Dirty Miracle

“Hope isn’t loud. It’s a green shoot in red dust when nothing else should grow.”

As we delved into the task of setting up the tent, I surrendered myself to the rhythm of it—canvas, pole, peg, repeat. It didn’t take long for the outside world to blur at the edges, my focus narrowing to the tactile, the tangible. The fabric was coarse under my hands, stiff with red dust, and the metal poles held the faint chill of shade even under the relentless sun. The clink of fittings and the subtle resistance of fabric being stretched into form demanded attention—not thought, not worry. Just presence.

It was a gift, that focus. A small sanctuary carved out of effort and coordination. For the first time since our arrival, my mind went quiet. The relentless churn of unanswered questions—Where is Luke? What are we meant to do here? How long will we be stuck?—receded like waves at low tide, still present but no longer crashing over me.

From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Paul and Glenda locked in a battle of mock exasperation over the printed instructions. He was holding them upside-down at one point—surely on purpose—and she was waving a tent pole at him like a schoolteacher threatening detention. Their voices, though light and half-laughing, carried across the clearing, punctuating the dry air with something surprisingly human.

Watching them, I smiled.

It was absurd, really—that something as mundane as a bicker about tent setup could spark warmth in such a desolate place. But there it was: an exchange so ordinary it almost felt sacred. In the face of impossible dust and existential disorientation, Paul and Glenda had conjured something recognisable. A moment that could have belonged to any bushwalk or camping trip back home. The kind of interaction that stitches people together, quietly and without ceremony.

It reminded me, not for the first time, that humans have always been good at this. At finding connection in the cracks. At seeking out small flickers of joy amid uncertainty and disruption.

I turned my attention back to Glenda, watching her more closely now.

My initial impressions of her had been swift, almost involuntary. That she was capable—yes. That she was kind—probably. But it had all been surface-level. Now, I saw something else. She worked with an ease that came from practice, not guesswork. Her fingers knew the weight of canvas and the tension needed in guy ropes. She didn’t hesitate, didn’t double-check, didn’t wait for consensus. Her confidence wasn’t the brittle kind worn for show—it was woven into her, subtle and unspoken.

She moved around the structure with calm efficiency, issuing clear instructions without ever raising her voice. Her posture was steady, purposeful. No wasted energy. Just deliberate, quiet competence.

And it struck me, then—whatever Glenda’s background had been before Clivilius, it wasn’t ornamental. She wasn’t here by accident.

Her skillset—her presence—wasn’t just welcome. It was vital.

In the soft rustle of canvas and the creak of tensioned lines, I found a sliver of reassurance. We were not alone in this place. We had no map, no plan, no certainty—but we had each other. And some of us knew how to build shelter before the night came.

Chris’s voice, a familiar beacon in the haze of my thoughts, drew me back from the edge of my ruminations. “Hey, Karen,” he called, hunched over near the tent’s far corner, his hands deep in canvas and cord.

I turned towards him, brushing the grit from my knees as I stepped closer. “What’s up?” I asked, dropping into a crouch beside him. My voice carried curiosity, but beneath it, a quiet yearning pulsed—hope, faint but stubborn, that perhaps he’d found something. Some small sign of life. Anything.

But the silence clung to everything. Heavy. Immovable. It was the kind of silence that didn't simply settle over a place—it became part of it. No wind rustling leaves. No insects humming their invisible circuits. Not even the whine of a single fly. It was as though the very idea of movement had been forgotten by the world around us.

Chris handed me a tent peg—ordinary at first glance, its metal dulled by a fine film of dust. Yet his eyes held a flicker of something… not urgency, exactly, but interest. “Take a look at this,” he said, and there was a current beneath the words, like he was handing over more than just a tool.

I turned it over in my hands, squinting against the light as I examined its shape. “What am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked, brow furrowed. It felt cool and unremarkable. Familiar. A tent peg, nothing more.

“Try pushing it into the ground,” he said, watching me closely. His tone had shifted—still gentle, but charged with a quiet discovery.

“You could have told me that to start with,” I replied, shooting him a dry smile as I positioned the peg.

He offered a slight shrug, the corner of his mouth quirking in return.

I pressed it into the earth, expecting the soft upper layer of dust to part easily. At first, it did. The peg slid through the loose topsoil with no resistance. But then—suddenly—it met something. An abrupt stop, jarring and unnatural. Like hitting stone, but without the satisfying give of rock and soil. It wasn’t a thunk or a clunk—it was silence. Resistance without identity.

My hand paused, fingers still curled around the peg. The sensation prickled against my nerves.

