Ashwater Garden

The greenhouse sat like a stubborn lung at the rim of the settlement, ribs of warped glass stitched with copper wire. Morning fog hugged the broken towers, turning the ruined city beyond into a low, wet dream. Inside, the air smelled of damp soil and boiled rain—odd comforts in a world that had learned to ration both. Iris Calder moved between trays of pale lettuce and low, patient beans with the practiced tenderness of someone who had once coaxed life out of dead things for a living. Her palms were stained green in a way that matched the green of the plants: a small defiance against the rust and salt outside.

She hummed under her breath, a thin, private tune she’d picked up from an old cartridge player in the maintenance room. The sound was swallowed half by fog and half by the hum of the recycler, the Heart, whose voice was a low, steady beat under the greenhouse's ceiling. People walked past in thin jackets, shoulders hunched, pockets full of ration tokens. They glanced at the glass and at her, sometimes with gratitude, sometimes with something like suspicion—because growth meant water, and water was a ledger in bones.

“Morning, Iris.” Marla from distribution leaned against a rusted post, fingers worrying the strap of her bag. Her voice was sharp in a way that had nothing to do with anger, everything to do with keeping warm.

“You look tired,” Iris said, pulling a tray closer to the light. The plants sipped, veins of water creeping up their stems.

“Council cut rations two weeks early,” Marla said. The words were a small, bright sting. “Promised shipments didn’t arrive.” She tapped the side of her nose, a gesture that meant the outside had been quiet for a wrong kind of reason.

Iris kept her hands moving. She'd learned not to stop when conversations tilted toward fear. Still, beneath the mechanical rhythm of pruning and feeding, she felt a slackness her hands couldn't hide. The Heart's hum shifted once, a bright, brittle note like someone clearing a throat. It had started last week, a hiccup that technicians said was 'phase noise.'

When she went to check the optical readout, the screen pulsed a pale warning and then returned to the usual scrolling numbers. There was a small, stubborn line on the display: FILTER INTEGRITY 98%—then nothing. She rubbed at the corner of her eye and tasted salt. On the workbench, a photograph of a smaller hand slipping into hers sat under a jar of preserved seeds; the photo's edges had gone soft from being touched. Tavi's face in that picture—dirt under his nails, grin crooked—felt like a lever inside her chest. He'd been coughing more lately, and Marla's news made coughs sound like sentences.