Verdant Tide

Salt and earth and the metallic tang of old engines lived together in Greenhold like siblings who had stopped arguing and learned to share the same roof. Vines braided themselves through rivets and braces; an ancient ferry hull lay on its side and inside it a tangle of hydroponic racks steamed faintly in the humid glow of salvaged lamps. Morning came in a slow silver that stuck to the skin of hands that worked the way hands had to be worked now: with a mixture of tenderness and blunt force. Mara's palms knew every groove of the sluice valves, every hairline fracture at the base of the nutrient tanks. She could tell which pump would cough next by the way the morning algae arranged itself along the intake grate.

A child's voice called from the lettuce beds—thin and hopeful.

"Mara? Are the tomatoes ok?"

Sera, ten and stubborn as driftwood, cupped a limp leaf like a treasure. Mara wiped grease on her trouser leg and smiled a tired thing that passed for cheer. "We'll see. Don't let the chickens eat the seedlings today."

Kito, bent like a question mark and forever smelling faintly of solder and tobacco, sat before the Verdant Core as if it were a hearth. The Core was a squat cylinder of composite and old-world alloys that hummed under a coat of braided vines. It wasn't a miracle so much as a carefully maintained machine and a long list of favors owed to people who still knew how to weld precisely. Kito's hands moved with a memory that had nothing to do with education and everything to do with the hundreds of nights he'd slept under its faint blue glow.

The Core coughed.

It was a small, stubborn noise: a hiccup of current that made a puddle of light wobble across the glass. Kito's jaw tightened. The community had patched leaks before. They had patched hunger and patched frost, but the Core kept time with the whole place; when it faltered the tanks cooled, the humidity fell, the seedlings — the seeds themselves — went tinder.

Mara's chest went hollow in a way that felt like naming a fear aloud. She leaned in, fingers ghosting the metal; the surface carried the faint afterheat of someone else's palm. Around them, the greenhouse's air tasted of iron and sweet rot. Children on the upper deck stopped their games and listened, because adults always listened to the Core when it spoke.

Kito said, without looking up, "We can nurse it a few days if we ration. But if the pulse drops below six cycles—this sort of core doesn't like to be coaxed back. It needs the regulator coil from a city model. Haven's server mentioned a field unit."

Haven. The name was a geography of rumor: a coastal complex half-sunken beyond the glass-forest where towers still kept their ghosts. Houses told stories to their children about the machines still humming there. To older people it was a map of possibility. To Mara it became, in the span of heartbeats, a place that might hold the one part that could keep Greenhold breathing through the season.