Rani Westwood
Part 1
The sky had not been blue in seventeen years.
People still talked about the last clear morning in whispers, like it was a folk tale passed down through ash-coated generations. They said the light used to feel warm, not searing. That clouds were once white and fluffy, not permanent smears of smoke stretching from one side of the horizon to the other. But I was born three years after the Last Sky, so to me, the world had always been grey.
I adjusted the oxygen mask over my face and tightened the seals of my jacket. The government-issued “Surface Survival Gear” came in three sizes and smelled like burning rubber, but it kept you from breathing in the toxic particulates that floated in the air like snowflakes from hell. Today was my first official trip outside the Dome. I had trained for months, passed every test. At seventeen, I was the youngest Atmospheric Collector in District V-12.
Beside me, Saira adjusted the drone pack. Her voice crackled through the comm-link. “Make sure your filters are set to triple density. Forecast says soot concentration is peaking.”
“Already done,” I replied, my breath a hiss inside the mask.
She nodded once and pressed the access pad. The Dome hissed and groaned as the outer gate released. A blinding orange glow leaked in—filtered sunlight distorted by the ever-present smoke layer.
Outside, the world looked like the bones of a dying animal—charred trees, shattered roads, and the blackened ruins of a city that once glittered on the coast. We stepped out together, boots crunching over broken glass and ash. The air felt thick even through the mask. Every breath was a reminder that this wasn’t our world anymore. We were just temporary guests, scavenging from its remains.
Our destination was the Ridge, a ten-minute walk up a slope where the old communication tower still stood. It offered the best atmospheric readings in the sector—what little data the drones couldn’t pick up. As we moved uphill, Saira spoke again.
“Did you hear what they’re saying about Sector W?”
“No,” I replied.
“They found a pocket of blue moss. Like the ones from the archives. Photosynthesis-active. Real growth. Not engineered.”
I stopped in my tracks. “That’s not possible.”
“Apparently it is. And not just a few patches—an entire grove.”
Hope was a dangerous thing in this world. It was easy to confuse rumors with miracles. But Saira wasn’t a dreamer. If she believed it, it might just be true.
The Ridge tower loomed ahead like a metal skeleton. Its limbs were twisted, scorched by firestorms, but the upper panel still collected wind data. I climbed the steps carefully, metal creaking under my weight. From the top, I could see farther than usual—visibility stretched beyond the collapsed bridges and rusted train lines to the dead ocean in the west.
“I can’t stop thinking,” I said over the link, “that we could’ve prevented this. That someone should’ve.”
Saira didn’t answer right away. “Everyone says that. But they said it too late.”
We calibrated the air sensors and launched two sample drones. One of them sputtered mid-flight and nose-dived into a ravine. I made a note to retrieve it on our way back. Data from the surviving unit showed spiked methane levels and increasing radiation signatures. Same as last week. Same as always.
“I wonder,” I said softly, “what the sky looked like before.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Saira said. “I was five when it happened. I remember a park near our old apartment. The sky was so clear, and the grass—it was real, not hydro-polymer. Green like—like you’ve never seen.”
She rarely talked about the past. I didn’t press.
As we finished collecting samples, my wrist monitor beeped—a message from the Dome.
“Return Immediately. Atmospheric breach reported near Perimeter East. Protocol Red. Evacuation in progress.”
“Shit,” I muttered. “That’s close.”
We ran.
The air thickened as we descended the Ridge, the sky shifting from orange to a deep, smoky brown. My lungs screamed even through the filters. Saira’s voice was sharp in my ear. “There—see that glow?”
A column of black fire rose beyond the hills. Perimeter East was burning again. These weren’t ordinary wildfires; they were oil-field infernos buried beneath centuries of sediment, now exposed by decades of erosion and storms. When they caught fire, they didn’t stop.
We reached the Dome just as the fire alarms wailed through the outer wall. Evac teams in full gear were loading people into shelters. A section of the wall looked warped, the outer seal peeling like melted plastic.
The last thing I saw before we went into lockdown was a bird.
A real one. Thin, black, its wings ragged but strong. It flew across the toxic sky like it remembered something we didn’t. And for a moment, I didn’t care about the fire. I didn’t care about the smoke or the alarms or the data readings.
For a moment, I believed the world could still remember how to breathe.
Part 2
The emergency lights turned everything inside the Dome red. It wasn’t the crimson of sunsets or blood, but the cold kind that pulsed through hallways like a heartbeat, warning us that we were not safe—not even here, in humanity’s last glass lung.
The Dome sealed with a hydraulic sigh, and the filtration systems began their thunderous work. I pulled off my helmet and inhaled recycled air. It smelled faintly of lemon disinfectant and static electricity.
“Another perimeter breach,” Saira said as she removed her gloves. Her face was pale, the ash lines still visible across her cheeks. “That’s three in a month.”
“They can’t keep patching it up with old alloy and hope it holds,” I muttered.
We headed down the corridor to the Decontamination Bay. A spray of antiseptic mist coated us from all angles—dehumanizing but necessary. If even one microspore from the ash got into the air vents, it could spread the Lungrot fungus in hours. There had been outbreaks before. Not everyone survived.
“Hey,” Saira said, glancing sideways as we walked, “you saw it too, didn’t you?”
“The bird?”
She nodded.
“It wasn’t a drone,” I said. “It flapped wrong. Like it was… alive.”
