Seed of the Lattice

Rin woke to the slow pulse of the station: a gentle vibration under her ribs that had nothing to do with her heart. The hum was a recall she carried like a lullaby—fans, pumps, the soft tick of reclaimed water in its arteries. Outside the porthole the planet hung like a pale coin, rimmed with cloud. Inside, the Lattice breathed.

She pushed her palms into warm substrate and felt the give of roots, the grainy comfort of packed biofoam around a stem. The smell was nothing like Earth—salt and metal and a green, chlorophyll tang that made her chest ache with a private homesickness. Tib, a maintenance orb no bigger than her fist, hovered close and blinked in a language of blue dots.

"Morning, Tin-thing," she said, using the nickname her brother had given the drone. Tib replied with a chirp that sounded like a saved joke. He had a slurry of dried spores on one lens; Rin swiped them away with the heel of her hand. She knew every groove in the Lattice by touch. She knew where the sap ran slow and where the microfilaments tensed in cold. Her job—her ritual—was to read the garden like a patient.

The Lattice had been grown from seed-skins older than most of the crew. It spiraled from floor to ceiling, panels of leaves stacked like the pages of a book. Light bands slid up and down their ribs, mimicking seasons the station had never had. Children from the habitation decks came to press their faces against safety glass and count the petals. Engineers named the cultivar Mir-5 after a myth and the technician who coaxed the first samples to sprout. Mir-5 smelled of lemon rind and old rain; Mir-5 balanced the microflora cycles that kept the atmosphere smooth for three life rings of the station. That was the sort of fact everyone learned and forgot until it mattered.

Rin moved through the aisles with a practiced economy—two-meter step, hand on the railing, knee almost grazing the mist lines. She hummed under her breath, a rhythm that matched the irrigation sequencers. A young volunteer scurried past in coveralls too big for him, clutching a tray of transplants. "Careful with the hydra roots," she called. "Fold the light mesh, not the stolon."

He grinned back, cheeks flushed with the station's recycled warmth, and tipped the tray like it was a sacred offering. The glass above reflected the turquoise of the grow lights. Somewhere behind the maintenance barricade the central processors kept records, logs of every nutrient cocktail and every sap pH shift. Records meant nothing in the damp dark if no one felt the plants' weight in their hands. Rin preferred the feel.