“You have to push it harder,” Chris said. There was something in his voice—encouragement, yes, but also a challenge, as though he knew what I’d just felt.

I looked at him, then back at the peg, and applied more pressure. My palm pressed down slowly, firmly. Still, it barely moved. It resisted like it had been welded to something beneath the dust. Not stone. Not clay. Something else. Something… deliberate?

My confusion deepened. “Hold on a sec,” Chris said, rising to his feet with a glint in his eye that suggested the puzzle had hooked him. I stood back, peg still loose in my hand, watching as he dropped to his knees beside the spot.

His hands worked quickly, fingers slicing through the top layer of soil, sending little clouds of dust into the dry air. The fine particles caught the light, suspended briefly like ash, before drifting down to rejoin the earth. He moved with an energy I hadn’t seen in him since our arrival—like the mystery had cut through the fog of uncertainty and woken something up.

There was something almost boyish about it. Not naïve, but eager. Focused. It was a strange contrast—the barren silence of Bixbus and the animation of a man determined to uncover a secret, however small.

I crouched beside him again, the peg dangling loosely between my fingers, forgotten for the moment. Dust clung to our clothes, to our skin, to the tiny hairs on our arms. Still, we leaned in.

And I realised, as I watched him work, how quickly human instinct could shift—how even in the most lifeless terrain, the act of searching, of wondering, could pull the colour back into things. The dull monotony of dust and heat gave way, for a moment, to anticipation. To the thrill of not knowing.

Whatever lay beneath that strange resistance, it wasn’t just ground.

It was the beginning of something.

I leaned in beside him, compelled by a mixture of resolve and the strange, flickering thrill that comes with not knowing what lies just beneath the surface. The peg, cool and dull in my hand, felt suddenly more important than it had any right to. I repositioned it carefully, angling it slightly, then braced myself.

This time, I pushed with everything I had—every ounce of frustration, every scrap of hope, every question I couldn’t yet ask aloud. My palms pressed hard against the metal, my muscles tightening with effort.

And then—crack.

The peg punched through the crust with a sound like fractured stone, sharp and sudden. I pitched forward from the unexpected release, stumbling slightly as the peg slid deep into the earth with a sudden, effortless ease. I caught myself with one hand, a grunt escaping me more from surprise than pain.

It was over in seconds, but something had shifted.

The resistance—whatever it had been—was gone.

Beneath the brittle surface of Bixbus, there was something more. Something that could be breached. Anchored into. And even if it was just an illusion, just a fluke of terrain and tension, it felt like something worth noting. A quiet, astonishing possibility: maybe we could belong here.

“Holy shit!” Chris exclaimed, the words breaking out of him in a rush of raw awe.

I straightened, brushing grit from my palms. “Chris!” I shot back, a sharp note of mock-reproach in my voice, half-amused and half-irritated by the sudden outburst. His enthusiasm had always ridden the line between infectious and infuriating.

“Did you see that?” he continued, undeterred. He was already scrabbling at the dirt again, hands feverish with curiosity, as if the ground had offered us an invitation to look closer.

“No. I was too busy falling on my face, wasn’t I?” I muttered, folding my arms. The sarcasm came easily, but beneath it, I felt a flicker of warmth for the man beside me—the way he could still find wonder in the grit.

Chris didn’t respond. He was focused now, pulling something small and delicate from the newly unearthed soil. “Here, look,” he said, holding it out to me between dusty fingers. “I think it’s a seed.”

He placed it in my palm with reverence, as though it were a fossil or some ancient relic. I bent closer, inspecting its familiar ridged surface and pale brown shell.

“It’s a coriander seed,” I said flatly, unable to stop the disappointment from tinting my voice. Of all the things it might have been—some unknown flora, a native survivor of this strange land—it was something pulled from spice racks and potting trays.

Chris stared at me, blinking. “What the heck is a coriander seed doing buried under the crust!?”

His whisper was full of awe, like he believed the seed held some buried wisdom from Clivilius itself. There was something tender in his excitement—something I didn’t want to quash, even if it was entirely misplaced.

I sighed, the truth dawning on me like an anticlimax. “It wasn’t.”

I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out a small zip-lock bag, half-filled with coriander seeds I’d brought from home. An old habit, really—tucking seeds into pockets like charms. As I unsealed the bag, a few spilled out, tumbling onto the cracked soil below. They scattered like tiny breadcrumbs across the red dust, absurdly out of place.

Chris’s face fell almost comically fast. The lightness in his expression gave way to a slight slump in his shoulders. “Oh,” he breathed, as if the entire mystery had been sucked out of the moment.