We both knew what that meant. The world hadn’t seen natural avian life since the Collapse. All major species either migrated away or died in the smog. The thought that one had survived—or returned—felt impossible. Yet we had both seen it.
I didn’t say what I was really thinking. If a bird could live out there, maybe the rumors were true. Maybe Sector W wasn’t just another false hope passed around the Dome to distract us from the present. Maybe something was growing.
We reached the Research Wing just as a crowd gathered outside Command. Everyone’s voices overlapped—fear, confusion, protocol updates. I recognized Director Varma’s crisp tone cutting through the noise.
“We cannot risk another breach reaching the central reactor. The firestorm’s radius is expanding faster than forecast. Atmospheric collapse could follow.”
Atmospheric collapse. The phrase made my chest tighten. If the Dome lost pressure or the filtration systems overloaded, even for a few minutes, the air would become unbreathable. We weren’t built to live on a dying planet—we had simply delayed the death sentence.
Varma turned as she saw us approach. Her eyes, sharp beneath her silver-streaked hair, flicked to the sample case in my hand. “Report?”
“Readings from the Ridge,” I said, handing her the device. “Methane up, radiation steady. Drone 2 was lost, possibly to wind shear.”
She nodded, scanning the data. “And?”
“I… we saw a bird,” I said quietly.
Her eyebrows arched. “A drone?”
“No. Real wings. Real feathers.”
For a moment, she said nothing. Then she gestured toward the lab. “Come with me.”
Inside the lab, the air smelled of ionized plastic and old books. Screens buzzed with live data—maps, projections, oxygen charts. Varma led us to a smaller room and locked the door behind us. Only then did she speak.
“You’re not the first to see it.”
Saira and I looked at each other.
Varma continued. “Three sightings this week alone, all in adjacent sectors. Wildlife drones have been picking up faint heat signatures inconsistent with mechanical movement. And that’s not all.”
She tapped on the table’s console. A hologram flickered into view—green, lush, alive. Plants. Vines. Trees.
Real ones.
“This is Sector W. A deep basin beyond the northern highlands. Once thought completely scorched, now showing signs of spontaneous regrowth. We’ve confirmed photosynthetic activity.”
My knees felt weak. “Why haven’t we sent a team?”
“We have. Two. Neither returned.”
Silence spread like fog between us.
“We don’t know if it’s safe,” she said. “Whatever is happening there—it’s not just rebirth. It’s evolution. The biosphere is mutating.”
“You think it’s dangerous,” Saira said.
“I think it’s different,” Varma replied. “And different is unpredictable.”
I stared at the images. A forest in the middle of a wasteland. The impossible made real.
“You want to send us,” I said slowly.
Varma nodded. “You’ve both survived surface excursions. You’re young, sharp, and you’ve seen what’s out there. We need confirmation. And if Sector W is truly recovering—we need to understand how.”
“When?” Saira asked.
“Three days. You’ll go in stealth, off-grid. No radio contact until you reach the observation post.”
The air felt suddenly thinner. I wasn’t afraid of the surface—that had been trained out of me—but the unknown? The possibility that everything we knew about Earth’s death was wrong?
“We’ll go,” I said before Saira could speak.
She looked at me, surprised, but didn’t argue. Her eyes flicked back to the projection.
Outside, alarms were still wailing. The Dome had become our prison and our sanctuary, but if there was even a sliver of green left on this earth, then maybe—just maybe—there was still a future worth chasing.
Even if it meant walking straight into the ashes of tomorrow.
Part 3
The journey began before dawn—not that anyone could tell. The sky outside the Dome was a perpetual bruised amber, flickering with static from distant storms. We left through Gate Four, the least monitored and the most likely to remain unnoticed. Only Varma and a handful of senior engineers knew about the mission.
Saira and I wore upgraded gear, lighter and sleeker, with additional oxygen reserves and real-time environmental monitors built into our visors. Our packs held nutrient gels, water condensers, and encrypted data recorders. Most important of all: the soil scanner. If we found even a square meter of viable earth, it would change everything.
Sector W was more than 80 kilometers from Dome V-12. A drone could cover it in three hours. On foot, with full gear and toxic terrain, it would take four days. No contact until the observation post. No support if we failed.
As we walked across the old freeway—now cracked and covered in soot—Saira spoke softly, her voice grainy in my headset.
“Why did you agree so quickly?”
“I didn’t want to hesitate,” I said. “Not when it mattered.”
She nodded, but her silence afterward felt heavy. We had both lost family to the air. My mother died when I was ten. One breath during a filtration lapse, and her lungs collapsed. Saira’s brother had gone outside to find spare parts for their vent regulator. He never returned.
We moved through the ruins of what had once been a town—signs faded, windows broken, cars turned to skeletons of metal and rust. Nature hadn’t reclaimed anything here. There was no green, no wild rebirth. Only the slow, bitter decay of everything human.
At midday, we stopped in the shell of an old diner. Inside, beneath a collapsed ceiling, was a cracked tile floor covered in black moss. Not the kind we wanted—this was the toxic kind, feeding off ash and blood.
We scanned it anyway.
“No growth change,” Saira said. “Same mutagenic strain as District N.”
“Keep going,” I replied.
The sun—or what passed for it—burned higher in the haze as we left the diner. Time blurred on the road. Our boots kicked up dust that clung to our suits like guilt. My legs ached. My water ration tasted of recycled plastic. But still, we walked.
