Reborn Before the Bloom: I Grow the Last Fortress

Chapter 10: Cold Room

The courtroom smelled like floor polish and old paper, and Jonah's tie was choking him.

He sat at the plaintiff's table beside Nell, who wore a navy suit and a look of total calm. Across the aisle, Preston Hale was tall, silver-haired, and pleasant, the kind of man who smiled while he took your wallet. Dalton sat behind him with Marguerite. Dalton didn't look at Jonah. Marguerite did.

The judge was a heavy woman with half-moon glasses and no patience. For forty minutes Hale talked about family harmony, about the trustee's lawful duties, about a vulnerable cousin who had "lost his grip after a stressful episode." Dalton nodded at all the right moments. It was a good performance.

Then Nell stood up.

She didn't raise her voice. She laid three things on the clerk's desk: a photograph of Article Nine, Section C, a photocopy of four signed affirmations, and a single sheet with a coffee ring in one corner.

"Your Honor, the trust requires five signatures. The trustee collected four, each under a cover sheet reading 'Routine Annual Trust Affirmation.' My client's copy sat in a folder with his name typed on the line. He never signed it." She tapped the sheet. "Exhibit C is the waiver the trustee handed him. You'll notice the consent language in the signature block, and you'll notice the original has no signature at all."

Hale half rose. "Your Honor, the plaintiff is clearly..."

"Sit down, Mr. Hale," the judge said, without looking at him. She was reading Exhibit C. She read it twice. Then she took her glasses off.

"I'm granting the injunction," she said. "The sale of the east orchard is frozen pending a full hearing on the validity of the trust conveyance. Counsel, I strongly recommend you speak to your client."

Dalton stood so fast his chair fell over. He didn't look at the judge or the lawyers. He looked at Jonah, once, a flat stare with nothing warm left in it, and then he walked out, and the courtroom door banged behind him.

Jonah's pulse roared in his ears. Beside him, Nell leaned over and said very quietly, "That's the best I've felt in ten years."

He turned his head.

Marguerite hadn't moved. She sat with her hands in her lap, her gloves folded, staring at him. Her face wasn't angry. It was something else, something he had never seen on it before.

It looked like fear.

At ten that night the orchard was black and still, and Priya's flashlight shook a little in her hand.

"Pump house," she said. "The survey puts the stairwell right under it."

They crouched at the little stone shed at the east edge of the trees, a place Jonah had walked past a thousand times. He had never once looked at the floor. He knelt now and brushed the dust back with his palm. A square steel plate sat flush with the concrete. A rusted ring bolt was set in one corner.

"Together," Priya said.

They hauled. The plate came up with a shriek of metal, and a smell rolled out of the dark: cold stone, wet iron, and something else, faintly sweet.

Jonah's mouth went dry. It was the taste from the greenhouse.

"You okay?"

"Yeah." He wasn't. He gripped the ladder and started down anyway.

Thirty feet. The air dropped ten degrees with every ten rungs. At the bottom, a short stone corridor ended at a rusted door the size of a refrigerator, a padlock the size of his fist hanging on it. Jonah had brought bolt cutters from the nursery. It took four tries and all his weight, and when the lock finally snapped he nearly fell over.

The door groaned open.

Priya's flashlight swept across the room, and she said, "Oh."

It was a long, low chamber lined floor to ceiling with steel shelves, and on every shelf sat rows of sealed glass jars. Hundreds of them. In every jar lay a single seed pod, brown and wrinkled, no bigger than a walnut, identical to the one his grandfather used to keep in a tin. Each jar had a paper label stamped with a date in red ink.

Jonah walked along the shelves with his heart hammering. The dates went back decades. 1971. 1983. 1994. Then, down on the lowest shelf, in the far corner, a single jar all by itself, its label darker than the rest.

BLOOM-0.

Under it, a date. He read it twice. He pulled out his phone and checked the calendar, and his stomach turned over.

"Twelve days," he whispered. "That's twelve days from now."

"That can't be right," Priya said. "Your countdown says seventy..."

"I know what it says."

The panel went red.

It had never gone red. The letters filled his whole field of vision, screaming white against crimson, and the sound that came with them wasn't a sound at all. It was a pressure in his skull.

ALERT. ORIGIN SEED DETECTED.

BLOOM SOURCE WITHIN 4 METERS.

Priya was staring at him. "Jonah, your face..."

"It's here." His voice cracked. "It's right here. The Bloom starts here."

"What?"

"The pods. They're not seeds. They're..." He couldn't finish. His hand shook so badly he had to grab the shelf. The jar nearest him was glowing faintly, a dim, sickly green behind the glass.

Behind them, something scraped on stone.

A flashlight beam cut across the floor. Then a voice, calm and quiet, from the corridor.

"You were never supposed to find this part."

Jonah turned around.

Dalton stood in the doorway in his gray coat. He had a heavy iron key in one hand, and he wasn't smiling. For the first time in his life, Jonah saw his cousin without the warm face on, and what lay underneath was much colder.

"Dalton," Priya said. "Step away from the door."

"I'm sorry about this." He actually sounded like he meant it. "I really am. You could have taken the money."

"Dalton, don't..." Jonah took one step.

Dalton pulled the door shut.

The iron slammed, and the deadbolt clicked, short and clean, the same tiny sound he'd heard through the greenhouse glass. Jonah froze. The room spun. For a moment he was back in the yellow dust, with blood on his hand and a family driving away.

No. No, not again.

He threw himself at the door and hit it with both fists. It didn't move. Priya was beside him, slamming her shoulder into the steel, and the sound echoed off the stone and died.

Then he heard it, behind him, soft and steady.

A hum.

He turned around slowly. All across the room, on every shelf, the jars were humming. A low, sweet, rising note. The pods inside glowed green.

On the bottom shelf, in the corner, the nearest jar cracked.