Sophia Devero's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

The wolf was gone, the gap braced with steel. Sophia should have felt safe. Instead she stood in the bunker at dawn and counted cans. Three shelves, mostly beans and dried meat. She did the math twice. Two people and a dog would empty it in a few months. Then the safest house in Ironpit would become a locked box with nothing to eat inside. Drake climbed down the ladder behind her. "You've been down here an hour." "Count it yourself," she said. "This isn't a home. It's a countdown." He scanned the shelves and went quiet. Charm didn't help him now. "So we hunt," he said. "I'm good with the bow." "You hunt what? Mutated wolves? Half the animals out there glow." Sophia shook her head. "We can't eat the land by killing it. We have to grow food. Something that comes back every season." Drake frowned. "The ground out there is dead ash. Nothing roots in it." He was right, and that stuck her. She had walked the whole property and seen only cracked dirt. Then the dog trotted to the stairs and barked up at the ceiling. It looked back at her, waiting. "He wants us to follow," Sophia said. They climbed to the top floor. The dog nosed a door she'd never opened. It led to a stair, and the stair led up to the roof. Sophia pushed through and stopped. Green. The whole rooftop was green. Old wooden planters lined the edges, spilling vines over the rails. Wild flowers grew thick between clumps of grass. Someone had built this before the fall, and the rain and sun had kept it alive. She knelt and pushed her fingers into a planter. The soil was dark and damp and rich, not ash. Real dirt, held safe above the poisoned ground. "This is it," she said. "This is where we grow." Drake turned slowly, taking in the layers of green. "There's enough soil up here to feed us for years. If we plant it right." Sophia dug through the tangled beds. Under the weeds she found small green pods hanging from a vine. She split one open. Seeds. Dozens of them, dry and whole. "Seeds," she breathed. "We plant these, we save the seeds they make, we plant again. It never runs out." She looked up at him. "This is how we don't starve." By noon they had cleared two planters and pressed seeds into the soil. Sophia hauled water from the pool below. The dog flopped in the sun and watched them work. She sat back, dirt under her nails, and let herself breathe. The bunker had been a countdown. This garden was a future. Then she saw it. In the soft new soil of the planter, pressed deep and wide, sat a single paw print. Bigger than her hand. And the low fence around the roof leaned outward in one spot, bent, as if something heavy had already climbed and gone.