Ch. 70

Wyn, peering over her shoulder from the burned-out kitchen window, whistled low. “You think someone’s got a sense of humor, or are we still in enemy territory?”

Carolina snorted. “Does it matter most days?” She balanced the glassy pod between finger and thumb, marveling at its improbable weight, the way it caught the light. It looked like nothing she’d ever seen on the market or in the labyrinthine alleys of the undercity: a hybrid of technology and seedling, as if a newborn planet might burst from it if threatened or loved enough.

Lyra had taken up post at the roof hatch with a battered crossbow, eyes never leaving the horizon. The rest of the crew, those unlucky enough to be inside at dusk, orbited the windmill interior at a manageable velocity: running diagnostics, taking inventory, breaking and mending things in the old cycles of survival. Even Wyn, usually game for any oddity, hesitated before touching the seed. “You think it’s for the garden?” she asked.

“Or,” Xander countered, “for the grave.”

Carolina tucked the pod into a drawer behind the prescription bottles and surgical tape, with the same delicacy she used to stow away memory. “We’ll plant it when we need to.”

The matter resolved—though not solved—they retreated to the sanctum of the third-floor loft, where the walls bore Xander’s repairs and Wyn’s birds soared up and up, unbound by paint or gravity. They ate cold curry over boxed rice, sitting cross-legged on the floor, using chopsticks and arguing about nothing. The city outside had grown quiet, the lull before sunrise when even the predators slept.

As the meal dwindled, Xander dug his thumb into the hollow of her collarbone. “You look tired.”

Carolina made a face. “I always look tired. Occupational hazard.”

He spent a long moment watching her, as if she might vanish if he blinked. “Still. I could help.”

There was no room for pretense anymore. She let herself collapse into his lap, stretching her legs out, letting her head find his sternum. He smelled like ozone and grease and, beneath that, the gummy honey of sweat, which should have been repellent and instead was like coming home.

“You know,” she said, watching the battered ceiling fan turn, “we could leave. Tomorrow. Take the train to the coast. Disappear.”

“You could,” he corrected gently. “But you wouldn’t. Not unless you brought the city and everyone in it.”

She didn’t have a retort. Instead, she listened to his heartbeat, steady and real, the only clean music left after the war.

“So what do you want?” he asked quietly.

It was a question she’d spent her entire life dodging, camouflaging with purpose and triage. To say it plainly felt obscene, but she tried.

“More days like this. Fewer dead babies. Maybe—” Her voice caught, stupid with longing. “Maybe a garden.”

“That’s three things.”

She pinched his ribs. “Greedy.”

He caught her hand and pressed it to his mouth, kissing each crooked knuckle. “Stay greedy. We’ll need it.”

The power flickered, but held. Xander laughed, not unkindly: “For a moment, I thought the world had finally run out of juice.”

“Not a chance,” Carolina said, and kissed him, open and hungry, tasting the sharp edge of survival and the possibility of more.

They undressed each other without ceremony, shoving aside paperwork, spare utensils, the debris of ongoing crises. He slid his hands over the map of her body, pausing at the old surgical scars and fresh bruises, honoring each one with a lingering touch. The world outside could boil, or freeze, or collapse into itself, but in that patchwork loft, they were invulnerable.

When they moved together, it was less an act of erasure and more a spell of invocation: I am here, you are here, and no one—no machine, no government, no prophet of the old order—can take that from us. The pace was slow, every stutter and moan a radical assertion of life. Afterward, they lay tangled, sheets on the floor, still humming with static.

“I have a terrible confession,” Carolina said, poking at his ribs again.

He raised a suggestive eyebrow, already dreaming up repercussions. “Go on.”

“I never learned how to plant a vegetable. All those years making medicine and I can’t keep a single thing alive unless I can cut it or dose it.”

“We’ll start with something easy,” Xander decided. “Radishes. Or beans. Or those mutant tomatoes Wyn’s always talking about.”

“Radishes,” she repeated, testing it out. “Fine.”

He gathered her closer, the city stretching out beneath them in its wounded, radiant sprawl, and as she watched the lights flicker back on along the distant avenues, she allowed herself to believe in the magic of small, ordinary things: seeds, and sunrises, and the way his hand cupped her hip as if it were the most valuable thing in the world.

Somewhere, outside, a drone buzzed the border of the windmill’s field, then retreated. Carolina listened to its fading whine, and then to the soft hiss of Xander’s breath in her hair.

“You’re not tired anymore,” he murmured, fingers glancing over her ribs.

“No,” she said, and for the first time in years, she meant it.

They slept, and woke, and did it all again, each day a little less fragile than the one before.

The war would return. It always did. But for now, there was breath, and warmth, and the endless, improbable hope of a garden that survived the ashes.