Lida stood at her window and looked at the box and the soil packet in her hands.
The box was made of pressed ceramite and it was ugly. It sat on a ledge beneath her ground-floor window, bolted to the exterior wall with fasteners that a servitor had tightened without caring whether the box was level. It wasn't. The left side sat two centimetres lower than the right, and the drainage holes along the bottom were punched at uneven intervals. The box was grey, and the wall behind it was grey, and the ledge was grey. The golden light from the Webway turned everything slightly warm, and that was about it.
The packet was a rectangle of waxed paper, folded and sealed with a strip of adhesive that had a handwritten label on it in characters she couldn't read. Beneath the characters, someone had added a line in Low Gothic with a pen that had been running dry: "Marigold. Full sun or equivalent. Water when dry."
She'd taken the packet three weeks ago from a tall man who had been walking through the district with a canvas bag slung over one shoulder, handing out soil packets and seed bundles to anyone who would take them. He wore sandals and his hair was long and dark. He'd held the packet out to her with both hands. She'd said thank you and closed her door and put the packet on the shelf above her sink and left it there.
It had stayed on the shelf for three weeks. She looked at it every morning when she filled her cup from the tap, and every morning she thought about throwing it away, and every morning she put the cup down and went about her day and left the packet where it sat.
Today she picked it up.
She didn't know why today was different. The hab unit was the same, and the light through the window was the same, and the sounds from outside were the same – footsteps and voices and the distant hum of the ventilation system that cycled the Webway's air through filters and returned it at a temperature that was always slightly too warm. Nothing had changed, and she picked the packet up anyway and carried it to the window.
The soil was inside the packet, a compressed disc of dark material that expanded when she broke the seal and poured water over it. It smelled of earth. She hadn't smelled soil in seven years. The bunkers beneath the Ural Desolation had smelled of recycled air and sweat and the chemical tang of the water purification unit. The smell made her stop and hold the packet close to her face and just breathe.
Lida carried the soil to the window box and pressed it into the ceramite trough with her fingers. The box held enough for a thin layer across the bottom and a few centimetres of depth at the centre where the slope of the uneven mounting concentrated the material. She broke the compressed disc apart and spread it as evenly as she could and added more water from a cup she'd filled at the sink. The soil darkened as it absorbed the moisture and settled into the box's contours.
The seeds were in a smaller pouch inside the packet, a fold of paper that held perhaps two dozen small oval shapes the colour of dried grass. She tipped them into her palm and counted them. Twenty-three. She picked one up between her thumb and forefinger and held it to the light and looked at it, and then she pressed it into the soil about a centimetre deep and covered it and moved her finger to the right and pressed another seed in beside the first.
She planted all twenty-three in two rows across the box's width, spacing them as evenly as she could without a ruler. The spacing was imperfect. Some seeds sat closer together than others, and the second row curved slightly where her hand had drifted. She pressed the soil flat over the last seed and wiped her hands on the cloth she kept beside the sink and looked at the box.
Brown soil in a grey box under golden light, and the window behind it reflected her face, thin and older than it should've been, and the room behind her – small and clean and empty of anything that hadn't been issued by the logistics corps when she arrived. A cot, a shelf, a sink, and a chair. The chair had a cushion on it that she'd traded for at the market, and that was the only object in the room she'd chosen for herself.
She watered the soil again, and then she closed the window and sat in the chair and put her hands in her lap.
The dirt under her fingernails was dark. She hadn't had dirt under her fingernails since before the bunkers. The last time had been in the yard outside the hab-stack in Chelyabinsk-4, where she'd kept a planter of kitchen herbs on the landing of the third-floor stairwell. Basil and dill and a stubborn rosemary that refused to die despite the fact that the stairwell got approximately forty minutes of direct sunlight per day through a window that was permanently fogged with condensation. Of course, the rosemary outlived the building. Chelyabinsk-4 was glass now, or rubble. She hadn't gone back to look.
Lida sat in the chair until the dimming cycle started and the golden light through the window faded to a low amber. Then she ate a ration bar and drank a cup of water and lay on the cot and looked at the ceiling until she slept.
The second day started the way every day started. The light came back, and Lida woke, and she filled her cup at the sink and drank it standing up.
She went to the window before she did anything else.
The soil was the same, brown and flat and slightly damp from yesterday's watering. Nothing had come up. She looked at the box for a while, and then she went about her day.
She walked to the distribution centre four blocks south and collected her weekly ration allotment – protein packs, a bag of dried grain, a vacuum-sealed pouch of vegetables from the hydroponic bays on the city's eastern edge, and a small container of salt that she measured carefully because she used it on everything. She carried the rations back in a cloth bag and sorted them onto her shelf and folded the bag and placed it beside the sink.
She cleaned the hab unit even though it didn't need cleaning – wiped the shelf and the sink and the surface of the small table she used for eating and swept the floor with a broom made of synthetic bristles that someone in the market district had assembled from salvaged materials and sold for two ration tokens. The sweeping took four minutes. The floor was already clean.
