SEEDS OF MEMORY
The Last Garden of Ruin — Story One
By Sean Talbot
The first green thing Cassian Reed had seen in eleven years was growing through a dead man’s teeth.
He crouched beside the skeleton and considered whether hunger had finally damaged his eyesight.
Two leaves trembled between the open jaws. Beneath them hung a single white berry, translucent enough to reveal a dark seed inside. The skeleton sat against a pharmacy counter, its hands folded across the remains of a coat.
Someone had arranged it that way.
“Lovely place for a garden,” Cassian murmured.
Outside, wind dragged ash along Mercy Street. Nothing answered. Nothing ever did in the dead districts, which was why he preferred working alone here.
He checked the leather strip tied around his wrist.
CASSIAN REED. THIRTY-FOUR. YOUR SISTER WAS LENA.
He remembered all three facts today.
That was encouraging.
He removed a specimen jar from his satchel. Dr. Sloane paid generously for anything that might once have been alive. Usually he brought her beetle shells, spoiled seed packets, or the leathery remains of things neither of them could identify.
A living plant would clear his debts.
Perhaps even buy back a memory.
He slipped his knife beneath the stem.
The berry brushed his split knuckle.
The pharmacy vanished.
* * *
He was kneeling beneath a table.
His hands were wrong: small, brown, the nails painted yellow. Someone was screaming above him. Glass fell across the floor in bright pieces.
A woman crawled into view, dragging one useless leg.
“Milo. Look at me.”
Cassian tried to speak. A child’s sob came out.
The woman took his face between her hands. Blood filled the creases of her fingers.
“When it comes, hold the roots. Like we practised.”
Behind her, the windows turned white.
He knew what that light meant, although he had been born thirteen years after the Burning.
He tried to close eyes that belonged to someone else.
The woman pulled him against her chest.
“You don’t have to remember this part.”
Then heat reached them.
* * *
Cassian struck the pharmacy floor hard enough to knock the air from his lungs.
He scrabbled backwards, clutching his hand.
The berry had burst against his knuckle. Clear pulp glistened in the cut.
“No,” he whispered.
He wiped it on his coat. Too late. He could still feel the woman’s fingers against his cheeks.
He had traded memories for nine years. They came sealed in amber sap, carefully measured and priced. A soldier’s first snowfall. A baker’s wedding morning. One desperate man’s recollection of clean water running from a tap.
Nothing had ever taken him that completely.
Nothing had ever shown him the Burning.
He looked at the skeleton again.
Too large for a child.
Behind the counter, half concealed beneath fallen shelving, lay a smaller skull.
Cassian stopped breathing for a moment.
White roots threaded through both sets of bones, joining beneath the cracked tiles.
He should leave. Seal the building, tell Sloane, let someone with education and fewer debts decide what came next.
Instead, he reached beneath the shelf.
His fingers found a bracelet beside the little skull.
Four wooden letters on a rotten string.
MILO.
He sat back on his heels.
For the first time in years, he had found a memory he could verify.
A scrape sounded behind him.
“Step away from the plant.”
Cassian slowly raised his hands.
The woman in the doorway carried a pruning hook almost as long as his arm.
She was young, barefoot, dressed in layers of faded cloth. Dark hair hung against her cheeks. Dirt filled the lines of her palms, but there was no ash on her feet.
“I wasn’t eating it,” he said.
Her gaze moved to his bleeding knuckle.
“You let it in.”
“It didn’t ask particularly politely.”
She crossed the room and seized his wrist.
He reached for his knife.
“Do that,” she said, “and you’ll bleed somewhere much worse.”
He let the knife stay where it was.
She studied the cut, then pressed her thumb beneath his jaw.
“Your name.”
“Cassian Reed.”
“Where were you born?”
“South cisterns.”
“Your mother’s face.”
He hesitated.
Her grip tightened.
“I sold that,” he said.
She released him.
For a moment, anger displaced the caution in her expression.
“Of course you did.”
* * *
Her name was Ivy.
That was all she offered while wrapping his knuckle in cloth that smelled sharply of crushed leaves.
“You keep touching me,” Cassian said. “Should I expect more dead children?”
“Only damaged fruit releases sap through the skin. Keep your hands away from anything split.”
“Useful information an hour ago.”
“Ten minutes.”
He looked towards the doorway. The light outside had scarcely changed.
He had spent an afternoon beneath that table.
Ivy followed his gaze.
“It feels longer when you fight.”
“You’ve done this before.”
She tucked the loose bandage beneath itself.
“Can you stand?”
He did, badly.
Her eyes dropped to the bracelet in his other hand.
“Put that back.”
Cassian glanced towards the shelving.
“Do you know who he was?”
“I know where he is.”
