The Last Garden of Static

The greenhouse perched on the broken tram like an insect that had learned to sleep. Rust curled along the tram's eaves in orange waves; glass panes were stitched together with strips of patched plastic and a lattice of copper wire. Inside, Mirella Havel moved between rows of repurposed cans and hollowed-out engine blocks as if she knew every breathing thing by sound. Her fingers smelled of oil and peat; they knew the difference between a stem that wanted light and a bolt that wanted gentle persuasion.

Outside, the city lay folded under a bruise-colored sky. The towers were skeletons from a softer age, their bones netted with vines and hanging laundry. Wind carried the low, dry noise of sand against metal and, sometimes, the thin music of a distant radio—faded, erratic, like an echo caught between two breaths. Here, at the top of the tram, the world felt smaller and safer. Seeds slept in clay cups beneath waxed cloth. A single filament bulb hummed above the workbench where Mirella kept her clockwork—little scrap-built things whose ticks she tuned with the same care she tuned a sprout to a rhythm.

A ticking music box lay open on the bench, gears spread like a metal flower. She tuned a tiny brass tooth with a flat screwdriver, listening as the notes came together and the air grew thicker with the scent of moss. A sparrow-drone, sewn from scavenged lenses and rusty springs, alighted on a shelf and clicked its foot against the jar of water. It had learned to mimic real birds when she wound its wing.

"You'll wake the whole tram if you keep at that," Tomas said from the hatch. He was small, knuckled like a man who had worked wood before the world forgot wood existed. He carried a cup of hot, one-portion tea and set it down where the light pooled. His voice held the cautious humor of the old, the kind that learns to give small mercies instead of promises.

Mirella did not look up. "Good. Let it wake them," she said. The box answered with a plucked, bright phrase, the sort of sound that made the green leaves lean toward it. Outside, a scavenger's bell clanged once—three times—faint but precise. Tomas's hand tightened on the mug. He had the look of someone who had cataloged every way the city could disappoint a person.

She wiped her hands on a rag and stood. The tram swayed almost imperceptibly when distant engines moved; she felt the vibration in her boots. A scraped, printed poster on the inner wall showed a stylized acorn and a line of type: "SEED HOLDING — STATION VAULT: HARBOR NORTH." The paper was old, its edges eaten by rain and sun, but someone had pasted another note over it in handwriting that ran jagged and urgent: "Only one viable — guarded." Mirella's fingers curled around the edge of the bench. The noise of the city tightened like a string.