She walked to the fountain plaza and sat on a bench and watched people. Two boys ran past, both of them screaming. A woman carrying two bags of vegetables from the hydroponic section stopped to adjust her grip and a man she apparently knew took one of the bags without asking and they walked together toward the residential blocks. Two workers in maintenance coveralls knelt beside an open panel in the boulevard's surface and argued about something involving a pipe junction.
The old man was on his bench. The same bench, on the plaza's south side, where the fountain's spray caught the light and threw small prisms across the stone. He sat with his hands folded in his lap and his back straight, watching the same foot traffic Lida watched from her side of the plaza. His name was Pyotr.
She left the plaza when the light began its afternoon shift and walked back to her hab unit and stopped at the window box.
The soil was dry at the surface, and she watered it. The water darkened the soil and pooled in the slight depression at the box's centre. She watched the water soak in and disappear, and she went inside and ate and slept.
The third day, Lida filled her cup at the sink and drank it standing up and went to the window.
A green shoot stood in the soil near the centre of the box, where the second seed in the first row had been planted. It was small. The stem was thinner than a matchstick and perhaps three centimetres tall, rising from the soil at a slight angle, and two seed leaves spread from its tip, oval and pale green and each one smaller than her thumbnail. They had a faint sheen to them.
Lida set her cup on the ledge and looked at the shoot.
She looked at it for a long time. She leaned forward until her face was close enough to see the fine texture of the seed leaves and the thin white hairs along the stem where it came out of the soil. The shoot was ordinary. It was a marigold seedling; she'd grown them before in the stairwell planter in Chelyabinsk-4, alongside the basil and the dill and the rosemary. She knew what it would become if it survived – a stocky plant with toothed leaves and round flowers in shades of orange and yellow that smelled peppery and sharp. She'd grown dozens of them.
She kept looking at it.
The golden light from the Webway fell on the shoot and the seed leaves caught it and held it, and the sheen was there. The green was a little more gold than it should've been. She tilted her head and the sheen shifted, and she straightened and it came back.
She watered the soil around the shoot, careful not to disturb the stem, pouring from the cup in a thin stream directed to the edges of the box. The water soaked in, and the shoot didn't move. She set the cup down and went to sit in her chair and realised she didn't want to sit in the chair, and she went back to the window and looked at the shoot again.
She was still looking at it when the knock came at her door.
Pyotr stood in the corridor with his hands clasped behind his back and his chin tilted slightly upward. He wore the same clothes he always wore – the drab coveralls of the labour corps with the sleeves rolled to the elbows and a pair of soft shoes that had been resoled at least twice. His face was lined and brown and his hair was white and cut close to his skull.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning," Lida said.
Pyotr shifted his weight. "Did yours sprout?"
Lida stepped aside and gestured toward the window. Pyotr walked past her and stopped at the box and looked down at the shoot with his hands still clasped behind his back.
"Mine came up yesterday," he said. "Two of them, in the box on my east wall. I planted them the same day you did, I think. I saw you from my bench."
"I didn't know you'd planted any," Lida said.
"Yeah, I almost didn't." Pyotr bent at the waist and brought his face closer to the shoot. "Is it glowing?"
Lida came to stand beside him. They both looked at the shoot. The seed leaves held their faint golden sheen, and it was there whether you looked for it or not.
"I think so," she said. "A little."
"Mine do too," Pyotr said. He straightened and folded his arms. "The leaves. Just a little gold in them. I thought my eyes were going, but it's there. I held a lamp next to one and the glow didn't change. It's not reflected light; it's coming from inside the leaf."
They stood side by side at the window box, and somewhere in the distance the ventilation system cycled, and a child's voice carried from another block.
"Do you think the other seeds will come up?" Lida asked.
"Probably. Some of them." Pyotr unfolded his arms and put his hands in his pockets. "I planted fourteen. Two came up. The rest might follow, or they might not. Seeds are like that."
"I planted twenty-three."
"Then you'll have more than me, assuming a reasonable rate."
Lida looked at the shoot again. The two seed leaves stood open to the golden light, small and pale and faintly luminous, and the thin stem held them steady.
"The man who gave them out," she said. "The tall one; with the dark hair."
"I know who you mean."
"Do you know who he is?"
Pyotr's mouth worked for a moment.
"I asked a maintenance worker," he said. "She said he's the one who built the fountain. And the trees along the eastern boulevard. And the gardens in the upper district. She said he grew them out of the ground with his hands."
"I mean... that's not really possible, is it."
"No," Pyotr said. "But the trees are there. And, quite frankly, growing trees out of the ground would be the tamest thing I’ve seen since the siege. So..."
Lida chuckled. “I guess I should just be happy for the little miracles.”
—
High above the Human Webway, Hashirama felt the growth of plantlife and smiled.
This... this made everything worth it.