Reborn Before the Bloom: I Grow the Last Fortress

Chapter 4: Seed Bank Auction

The auction hall was a converted warehouse behind the university's agriculture building. It smelled like cold concrete and floor wax.

Jonah took a seat in the back row with a numbered paddle sweating in his hand. The phone in his pocket said 92 DAYS. He had checked it three times since he parked.

Up front, a man in a university lanyard tapped the microphone. "Lot one, ladies and gentlemen. The complete holdings of the Hartwell Agricultural Seed Bank. Forty-one thousand accessions, cold storage included. The university regrets the necessity of this sale."

Nobody in the room looked sorry. Maybe thirty buyers, most of them in company fleece, there for the freezers and the shelving. One woman sat alone in the front row in a gray suit, a tablet on her knee, very straight.

Jonah's stomach clenched. Everything he owned was riding on the next ten minutes. Last week he had sold his flat, a small second-floor place he'd spent eleven years paying off, to a young couple who cried at the viewing. He had emptied his savings too. Now he was sleeping in the Pike guest room again, and nobody in that house knew why.

Yesterday, at the preview, he had walked the cold room in a borrowed coat with his bare hand on the steel. The panel had lit up at every drawer.

Sorghum, landrace. Viability: 91%. Drought resilience: HIGH.

Wild bramble (Rubus), thorn line. Viability: 88%. Resilience: HIGH. Notes: aggressive thorn growth.

Rice, flood-tolerant. Viability: 94%. Resilience: HIGH.

Kale, frost-hardy heirloom. Viability: 90%. Resilience: HIGH.

He stood there in the freezing air, grinning like a fool. Thorns. Drought crops. Food that could survive anything. It was the raw material for everything he planned to build, sitting in drawers.

"Opening bid, fifty thousand," the auctioneer said.

Jonah raised his paddle. His hand was shaking, so he used his other hand to hold his wrist still.

"Fifty. Do I hear seventy-five?"

Nobody moved. Then the woman in the gray suit lifted two fingers without turning around.

"Seventy-five. One hundred?"

Jonah raised his paddle again.

It went on like that. A hundred and fifty. Two hundred. The fleece buyers dropped out one by one, whispering about cold-chain costs and the electric bill. By two hundred and eighty thousand it was only the two of them. Jonah could feel sweat running down his back. His mouth was dry.

"Three hundred," the woman said, in a clear, pleasant voice. Now she turned around, just a little, and looked right at him. She smiled.

His heart thumped. He was almost out of money. Not almost. He was out.

"Three-twenty," Jonah said hoarsely, and raised his paddle.

"Three-thirty."

"Three-forty."

That was every dollar. He had no more. If she went one more, he would lose all of it, and the Bloom would find him with a hedge clipper and a tomato plant.

The woman held her tablet for a long moment. She tapped it once, lightly, and then she lowered her hand and folded it in her lap.

"Three hundred and forty thousand," the auctioneer said. "Going once. Twice. Sold, to the gentleman in the back."

Jonah's whole body went limp. He let out a breath so long it almost sounded like a laugh. The catalog estimate had been one and a half million. Nobody wanted the seeds. They had come for the freezers.

He was signing the transfer forms at a folding table when a pair of gray heels stopped beside him.

"Congratulations, Mr. Pike."

He looked up. Close up, the woman was older than he'd thought, with a face that gave away nothing. She held out a card between two fingers.

"Adrienne Voss. Acquisitions, Canopy Compact."

His pen stopped.

In his first life, the Compact had sold filtered air by the hour. He had watched a family outside their glass towers pay with a wedding ring. He kept his face blank. "Never heard of it."

"You will." She smiled. "We were prepared to go considerably higher. I'd like you to know that. It's rare for someone to surprise us."

"Sorry to disappoint."

"Oh, you haven't disappointed me." She set the card on the table, face down. "Do read the back."

She walked out. Her heels clicked all the way across the concrete, and Jonah waited until the door closed before he turned the card over. Black card stock, cream lettering. On the back, in neat blue ink:

Seeds don't keep without cold. Think about who pays your power bill.

His hand went cold. It was so polite. It was a threat, and she hadn't even raised her voice.

He put the card in his shirt pocket, finished the signature line, and pressed hard enough to dent the paper.

The security guard let him into the vault at four, with a clipboard and a flashlight and a look that said he wanted to go home.

The cold room was long and narrow, lined with steel drawers from floor to ceiling. Jonah walked it slowly, breath smoking, the panel flicking from one drawer to the next. Study bars crept up in the corner of his sight. Each new strain made them twitch.

Study: 3%. Study: 3%. Study: 4%.

It was a start. It was a hundred starts.

At the far end, where the light from the guard's flashlight didn't reach, he stopped. One drawer sat lower than the rest, painted black. The label on the front wasn't the university's. It was old yellowed paper, stamped in red ink, with a seal Jonah had seen on the side of every barn on the Pike estate.

PIKE ESTATE — RESERVED.

He stared at it. The Hartwell catalog didn't list this drawer. He had read all forty-one thousand lines of it.

The panel flickered, and for the first time since the pod, it didn't give him anything at all.

His grandfather had been here before him.