Miranda's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The seedling was dying, and Miranda had three days before the last of its root shoots turned black. She knelt in the back room of her flower shop and pressed one dirt-stained finger against the glass of the propagation case. Inside, a single pale stem bent under the heat lamp. It was supposed to be a black rose. The books said the variety had died out a century ago. She had traded six months of savings and a jar of her mother's hybrid seed to a bog trader who swore this cutting was the real thing. She meant to grow it, bloom it, and set it on the counter of the baker two doors down, who came in every Thursday for peonies and never once asked her name. The back room was too small. She knew it before she bought the case. The rose needed cool nights, wet mornings, and steady filtered light. Her greenhouse sat above the shop's boiler and swung twenty degrees between noon and midnight. She had tried three shade cloths and a bowl of ice under the bench. By morning the leaves curled like paper held to a candle. She sat back on her heels and made herself say it out loud. "It will die here." She thought of the old conservatory past the edge of the bog. Everyone called it condemned. The glass roof had cracked in the last storm, and the keepers had walked away twenty years ago. But the walls were stone, the vents still worked, and a spring ran under the north wing. She had been inside once as a girl. She remembered orchids blooming in the ruin. She wrapped the seedling in damp moss, packed the case into a crate, and locked the shop at noon. The path to the conservatory ran through wet ground. Her boots sank to the ankle. When she pushed the iron door open, warm air met her face. Ferns had grown waist-high between the broken tiles. Rain dripped from a hole in the roof onto a bed of soft green. She set the crate on a stone bench and lifted out the seedling. The light through the cracked glass fell on it evenly. The air was cool. The floor was wet. She pressed her palm to the soil and felt it hold the moisture the way her back room never had. She planted the cutting in a patch of clean loam near the spring. She staked it with a splint of willow. Then she stood and looked up at the ruined ceiling. The rose had a chance here. But the conservatory was not hers. Someone owned this land, or someone would come to claim it once they saw a light burning inside after dark. She would have to come every day. She would have to be seen coming. She locked the iron door behind her and started back through the bog.