By the second day, the silence began to feel alive.
It wasn’t just the absence of sound. It was the presence of watching. As though the earth itself, dormant and furious, waited for something to touch it again. I felt it in the tremors beneath my soles, in the gusts of wind that came from nowhere. Even the air changed—it wasn’t cleaner, but it was different. Charged.
That night, we camped inside a tilted railcar. I couldn’t sleep. Through the cracked window, I saw it again.
A bird.
Small. Black. Sharp-winged.
It landed on a rusted signpost outside the train and tilted its head, watching us. Then it let out a sound—not quite a chirp, not quite a cry—and flew off into the darkness.
“Saira,” I whispered. “You awake?”
“Yeah,” she replied immediately. “I saw it too.”
“Same kind?”
She nodded slowly. “They’re not afraid of the ash.”
We didn’t talk after that. What could we say? The world was moving without us now. Changing in ways we no longer understood.
On the third day, the landscape shifted.
The ash wasn’t as thick. The air monitor beeped with minor elevation in oxygen concentration. It shouldn’t have been possible this far from the Dome. My pulse quickened.
Saira ran a scan. “Look at this,” she said.
The soil beneath our feet showed nitrogen. Real nitrogen. Trace amounts, but clean. Uncontaminated.
“Something is growing here,” I said.
By sunset, we saw it.
The ridge of Sector W rose in the distance, and along its base—just barely visible—was a green shimmer.
Not bright. Not lush. But real.
Vines.
Saira’s hand gripped my arm. “Tell me I’m not imagining this.”
“You’re not.”
As we descended into the basin, the temperature dropped. It was cooler here, even pleasant. The ash in the air was lighter. We removed our helmets—cautiously.
And breathed.
The air tasted like rust and old stone. But beneath that—life. Damp, wild, unfiltered.
We knelt beside the vines. They wound around the ruins of a fence, tiny blue-green leaves trembling in the wind. I touched one with my bare fingers. It didn’t wither. It didn’t burn.
It held my touch like memory.
Behind the vines, the forest began.
It wasn’t tall. The trees were twisted, the bark veined with streaks of silver, the leaves an unnatural green. But it was a forest. A real one.
We had found Sector W.
Saira turned on the scanner. Her eyes were wide behind the visor glass. “Photosynthetic rate is off the charts. CO₂ conversion. Chlorophyll markers. And—”
She stopped.
“What?”
“There’s movement.”
We looked deeper into the forest. Between two trees, something passed. Not a bird. Not human.
Something else.
Alive.
We turned off our lights and waited.
The forest breathed.
The air pulsed with warmth and warning. We had stepped into something ancient. Something reborn.
Something that remembered a time before the ash.
And maybe—just maybe—something that wanted it back.
Part 4
We entered the forest in silence, as if speaking too loudly might wake something older than sound. The air was warm and strangely fragrant—not floral, but earthy and dense, like rain on scorched bark. Every few steps, our boots crunched on something that looked like dried fruit skins and brittle leaves, but when I bent to touch them, they dissolved like ash between my fingers.
“This isn’t regrowth,” Saira murmured. “It’s transformation.”
The trees around us didn’t look like anything from the archival databases. Their trunks were dark grey, almost black, with soft ridges like breathing skin. Some glowed faintly from within, like veins beneath thin flesh. And the leaves—those trembling blue-green leaves—hummed when the wind moved. It wasn’t sound, exactly. It was vibration. As if the forest was tuning itself to us.
We followed a narrow path carved between two root systems, not sure if it was made by animal, wind, or something else. Our visors recorded everything. If we ever made it back, this data would rewrite ecological science.
“See that?” Saira whispered.
To our left, a tree leaned low to the ground. At its base, pale mushrooms sprouted in concentric rings, each one shaped like a spiral. A bird pecked at the spores, unfazed by our presence. When it flew off, its wings shed iridescent dust that shimmered briefly, then vanished.
I lowered the scanner. “No toxins. No infection markers. All readings show harmony.”
She didn’t look up. “Nature doesn’t do harmony anymore.”
“Maybe it’s learning again.”
We moved deeper. It was hard to tell time inside the forest. The sky, already hidden by smoke, had vanished completely behind the strange canopy. But we didn’t feel tired. Not exactly. It was more like the forest was giving us energy. Calibrating us.
We reached the ruins just before we thought we’d have to stop.
An old building stood at the edge of a clearing. Half-collapsed, covered in vines and tree roots, but recognizable: a research outpost from the Old Climate Division. The Dome had records of these. Most were abandoned a decade before the Collapse. This one had survived—barely.
We entered through a broken wall. Inside, it was cool and dry. Dust lay thick on consoles, paper files, and shattered screens. The air tasted ancient.
“This must be the observation post Varma mentioned,” I said, shining my light across the room.
Saira picked up a data chip half-buried in moss. “Still intact. We can decrypt it back at Dome.”
I checked the solar array outside. Broken, but the backup battery was functional. I rigged the power unit to charge from our packs. Soon, the system hummed to life. A screen flickered. Lines of garbled code appeared, then a prompt.
Voice Log: 0039
Dr. Indira Sayal
static-laced voice came through the speakers. A woman. Calm, tired.
“Day 272. The trees aren’t just growing—they’re listening. I don’t know how to explain it yet. The air’s cleaner here, but not because of any tech. It’s like the plants are filtering the atmosphere themselves, faster than our systems ever could.”