She pointed at the roots.
A whistle sounded outside. Two short notes, followed by one long.
Cassian’s stomach tightened.
Ivy noticed.
“Friends?”
“Creditors.”
“How many?”
“I owe one. He employs several.”
She moved to the shattered window.
Across Mercy Street, three figures were searching the rubble. Brass collection tubes swung from their belts. Cassian recognized the broad shoulders of the man leading them.
Voss.
He had given Cassian until sundown to repay six measures of potable water.
Cassian had hoped to be elsewhere by then.
Voss bent near the pharmacy entrance.
His gloved fingers closed around a fallen green leaf.
“Reed,” he called softly. “You finally found something worth stealing.”
* * *
Ivy led Cassian through a storeroom and down a service stair.
Behind them, the pharmacy door banged against its frame.
“There’s nowhere profitable to run,” Voss called.
Cassian hurried after Ivy into the dark.
Roots lined the stairwell. Some were thin as thread; others had forced the handrail from its brackets. Under his boots, they shifted with a sound like leather stretching.
He stopped.
“They’re moving.”
“You’re standing on them.”
She pulled him onto a clear patch of concrete.
At the bottom stood a steel door. Ivy laid her palm against roots covering its hinges.
They withdrew.
“That’s going to need an explanation,” Cassian said.
“Later.”
Beyond the door waited a garden.
He forgot Voss.
Green filled a chamber beneath a broken glass ceiling. Vines climbed support pillars. Ferns crowded shallow pools. Small trees stood in rows between old laboratory benches, their branches heavy with pale fruit.
Water fell somewhere in the shadows.
Cassian had heard rain twice in his life. This sounded close enough to hurt.
He approached a tree with leaves shaped like open hands.
Inside one fruit, something flickered.
A doorway. A yellow kitchen. Someone turning towards him.
He stepped back.
“How many?” he asked.
Ivy watched the stairwell.
“People? We don’t know.”
“Who’s we?”
Before she could answer, a heavy blow rang against the steel door.
Voss had found them.
* * *
Ivy shoved a laboratory trolley beneath the door handle.
Cassian searched for another exit.
On the nearest bench lay a cracked identification plate.
NEW ASH BOTANICAL RESEARCH FACILITY.
Beneath it was a faded emblem: three interlocking leaves.
He knew that emblem.
Dr. Sloane wore it on a chain beneath her shirt. He had seen it once when she bent over a specimen, then watched her hide it before answering his question.
“There’s a woman in the north market,” he said. “A botanist. She could help.”
Ivy glanced at the plate in his hand.
“Someone already helped us enough.”
The trolley jumped.
Voss spoke through the door.
“I can smell wet soil, Reed. Open this and your debt disappears.”
Cassian imagined a cup filled to the brim. A clean bed. Buying back his mother’s face from whatever merchant held it now.
Ivy was watching him.
He put the identification plate in his pocket.
“I’m considering a better offer.”
The next blow tore the upper hinge loose.
Ivy knelt, pushing both hands into a bed of dark earth.
Roots tightened around the doorframe.
Blood appeared beneath her fingernails.
“Help me,” she said.
“How?”
She nodded towards a wheel on the far wall.
EMERGENCY IRRIGATION.
“Open the sluice. Flood the stair.”
He ran to it and hauled.
The wheel refused to move.
Rust flaked beneath his palms. He braced one foot against the wall and pulled until something tore in his shoulder.
Nothing.
Behind him, the steel door buckled.
“There’s a release,” Ivy gasped. “Below the wheel.”
He crouched.
An inspection panel hung open over a dark shaft. At its bottom, beneath tangled roots, he could just see a red lever.
Too deep to reach.
“Maintenance access?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
The door burst inward.
* * *
Voss stepped over the ruined trolley with a hand crossbow raised.
His companions followed, one carrying a collection blade, the other a sack of empty jars.
For a heartbeat, all three stared.
Then Voss smiled.
“Well.”
He lowered the crossbow towards Ivy.
“Hands out of the dirt.”
She stayed where she was.
The bolt struck the soil beside her wrist.
“The next one goes through.”
Cassian moved between them.
“You damage her, you might damage the stock.”
Voss considered that.
“Then make yourself useful.”
He gestured towards a tree.
Cassian saw what would follow: measured doses, locked rooms, customers paying to watch children burn. He had sold joy and grief without asking whose they were. Until today, he had considered that distinction unnecessary.
One of the men cut a fruit free.
Milk-white sap spilled over his glove.
He laughed, then dropped the blade.
“Tessa?”
He reached into empty air.
Ivy flinched as though struck.
Voss turned towards his man.
Cassian looked down the inspection shaft again.