The air around us seemed to settle again, heavier now. Quieter. Even the dust seemed to still.

“I must have forgotten to give them to Jane,” I murmured, the words tinged with a dull self-consciousness. I’d packed them for her. One of our half-formed ideas from before—sprouting herbs in windowsills.

“I should have known,” Chris muttered. It was more to himself than to me, but I caught the note of self-reproach in it. Not anger—just the weary deflation of hope met with logic.

And still, the coriander seeds lay scattered between us—tiny, round, and impossibly ordinary.

In this world of strange silences and foreign skies, they were the most Earth-bound things we had.

“But I didn’t bring those,” I said slowly, my gaze shifting as something caught the edge of my vision. It wasn’t the seeds in my hand anymore—it was something beyond them, something stirring in the soil. My breath hitched, and the fog of disappointment that had been settling around us evaporated in an instant, replaced by a sharpened clarity. There—emerging from the cracked earth—was something green.

“Shit!” Chris blurted, his voice loud in the still air, startled awe giving it an almost childlike pitch.

“Chris! Language!” I hissed, more out of habit than true disapproval. My eyes stayed fixed on the impossible: a cluster of delicate green shoots, faintly trembling in the dry breeze, rising from the very soil we’d only just disturbed.

It was such a fragile colour—this green. Not the rich, leafy depths of a forest, but the tender green of beginnings, like the very first signs of spring after a bitter frost. And in this scorched, rust-toned world, it was nothing short of shocking.

“Are they…?” Chris began, voice trailing off as the truth unfolded before him in real time.

“Coriander plants,” I confirmed, the words almost reverent. They slipped out on a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding. We knelt side by side in the dust, silent now, a stunned stillness passing between us. The barren brutality of Bixbus, with its silence and glare, softened slightly—just for a moment—as life quietly asserted itself.

“Did they grow just then?” he asked, crouched so low his nose was nearly to the ground. His hands hovered protectively around the young plants, as though shielding them from the dry air might help.

“I’m pretty sure they weren’t there before,” I replied dryly, lifting an eyebrow. “Honestly, Chris, sometimes you ask the most stupid questions.”

But the words were gentler than they sounded. I didn’t mean them. Not really. Beneath the teasing was a crackling undercurrent of exhilaration. The impossibility of it—life, spontaneous and unbidden—was rearranging something fundamental in me. This wasn’t just a botanical curiosity. It felt… emblematic. A sign.

I reached once more into the bag in my pocket, pinched a single coriander seed between my fingers, and placed it delicately into the loose soil Chris held. The gesture felt deliberate, ceremonial, like planting a flag on newly discovered ground. The seed nestled into his palm, surrounded by the red-tinged earth, and we both paused—as if we’d just lit a fuse and were waiting to see if it would burn.

Chris exhaled softly. “It's like waiting for a kettle to boil,” he said, and though the line was delivered with a smirk, it couldn’t quite mask the quiet anticipation behind it.

“Shh!” I murmured, waving a hand gently between us. I didn’t look away from the soil. Something about the moment felt too fragile, too charged with possibility to risk breaking it with words. My pulse quickened, matching the rhythm of my breath, each second stretching long and taut like string drawn to its limit.

“I don’t think either talking or silence is going to make a difference,” Chris whispered back, a smile tugging at his voice. But he didn’t press the point. He simply shifted beside me, still and ready, matching my reverence even if he didn’t share it fully.

Time slowed. The air thickened. The dust hung around us like incense in a temple.

Then—it happened.

It began not with a flourish, but with a tremble. The seed’s shell, still dust-coated, cracked with a soft, almost inaudible sound. A hairline split became a fissure. From within, something pale and determined emerged—a tentative root, followed quickly by a slender shoot. The earth accepted it without resistance.

We watched in silence, mouths slightly open, as the shoot unfurled, stretching upwards with quiet grace. Two tiny leaves opened like hands, reaching—not towards the sun, which remained harsh and unsentimental overhead—but towards possibility.

It was breathtaking. Not just because it defied everything we thought we knew about plants, about time, about germination. But because it reminded us that life, even here, even now, was not just possible—it was ready.

The red dust of Bixbus had become the backdrop to something astonishing. In this act of spontaneous growth, I saw more than chlorophyll and moisture—I saw hope, coiled deep within the grains of a dying soil, waiting only for the smallest invitation to rise.

And I felt something inside me rise with it.

If a single coriander seed could take root in this barren dust and bloom before our eyes—then what else, I wondered, might be possible in Clivilius?