We froze. Sayal’s voice was raw with awe.
“We tried replicating the growth patterns back at Sector C. Failed every time. Something in the soil here… it remembers. It adapts. When we brought the samples outside the zone, they withered. As if the forest knew they were being taken. As if…”
A pause.
“…as if it had boundaries. And intentions.”
The recording cut off.
Saira looked at me. “That voice log was twenty-three years old.”
I exhaled. “And no one ever followed up.”
“They couldn’t. The Collapse hit before she could transmit her findings.”
Outside, the hum of the forest deepened. I stepped into the clearing and stood still, letting the air move around me. It wasn’t just wind. It was intelligent. Intentional. I could feel it examining me the way a doctor might, measuring breath, pulse, weight.
Then I heard it.
Not a sound.
A message.
In my chest, not my ears.
A single word.
“Return.”
I staggered back.
Saira caught me. “What happened?”
“I think…” My voice shook. “I think it spoke to me.”
“You heard something?”
“Felt it. It said… return.”
“To what?”
“I don’t know.”
We spent the night inside the outpost, barely sleeping. The forest glowed softly through the broken windows, casting pale green light on our suits. Our sensors buzzed quietly, not in alarm, but in activity. Everything here was alive. Connected.
At dawn—or what we assumed was dawn—we stepped out again, ready to begin the sample collection.
Saira pointed toward a patch of strange ferns. “Let’s try soil and plant samples here.”
I knelt and began scanning, extracting tiny bits with the micro-lab tools. The readings were clean. No radiation, no ash residues. Just oxygen-rich, nitrogen-dense, reborn earth.
Then I saw it again.
The same bird.
But this time, it wasn’t alone.
There were dozens of them. Perched on branches. Watching.
And beneath them, something moved.
Not animals.
People.
Or at least… they looked like people.
Part 5
They stepped through the mist with silent feet, half-shadowed by the green shimmer of the forest. My first instinct was to reach for the tranquilizer rod in my pack, but Saira stopped me with a hand on my wrist.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “They’re not… hostile.”
I wasn’t sure what they were at all.
There were five of them, each cloaked in vines and bark-colored fabric that blended with the trees. Their faces were human, or close to it—skin pale like paper, hair wild and tangled, eyes luminous in the green half-light. They looked too young and too old at the same time, like something had kept them alive while the rest of the world died.
One of them stepped forward—a woman, perhaps in her forties, though her presence felt ancient. Her gaze settled on us with neither fear nor curiosity. Just… recognition.
“We’ve been waiting,” she said.
Her voice wasn’t transmitted through my headset. It bypassed the tech completely, landing in my skull like a memory long forgotten. I could feel Saira stiffen beside me. She’d heard it too.
“You’re from the Dome,” the woman continued. “But you were born after the Fall. You’ve never seen the world whole.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“We remember,” she said simply.
I took a careful step forward. “Who are you?”
She smiled faintly. “We are what remains. What grew back. The forest made us something… different.”
Saira found her voice. “That’s not possible. Human physiology can’t adapt like that.”
“No,” the woman agreed. “But the forest doesn’t obey the old rules. It never did.”
They led us deeper into the grove. No threats, no weapons—just silence and eyes that never blinked. As we walked, the forest seemed to lean in. The light brightened slightly. Petals fell from invisible heights and dissolved midair. The air was warm, wet, and almost musical.
They brought us to a clearing where a structure stood—grown, not built. It looked like a cathedral sculpted from roots and vines. Its ceiling swayed gently with the wind, leaves shifting like stained glass.
Inside, there were beds of moss. Crystalline water ran down living walls into a shallow pool. Children—real children—laughed somewhere just out of sight.
“You’re survivors,” I said. “From the old world?”
The woman nodded. “Some of us were. Some were born here.”
“But how? There’s no record of this. No one’s made contact in two decades.”
“Because we never left.”
Saira stepped forward, visibly shaken. “Why didn’t you try to reconnect with the Domes?”
The woman’s expression softened. “Because they would try to fix us. Or worse—study us.”
She wasn’t wrong.
The Dome viewed anything unknown as a threat or a resource. There was no room for mystery—only control.
“But the planet—” I began. “It’s still dying. Fires, ash storms, atmospheric collapse—”
“Not here,” she interrupted. “Here, the forest has begun again. It rewrote itself. It rewrote us.”
“You’ve changed.”
“Yes,” she said. “And soon, you will too.”
I took a step back. “What?”
“It’s already begun. The air, the spores, the trees—they’ve touched you.”
My skin tingled. My breath felt deeper. My senses… sharper.
Saira looked down at her gloved hand. “I haven’t been tired since we entered. I haven’t needed food.”
“Adaptation,” the woman said. “The forest tests who is ready. You passed.”
“For what?”
“To remember.”
We sat with them that evening, on mossy benches, surrounded by fireflies that didn’t burn. They told us stories—not with words, but with images projected directly into our minds. Visions of cities swallowed by flame, of oceans turned to salt and silence. But also of green. Of survival. Of a world that refused to die quietly.
The forest had learned from our destruction. It had watched, absorbed, and reshaped itself. It had built a sanctuary not just from earth—but from memory.
“Will you come back?” the woman asked me as we prepared to sleep.
“To the Dome?”
She nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “They need to know.”
Her gaze turned distant. “Be careful. Not all truth is welcome. Especially when it threatens control.”
I understood then.
We had been sent to confirm life.
But what we found was far more dangerous.
We found hope.
And hope, in the wrong hands, could be a weapon.
That night, I dreamt without fear for the first time in my life. I stood beneath a sky that was blue, a real blue, and rain fell—soft and cleansing. I opened my mouth and drank it in.
When I awoke, the forest was singing.
Part 6
The forest gave us three days.
Three days of breath without filters. Of sleep without sirens. Of waking to birdsong instead of alarm klaxons. It felt like borrowed time, and maybe it was. On the fourth morning, the woman—her name was Lira, we’d learned—stood at the edge of the mossy grove and said, “It’s time.”
She placed a bundle in my hands: soil sealed in a glass cylinder, lined with living roots. “This will survive your journey. Don’t let them cut it.”
Saira stood beside me, her scanner repacked, our gear dusted clean. She was quieter than usual, as if afraid words might break the spell we were walking away from. But her eyes stayed sharp. She hadn’t stopped recording since the moment we’d entered Sector W.
“Do you want us to bring anyone back?” I asked Lira. “Others like us—who want to believe?”
Lira shook her head. “No. Not yet. If they come, let them come as you did—not because they’re told to, but because they’re ready to listen.”
I didn’t argue. I understood now—this wasn’t a discovery to be broadcast. It was a secret waiting for the world to earn it.
We left before the second sunstrike hour, the forest bowing around us like a closing book. Birds followed our path until the tree line faded. The air grew harsher as we ascended the ridge. The old world returned with each step: the weight, the dryness, the smell of old rust and human failure. We reactivated our filters, resealed our visors, and didn’t speak until we were halfway back to the Dome.
“Are you going to give them everything?” Saira asked as we camped beneath a bent radio tower.
“Not everything,” I replied.
“Same.”
We exchanged a glance. The bond between us had deepened—not just from surviving the journey, but from sharing the knowledge that we’d seen something no one else in our generation had ever imagined.
Hope alive.
By the end of the fourth day, the Dome’s outer perimeter glinted in the smoke—a pale, sickly silver against the brown-grey sky. My legs ached, my throat stung, but I moved faster with every step. We had made it back.
As we approached Gate Four, the automated sentries scanned our vitals. There was a moment of hesitation—my pulse was different, slightly elevated, and Saira’s oxygen levels were too high. We exchanged a quick look.
“We’re fine,” I said into the comm port. “Just environmental stimulation from Sector W.”
A pause. Then the gate hissed open.
Inside, the air felt heavier. The light dimmer. The Dome, once a fortress of salvation, now felt like a cage. Still, I didn’t let my face show it. Not yet.
Director Varma met us in the debriefing chamber, her sharp eyes scanning our soot-covered gear and weather-beaten faces.
“You made it,” she said flatly, but I saw the flicker of something beneath the surface. Relief? Respect?
“We have data,” Saira said, handing over the drives. “Atmospheric readings. Biological samples. Soil recovery rates.”
“And?” Varma asked, eyes on me.
I held up the sealed glass cylinder. “It’s not just growing. It’s thriving. The forest is filtering the air, generating oxygen, fixing nitrogen. It’s alive—and conscious.”
“You’re saying it’s sentient?”
“Not like us,” I said. “But yes. It adapts. It protects itself. It remembers.”
Varma took the vial gently, like it might explode. “And the reports of survivors?”
“They’re not rumors,” Saira said. “We met them. They’ve adapted—symbiotically. Physically and psychologically.”
Varma’s mouth tightened. “And they let you leave?”
“They wanted us to.”
That stopped her.
We were sent back to our quarters with instructions not to speak to anyone. Our rooms were scanned. Our blood taken. I suspected every word we spoke from now on would be recorded.
That night, I lay awake staring at the ceiling fan that didn’t spin. The Dome felt louder. Artificial. Every hum of machinery, every recycled breath, every light panel flickering overhead—it all felt wrong.
I opened the pouch on my belt and took out the smallest thing I had smuggled back.
A seed.
It was no larger than a fingernail. Soft green, wrapped in a tissue made from leaf fiber. I held it in my palm and felt warmth radiating from it—not imagined. Real.
I planted it in a corner of my floor beneath the vent, pressed into a pot of synthetic soil. I didn’t know if it would grow in this false air, this artificial light. But it felt right to try.
In the morning, Varma summoned me again.
“There will be questions,” she said. “About what you saw. What you brought.”
“I’ll answer them.”
“But not all the truth.”
“No.”
She looked at me for a long time. Then—surprisingly—she nodded. “Good. The Dome isn’t ready. But one day, it might be. When it is, I want you to lead the next mission.”
“You believe me?”
“I believe the Earth may have found a way to survive us. That doesn’t mean we’re ready to return the favor.”
I left her office with a strange sense of purpose.
The Dome was still broken.
But the world outside was not as dead as we’d been told.
And somewhere, beneath the ashes of tomorrow, the roots of a new story had already begun to spread.
Part 7
Three days after our return, the first sprout broke through the soil in my room.
It was almost nothing—just a single pale green shoot, curling toward the soft glow of my desk lamp like it believed it was sunlight. But to me, it looked like a flag planted on the moon. A signal from another world. A piece of something impossible that now lived beneath my fingertips.
