Green from the Grave

The discovery happened during the tent construction, in the unremarkable act of driving a peg into the ground. Chris had been working the site with the methodical attention of a man who had spent his career reading soil, and when the peg struck resistance beneath the loose upper layer of dust, he did not dismiss it as stone. He investigated. His fingers sliced through the top layer and found what lay beneath: a hard crust, brittle but substantial, and below that, something darker, finer, heavier. Living soil. Actual soil, with the texture and weight of earth that had once sustained growth, buried under the accumulated dust of a world that appeared to have forgotten what fertility meant.

Karen had been working alongside him when a small zip-lock bag of coriander seeds slipped from her shirt pocket, scattering a handful of the pale brown kernels into the freshly exposed earth. She carried seeds the way other people carried loose change, a habit born from decades of fieldwork and a conservationist's instinct that you never knew when something might need planting. The seeds had been intended for Jane Lathom, a gift for a windowsill herb garden that would now never be delivered. Their arrival in Clivilian soil was entirely accidental.

What followed was not.

The first shoots appeared within seconds. Green, impossibly vivid against the red-brown earth, rising from the scattered seeds with a velocity that defied every principle of germination either of them understood. Shells cracked. Pale roots threaded downward into the dark soil with aggressive purpose. Stems pushed upward and unfurled twin leaves that reached for the light with the deliberate grace of something that had been waiting for permission to exist. Karen and Chris knelt side by side in the dust, watching coriander plants achieve in moments what should have required days, and neither of them spoke for a long time.

Glenda arrived from the other side of the tent, where she had been working with Jamie on the frame, and the sight of green growing from Clivilian ground stopped her mid-stride. Chris explained what they had found: the crust, the soil beneath it, the accidental planting. Glenda crouched beside them and asked to try. She took a single seed from Karen's bag, pressed it into the soil Chris held cupped in his palms, and watched with the focused attention of a physician observing a symptom she had never encountered in any textbook. The seed split. The root emerged. The stem rose. The leaves opened. Glenda's gasp was involuntary, the sound of a scientist confronting evidence that rearranged the categories she had been trained to think in.

The experiment was repeated a third time, with Karen sliding her hands beneath Chris's to steady them as his arms began to tire from holding the makeshift planter still. The result was identical. Seed to seedling in seconds, the process so consistent it suggested not aberration but system, as though the soil had been engineered to respond to terrestrial organic material with a generative capacity that exceeded anything natural selection on Earth had ever produced.

Jamie's arrival was less reverent. He had been wrestling with the tent frame on the opposite side, growing steadily more furious as the structure collapsed for the third time without Glenda's assistance. His discovery that three of his four tent-raising companions had abandoned the task to crouch in the dirt did not improve his disposition. He approached with the particular energy of a man who had spent the morning losing battles with bacon-stealing dogs, Portal-displaced strangers, and canvas that refused to stay upright, and demanded to know what they were doing.

Glenda told him to come and look. He did, reluctantly, and what he saw silenced even his cynicism for a moment. The green shoots in Chris's hands were undeniable. They existed with the quiet stubbornness of fact, indifferent to whether Jamie approved of them or not. He asked if Karen had brought the plants. She explained the accidental nature of the discovery. He challenged whether planting something guaranteed it would grow. Glenda whispered for him to watch. The seed cracked, rooted, and sprouted in his full view, and Jamie's expression underwent a transformation he could not entirely conceal: the involuntary widening of the eyes, the brief slackening of the jaw, the visible recalibration of a man whose framework for understanding the world had just been breached again.

The responses that followed mapped the fault lines of the group with precision. Glenda's mind leapt to Joel, wondering aloud whether the soil's regenerative properties might share something with the lagoon water that had played a role in the boy's impossible recovery. Jamie shut the connection down with characteristic bluntness, unwilling to build theories about his son on the foundation of garden experiments. Karen declared that she and Chris would make the study of the soil their priority, her voice carrying the galvanised clarity of a scientist who had just been handed the most important research question of her career. Chris tempered her ambition with caution, reminding them all that they had been in Clivilius for less than a day and that cracking the surface might release more than they realised.

Glenda, undeterred, pronounced herself ready to paint Karen's masterpiece. The echo of the earlier declaration, now returned with the weight of evidence behind it, landed differently than it had the first time. Karen accepted it with a smile that was warm on the surface and more complicated beneath. She was an entomologist. She understood ecosystems. She knew that nature's arithmetic was never one-sided, that growth in one place demanded sacrifice in another, that the ledger of the natural world always balanced eventually. The soil's extraordinary generosity would have a cost. She did not yet know what it was.

The sound of Kain's ute returning from the Drop Zone broke the moment. Jamie volunteered to meet it with the visible relief of a man being granted permission to leave a conversation that had asked more of him than he was prepared to give. He walked toward the engine noise without looking back, leaving the others with their seedlings and their questions and the charged silence of a world that had just revealed it was not as dead as it had appeared.

Chris planted the fragile coriander shoots in the shade of the half-erected tent, pressing them into the disturbed earth with the careful hands of a man who understood that the first green things to grow in Bixbus deserved protection regardless of what else remained unknown. Glenda suggested they finish raising the tent. Karen agreed. Chris, straightening with quiet resolve and announced he wanted to see how far the soil spread.

Around them, the dust of Bixbus stretched to the horizon in every direction, featureless and vast. But beneath it, something had changed. The ground they stood on was no longer merely ground. It was a question, posed in the language of roots and leaves, and the answer it demanded would shape everything that followed.