The Last Gardener of the Meridian

Tomas had been born in the seed vault and meant to die there, and the Council had just voted to take it away from him.

He listened to the recording twice, sitting among the steel drawers in the cold blue light he loved. Decommission Deck Nine. Convert to family housing. The vault to be archived to data and the physical stock recycled. They said it the way you'd schedule a corridor repaint. To the seven thousand souls aboard the Meridian, four generations into a voyage that would end long after every one of them was dust, a room of dead seeds was a room of wasted air.

He understood the arithmetic. That was the worst of it. The ship was full. Children were being born into closets. And here he sat, an old man guarding two hundred thousand things that had never grown and, by every honest measure, never would — because the planet they were aimed at was a hundred and ten years away, and Tomas would not live to see another decade, let alone a sky.

His granddaughter Della found him there with the drawers open. She was eleven and had never once been outside; the word outside meant, to her, the maintenance crawlspace behind the gymnasium.

"They're really taking it," she said. Not a question. The whole ship had heard.

"They're really taking it," Tomas agreed.

Della ran a finger along a row of labelled vials — Quercus robur. Triticum. Lavandula. Latin nonsense, names for shapes shehad only seen in the old films, where green things stood taller than people and the air moved on its own. "What even are they?" she asked, and he heard in her voice not cruelty but a genuine blankness, the question of a child who has never been given a reason to care.

And Tomas realised the Council had not made a mistake at all. They had simply finished a long, slow forgetting — and he was the last one left who still remembered why these drawers were not trash.

"Come back tomorrow," he said. "Wear shoes you don't mind ruining. I have one harvest left in me, and I am going to spend it showing you."