I didn’t report it.
Saira and I met in the hydro-research corridor during our assigned reconditioning schedule. It was the only place where surveillance was light; the old filtration wing’s systems were always half-failing, so the guards left us alone.
“You look different,” she said.
“So do you.”
Her eyes were brighter. Her skin had a faint flush that wasn’t from recycled air. We weren’t sick. We were—changing. Slowly. Quietly.
“They’re planning a full-scale team survey,” she said. “Not just scientists. Armed escorts. Drones. Dismantle-and-transport protocols.”
I felt the weight of her words settle into my chest.
“They’ll strip it,” I said. “Take samples. Try to control it.”
Saira nodded. “They won’t listen to the forest. They’ll try to conquer it.”
“Then we have to stop them.”
She raised an eyebrow. “And do what? Tell them the trees talked to us?”
“No. But we can delay them. Sabotage the timing. Feed the Dome half-truths until we know more.”
She exhaled slowly. “It’s already begun, hasn’t it?”
“What has?”
“The change. In us.”
I nodded.
At night, my dreams had started shifting. They weren’t memories. They were visions—patterns of leaves, veins of soil, maps made from root structures. I could feel the rhythms of the Earth, not metaphorically, but literally. Its breath. Its hunger. Its hope.
And something else—its choice.
It had chosen to keep the ones who listened.
I opened the drawer beside my bed and checked the seedling. It had grown. Two new leaves had unfurled, their veins glowing faintly in the dark. When I touched one, it pulsed.
Not just alive.
Aware.
I began collecting scraps of compost, water from the shower vents, minerals shaved from old data chips. The seedling responded to all of it, feeding not just on nutrients, but on proximity—on attention.
On belief.
The day before the scheduled survey, Saira appeared at my door with a wrapped bundle. Inside was a small patch of moss.
“Where did you get this?” I whispered.
“Observation Lab. They isolated a fungal strain from our samples. Thought it was inert. It wasn’t. It started growing on their gloves.”
“You stole it?”
“I rescued it.”
We planted the moss under a panel behind my desk, where moisture collected in hidden cracks. It spread quickly, tracing soft green fingers across the grey steel.
We watched in silence, our hearts full and fragile.
It was happening. The Dome was no longer a fortress. It had become fertile ground.
But so had we.
That night, Saira and I stood on the westward balcony—the highest place in Dome V-12. Beyond the polyglass walls, the sky hung thick with orange haze. A lightning storm pulsed far off, backlighting the silhouette of dead towers.
“Do you think they’ll listen?” she asked.
“No. But we’re not doing this for them.”
“Then for who?”
“For the forest.”
“For the future,” she said softly.
“For choice,” I added.
She turned to me, eyes glinting. “You feel it too, don’t you? Like we’re not fully here anymore.”
I nodded. “Like part of us stayed behind.”
We didn’t speak after that. Just stood there, hands touching lightly, breathing the filtered air we no longer trusted.
At dawn, the team assembled in Launch Bay Delta. Suits prepped, weapons holstered, drones hovering. I was assigned as tech liaison. Saira, navigation support. They trusted us. Believed we were the best they had.
They were right.
But they didn’t know who we worked for anymore.
I disabled one of the map beacons. Delayed the drone calibration. Set the GPS to reroute the path. Nothing obvious. Just enough to buy time.
Time for the seedlings.
Time for the moss.
Time for the forest to reach in while they still looked out.
When we left the bay, the wind howled louder than usual. Dust slammed against the outer gates like fists. The surface didn’t want us today.
Or maybe it was warning us.
Back in my room, I checked the plant.
It had grown three more leaves.
One of them was curling toward the wall, tracing a shape that looked like a spiral.
No. Not a spiral.
A fingerprint.
It was becoming me.
Or I was becoming it.
Either way, the message was clear.
The forest was not waiting for permission.
It was coming back.
And this time, it was taking root inside us.
Part 8
The mission to Sector W was scheduled for 0600. They called it Operation Renewal. A misnomer if I’d ever heard one. There was no renewal in what they planned—only replication, dissection, control. They would enter the forest not with reverence, but with scalpels and syringes. Like it was a patient to be cured, not a healer in its own right.
But we weren’t going to let that happen.
Saira had intercepted the drone programming the night before. Just a few changes to the flight parameters—steer them off course, disable live feeds. She even programmed looped telemetry, so they’d think they were moving through untouched terrain, when in fact, they’d be circling just outside the ridge for hours.
Meanwhile, I placed decoys into the soil samples we had stored in the Research Vault. Lab-grown hybrids, inert and sterile. Enough to satisfy the surface-level tests, but not enough to give them what they wanted.
The real samples—the root bundle from Lira, the moss, the pulse-leaf from my own floor—they were hidden in a place they’d never look: the children’s greenhouse in the Education Sector. No one went there anymore. The kids played indoors now, under artificial skies, too fragile to know what real dirt felt like.
The moss had already spread across the cracked tiles near the sink. The pulse-leaf was blooming. I left it there, under the old skylight, hoping someday a child might wander in and ask, What is this? And someone brave might answer, The beginning.
Saira and I met in the cafeteria that morning, like two regular crew members grabbing a final ration packet before launch. We sat at opposite ends of the table. No eye contact. No signal. We didn’t need one.
Everything was already in motion.
