The soil tasted like copper and ash.
Kira pressed her palm flat against the earth, feeling for the faint pulse of life beneath the dead brown crust. Her fingers came away streaked with black, the color of everything now, the color that had consumed the world three generations ago when the bombs fell and the sky split open like a wound that would never heal.
She whispered to the dirt anyway.
"Come back," she murmured, the same words her mother had spoken, the same words her grandmother had spoken before that, a chain of women stretching back to the Before, when this ground had been part of something called the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, reconstructed in the twenty-third century as a monument to what humanity could create instead of destroy.
Now it was the only green left on Earth, and it was dying.
Kira pulled her worn canvas gloves tighter and continued digging. The sun hung bloated and orange overhead, too close, too hot, leaking radiation like a sick thing that had forgotten how to die. Around her, the skeleton of the old greenhouse loomed, its glass long shattered, its metal bones rusted into a cage that trapped nothing but dust and memories.
She had counted them that morning. Seventeen plants left. Seventeen, down from twenty-three last month, down from the hundreds her grandmother had tended when the bombs first stopped falling and the survivors emerged from their bunkers blinking into a changed world.
Something moved in her peripheral vision. Kira's hand went to the knife at her belt, but it was only a rat, scuttling between the dead tomato vines. Its fur was patchy, its eyes clouded with the sickness that plagued everything now. It looked at her with something that might have been hunger, might have been recognition, might have been the same desperate plea she saw in the mirror every night.
"Not yet," she told it. "I'm not done yet."
The rat darted away, and Kira returned to her digging, her knees aching against the hard ground, her back screaming from hours of work that might amount to nothing. But she had learned from three generations of women who refused to surrender: you did the work anyway. You planted the seeds anyway. You spoke to the dirt and you hoped anyway, because hope was the only thing that grew in barren places, and to abandon it was to become as dead as the world around you.
