiled it was like the sun finding a crack in concrete. "You hear them, boy?" he asked, not lifting his head. "They want the ledger. They want the ledger and they don't know why it matters."

Ren wanted to laugh the way a man laughs to keep himself from crying; instead he said, "If they come, they'll take everything and leave the rest for the paste. What good are words on paper?"

Lyle tapped a small tin against his palm and a scrap of paper slid free. The paper had code stamped along the edge in a handwriting that had nowhere to hide from a scanner. "Words are the roots of what we plant," he said. "They make it know itself. Keep it safe, Ren. If they come, don't let them find the ledger whole."

The greenhouse smelled of damp cloth and something green that made Ren's mouth water. Above the tower the recycled sky thinned to a smear. Somewhere down the spiral the public warning chimed again, and the city inhaled in a way that felt, in Ren's chest, like a countdown.