Outside, the storm still boiled. The team waited in full gear, boots squeaking on polished floor tiles, visors flickering to life. I could hear one of them bragging about how many samples he planned to bring back. He called it “harvesting.” Like the forest was a crop. Like it had grown for them.
I felt something stir in my chest. Not anger. Not fear.
Something older.
Defense.
Saira looked up just once before boarding. Her lips barely moved.
“We’re seeds too.”
I nodded.
The journey was delayed by two hours. A sand front from the northern hills blocked visibility. The drones refused to engage. While the officers argued and reprogrammed, we slipped a message into the system—an old encrypted loop coded in forgotten language.
Just one sentence.
“Let it grow.”
We didn’t sign it.
We didn’t have to.
That afternoon, Director Varma called me in.
“They think someone tampered with the survey program.”
I kept my face calm. “Sabotage?”
She studied me carefully. “Sabotage is loud. This was… elegant.”
I didn’t answer.
After a long pause, she leaned forward. “I saw what you brought back. Not just the soil. The plant. It’s alive in your quarters.”
I felt my pulse spike.
“You didn’t report it,” she continued.
“No.”
“Why?”
I met her eyes. “Because it’s not mine to give. It chose me.”
To my surprise, she didn’t lash out. She leaned back and folded her arms.
“When I was your age, I wanted to terraform Mars. I thought the future lay elsewhere. Now I realize… Earth was never the one that needed fixing. We were.”
There was a silence between us then. A soft, dangerous understanding.
“Whatever you’re doing,” she said finally, “do it carefully.”
And then, after a pause:
“Do it fast.”
When I left her office, I knew where she stood.
She wouldn’t help us.
But she wouldn’t stop us either.
By nightfall, the moss had spread into the ventilation shaft. The pulse-leaf had twined itself around the old desk in the greenhouse. I swore I saw it tremble when I whispered to it.
The children would come back there someday.
And when they did, they would inherit more than lessons.
They would inherit memory.
That evening, Saira found me beneath the Dome’s old telescope.
“Everything’s in place,” she said. “Tomorrow they’ll think they failed. Blame the weather. Reset the mission for next season.”
“That gives us weeks,” I replied. “Maybe months.”
“Time enough for the forest to reach further.”
She smiled. “It already has. I saw a vine near the waste shaft. Inside. It’s moving.”
We stood together, shoulders brushing. No words. No grand speeches.
Just two bodies carrying something far bigger than either of us.
We weren’t rebels. Not exactly.
We were gardeners.
Quiet, patient, dangerous.
And somewhere in the vents, in the corners of the Dome no one swept anymore, life was waiting.
Not just to return.
But to take back.
Part 9
They noticed on a Thursday.
A technician in Ventilation Maintenance filed a report: “Unusual moisture buildup in sector pipes. Source unknown. Possible leak.” That’s what the file said. By the time anyone investigated, it was more than water.
It was growth.
Tiny green tendrils, hair-thin and translucent, had spread across the metal like veins. They didn’t clog the vents. They didn’t burst pipes. They simply existed, quietly lacing through the infrastructure, breathing in what we exhaled.
A second report followed. Then a third. By the time the sixth alert came, the system flagged it as a “biological anomaly.”
Saira and I watched from the monitoring room. We weren’t worried.
We were waiting.
I saw it happen first in the children’s greenhouse. A girl—maybe seven—wandered in during her rotation break. Her name tag read “Mira.” She knelt by the moss with curiosity instead of fear. When she touched it, the moss shimmered.
The next day, she brought three others. They didn’t report it. They watered it from their water bottles. One boy brought a broken toy and left it beside the seedling, like an offering.
By the end of the week, eight children had come. Then ten.
No one told them to.
They just knew.
At night, the dreams changed.
Not just mine. Saira’s too. She woke up one morning with soil under her fingernails—though she swore she hadn’t touched the plant.
Another day, I opened my mouth to speak and paused, because the word on my tongue wasn’t mine. It felt older. Rooted. It passed before I could say it, but it left something behind—an ache in my teeth, a hum in my bones.
Then the vines bloomed.
It began in the sanitation shaft near the East Wing. Soft white blossoms unfurled silently under flickering lights. No one had ever seen flowers move like that—opening in time with footsteps, tilting toward passing bodies as if watching.
Varma called me again. Her expression was tight, but not panicked.
“They’re calling it a mutation.”
“It’s not,” I said.
She looked at me, measured. “It’s an invitation, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“And if we ignore it?”
“It will keep growing.”
She exhaled. “And if we try to remove it?”
“It will defend itself.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
But there was no fear in her voice—only something I hadn’t expected.
Respect.
“I won’t give them the order to sterilize it,” she said. “Not yet.”
I leaned forward. “You saw it too, didn’t you?”
She nodded once. “In my dreams. Trees. That sky.”
She’d never told anyone. But I saw it on her face now—she wasn’t as untouched by the forest as she pretended to be.
“You’re changing,” I said.
“We all are,” she whispered. “We just haven’t admitted it yet.”
The Dome buzzed with rumors by the end of the second week. Unexplained headaches. Strange whispers in the hallways. Someone claimed the hydro-tank water had turned faintly sweet. Another swore the recycled air smelled of rain.
No one could trace it.
No one could stop it.
Then came the turning point.
In the middle of the Dome, just below the atrium where they projected artificial stars for education programs, a tree grew.
Overnight.
