Reborn Before the Bloom: I Grow the Last Fortress

Chapter 5: Priya

The office was a rented room above a laundromat, and the whole floor hummed whenever the dryers ran.

Jonah climbed the stairs with a coffee in each hand. The door at the top had a printed sign: Dr. P. Raman, Independent Ecology. Under it, in marker: No, I am not hiring.

He knocked.

"It's open. It's always open. Nobody comes."

Maps covered every wall, taped edge to edge, with yellow highlighter circles around patches of green. A woman in her thirties sat behind a desk with three empty mugs, a laptop, and a stack of printed rejection letters. She didn't look up.

"If you're from the landlord, I paid Tuesday."

"I'm not. I read your papers. All four."

Now she looked up. She had a long black braid and dark circles under her eyes. "Which one?"

"'Anomalous Bloom Dynamics in Closed Basins.'"

"Rejected by nine journals." Her phone buzzed on the desk. She glanced at it, and a flat little laugh came out of her. "Ten. 'Speculative framing incompatible with established spore dispersal ecology.' They mean I said the word explosive."

Jonah set a coffee in front of her. "I think you're right."

"About what?"

"All of it."

"Sit down." She pointed with her pen. "Quickly, before I remember I haven't slept."

He sat. His knee was bouncing, so he put his hand on it. "Your basin cluster is going to wake up. In about ninety days. When it does, it won't stay in the basin. Cities will be gone in weeks."

Priya stared at him. "You're from a forum."

"No."

"Then you're someone's relative, and they're worried about me."

"Ask me what a spore cloud looks like."

"I've seen spore clouds."

"Not those."

She leaned back and crossed her arms. "Fine. Go."

"Yellow. It rises at dawn, in the first hour of light, from low ground. It coats cars like flour. It tastes like a coin on your tongue." His throat tightened. He kept going. "And the vines creak. You hear it in your back teeth before you see anything move."

The dryers downstairs thumped. Priya didn't move at all.

"Who told you that?"

"Nobody."

"I have never put that in a paper." Her voice had dropped. "The creak. I recorded it once on a field mic, at the edge of the basin, at five in the morning. I was alone. I didn't upload the audio because I thought I'd lost my mind." She swallowed. "Nobody has heard that but me."

"I heard it for about two weeks."

"That's not possible."

"I know."

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she opened the laptop and spun it around. "Show me you're not lying."

On the screen was a satellite time-lapse of a basin in gray and brown, a ring of scrub and dry rock. Right in the middle sat a dark green stain, a few hundred meters across. She clicked and it grew by a hair. She clicked again. A hair more.

"Eleven months," she said. "Nothing should grow there. No water, no soil. And it's not spreading evenly. It's pulsing."

She pulled a petri dish out of a drawer. Inside was a brown crust the size of a coin, flaky at the edges. "Scraped from the rim. Last spring."

Jonah held his hand over the dish.

The panel opened so fast that he flinched.

Bloom Cluster (dormant). Fragment, 0.4 g. Moisture: 4%. Awakening in: 90 DAYS.

It matched the number on his phone exactly.

"Your face just changed," Priya said.

"It says ninety days."

"What says?"

"A thing I can do. I can read plants. Anything growing." He cleared his throat. "Write down any number about that sample. Don't tell me."

She scribbled something on a sticky note and folded it. "Go."

"Four percent moisture."

She unfolded the note and her mouth went tight. "Four point one. I rounded it."

She set the note down slowly and flattened it with her palm.

"Why are you telling me?" she asked. "Why not a university, or the news?"

"Because they'd put me in a room." He shrugged, and it hurt. "And because you're the only one who was right."

A sound that was almost a laugh. "That's the first time anyone's said that in two years." She picked up the coffee he'd brought and drank half of it. "I'm in. Part of me is curious. And part of me is that you're the first person to sit down in that chair and not ask me to leave."

"Good."

"But you're going to show me every single thing it tells you."

"Deal."

"Start with the pulse. The basin cluster pulses on a cycle. Can your panel see which way it's going?"

He looked at the dish. The panel flickered, hesitated, and then drew a line.

Pulse source: approximate. A faint arrow hung in the air over the crust, pointing across the room.

Priya was already pulling a regional map off the wall. She slapped it flat on the desk. "The basin is two hundred kilometers northwest of here. Which way is the arrow?"

"Not northwest." The arrow swung as he turned the map to match. His heart began to thump. "East. South of east."

She frowned. "There's nothing east of here but farmland."

The arrow slid across the paper and stopped on a patch of orchard on the edge of town, land he had known all his life.

Pulse origin: 6 km.

Jonah's mouth went dry.

"Jonah?" Priya was watching him. "That's not the basin."

"No."

"What's out there?"

He put his finger on the dot. The Pike estate.