Through his borrowed terror, he remembered a small hand gripping a root beneath a table. The roots had been joined. Here, too, they ran between the trees, under the benches, into the shaft.
“Can this place remember the lever?” he whispered.
Ivy looked at him.
“Someone who used it?”
Her gaze moved towards a squat tree beside the wall.
Its fruit was amber.
“It might.”
Cassian picked one.
“What happens if I take another?”
“You make room.”
He thought of the words on his wrist.
Then he bit through the skin.
* * *
He was walking to work with a lunch tin banging against his thigh.
His left knee ached. His daughter’s school photograph was tucked inside the tin. She had lost two front teeth.
He loved her so fiercely that Cassian almost forgot why he had come.
The memory moved on.
A supervisor complained about leaking pipes. Someone borrowed a spanner. He spent an hour beneath a bench replacing a seal.
Cassian fought to hold the garden in his mind.
The lever.
Please.
Then he was crouching beside the inspection shaft.
His hand reached beneath the wheel housing and found a recessed catch.
A narrow maintenance ladder dropped into place.
Cassian opened his eyes.
Voss was shouting.
He struck the catch, slid down the ladder and landed among roots.
Above him, the crossbow snapped.
Pain burned along his calf.
He grabbed the red lever.
It moved.
Water roared behind the wall.
* * *
By the time he climbed out, the floor near the entrance was flooding.
Water struck Voss from the opened irrigation channel, knocking him against a bench. His crossbow vanished beneath the surge.
Ivy dragged the dazed collector towards Cassian.
“Take him.”
“He works for Voss.”
“He’s drowning.”
Cassian hooked an arm beneath the man’s shoulders.
Together they hauled him onto a raised walkway. Ivy pointed towards an opening behind the ferns.
“That passage rises to the street.”
Cassian pushed the man towards it. The other collector was already scrambling after him.
Voss caught the edge of the walkway.
For a moment, Cassian considered his fingers.
Then he grabbed Voss’s coat and pulled.
“Debt settled,” he said.
Voss coughed water onto his boots.
“You think this settles—”
Ivy lifted the pruning hook.
Voss went after his men.
* * *
They closed the sluice before the water reached the youngest trees.
Cassian sat on the walkway while Ivy bound his leg. The bolt had grazed him. His shoulder hurt worse.
“They’ll come back,” he said.
“Yes.”
“With more jars.”
She tightened the bandage.
He looked at the water settling between the beds.
“I know someone who can help.”
“The botanist.”
“She buys dead seeds. She cried when I brought her a root that hadn’t quite dried out.”
Ivy said nothing.
He touched the leather strip on his wrist.
Lena.
He remembered her face, the gap between her teeth, the way she stole the blanket when they were children.
He tried to recall her laugh.
There had been a snort she hated. He knew that much. But the sound was gone.
In its place, a stranger’s daughter smiled with two missing teeth.
Cassian gripped the walkway until his fingers hurt.
Ivy sat beside him without asking what he had lost.
After a while, he opened his hand. Milo’s bracelet lay across his palm. He had carried it through everything.
“How long have you been down here?” he asked.
“Most of my life.”
He studied her bare feet, the soil drying on her wrists.
“There are people outside who would protect this.”
“And people who would burn it.”
He couldn’t argue. Beyond the district, three hundred families scraped meals from fungus vats. Every one of them had buried someone. Voss would offer food and a way to hear those voices again. Cassian knew how difficult that offer would be to refuse.
He took out Sloane’s identification plate.
“I’ll bring her here alone. You can speak to her before she sees the garden.”
Ivy traced the three leaves with one dirty finger.
“Tomorrow. At the pharmacy.”
He nodded, then searched his satchel for a pencil. On the back of an old invoice he wrote everything he could remember about Lena’s laugh. The snort. Her embarrassment. How she pressed her sleeve against her mouth.
Ivy waited while he folded the paper and tucked it beneath his wrist strap.
He checked the paper twice, afraid that writing borrowed memories might somehow make them easier to keep than his own.
“Can we put him back properly?” he asked.
* * *
They returned through the flooded stairwell when the water had fallen.
Cassian laid the bracelet beside the small bones. He straightened the fallen shelving enough to shelter them, then set the specimen jar upright beneath the plant.
Empty.
Ivy watched from the counter.
“You could have sold it.”
“I still might charge admission.”
She almost smiled.
He looked at the roots joining the two skeletons.
“Was she his mother?”
“I think so.”
“Does he remember the end every time someone touches him?”
Ivy lowered her eyes.
“Sometimes something else grows.”
Cassian knelt and carefully poured the last of his drinking water around the stem.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then a folded leaf loosened beside the broken berry.
It opened slowly towards the light.
He stayed until it had finished.