It cracked through a floor tile like it had been waiting, patient and precise. By morning, it was five feet tall, with twisting branches and waxy blue leaves. People gathered around it like it was a miracle. Some touched it. Some cried.
Security cordoned off the area. Science teams took samples. But nothing they did slowed it. By evening, it had grown another foot. By the next morning, it bloomed.
And the Dome fell silent.
Because no one had seen color like that in decades.
Not simulated. Not painted.
Real.
Children lined up to see it. Adults came in waves, quiet and reverent. For once, no one asked questions.
They just stood there.
And breathed.
After the third day, Saira and I were called to the Central Committee.
They didn’t accuse us.
They didn’t threaten.
They simply asked, “What happens now?”
I looked around the room at the leaders, the scientists, the guards. They were all exhausted. Worn from years of surviving, not living.
“What happens now,” I said, “is you listen.”
“To what?”
“To the forest. To the earth. To what’s growing.”
Saira stood beside me. “You can try to fight it. Or you can choose to belong.”
“And if we don’t choose?”
I smiled. “The forest doesn’t wait for permission.”
They didn’t answer right away. But no alarms were raised. No orders shouted.
The tree was still standing in the atrium.
The moss had reached the old archive shelves.
The air felt lighter.
And I knew—
The Dome had already been breached.
But not by force.
By life.
Part 10
It happened on a day without warning, without wind.
The tree in the atrium bloomed again—larger this time, its canopy brushing the light panels. Flowers opened in synchronized spirals. Leaves glowed faintly in hues we had no names for—colors that weren’t just seen, but felt. The Dome fell quiet. For the first time in years, no one rushed, no one shouted. They just looked up, like pilgrims watching a sky long forgotten.
I was there when it bloomed.
So was Saira.
So was Mira, the little girl who had touched the moss weeks ago and now stood barefoot on the tile, her hands raised to the branches like she was greeting an old friend.
The forest had arrived.
Not outside, not waiting—but here, within.
It had crept through vents and whispers, through root and breath and memory. It had entered our dreams first, and now it stood in our waking lives, quiet and patient, asking not for dominance—but for attention.
That afternoon, Director Varma stood before the gathered crowd.
She didn’t speak like a leader issuing commands.
She spoke like someone remembering how to hope.
“We have spent twenty-seven years surviving. We built walls. Filters. Protocols. But we did not build peace. We preserved bodies, not spirits. We held back death, but we forgot how to live.”
She turned toward the tree.
“This is not an invasion. It’s a return. The Earth is not offering us a second chance. She is asking us to listen.”
The silence that followed was not empty.
It was sacred.
Later that day, Saira and I returned to the greenhouse.
The moss now covered half the floor. The pulse-leaf had seeded into the walls. Tiny white buds had begun to form on the upper vines, reaching toward the skylight as though trying to open the ceiling itself.
We sat in the dirt and didn’t speak for a long time.
Then she said, “Do you think it ever forgave us?”
“The Earth?”
She nodded.
“I don’t think it works like that,” I said. “It didn’t come back out of forgiveness. It came back because it could. Because somewhere, life still wanted to live.”
“And it chose us?”
“It chose anyone willing to listen.”
There were changes after that. Not sudden. Not sweeping.
But steady.
The armed mission to Sector W was canceled.
Instead, volunteers were invited to travel—with no drones, no weapons, no extractions. Just eyes and ears and empty notebooks.
Classes began teaching tree identification and root systems alongside coding and mathematics. Children were encouraged to walk barefoot on the moss in the greenhouse. They wrote poems about things they’d never seen but now could feel—oceans, rain, wind in tall grass.
The Dome’s water turned clearer. The recycled air had an unfamiliar taste—like something had shifted at the molecular level. Smoother. Fresher.
The dreamers began dreaming together.
We shared visions.
Of forests pulsing with memory.
Of cities grown from stone and vine.
Of birds that carried messages between worlds.
I started keeping a log, not for data, but for feeling. I wrote down what the wind smelled like. What the leaves sounded like when they moved. What the light felt like on my skin when it passed through those glowing branches.
The Earth had not forgotten us.
But it had changed.
And it was asking us—gently, insistently—to change too.
Not to become what we were.
But to become something new.
The day Saira and I left the Dome for Sector W—this time not as scouts, but as messengers—the entire west gate was lined with people. Not cheering. Just present. Watching.
We carried no weapons. No containment kits.
Only seeds.
I tucked the first one beneath my collarbone, wrapped in fabric Mira had given me. She said it was lucky. I believed her.
We walked through ash and wind and sky, and still—underneath it all—I felt the heartbeat of something older, deeper. Not just in the soil.
But in us.
By the time we reached the edge of the forest, the light had shifted.
Not just in color, but in quality.
The haze had thinned.
The trees had grown.
The forest did not greet us with sound or ceremony.
It knew we had returned.
And we walked in, not as intruders, but as its own.
I don’t know what the world will look like in fifty years.
But I believe this:
The Earth doesn’t need saving.
It needs remembering.
And now, we remember.
We are no longer the last generation.
We are the first.
The first to grow again.
The first to kneel in the dirt without shame.
The first to see a single green leaf as more than life—
—as forgiveness made real.
And under this sky, beneath these roots, beside this woman I trust with more than breath, I whisper to the soil:
“We’re listening.”
And this time—
The Earth listens back.
END
