The Line We Drew

“Out here, even a tomato seedling can feel like a message from the gods—or a warning.”

After a fruitless search for anything resembling a shovel—or frankly, anything sturdier than a tent peg—I found myself circling back to the riverbank, to the breadcrumb trail of coriander seedlings Chris and I had planted with such careful intention. Each one, a small defiant burst of green, marked not only our presence but our fragile hope. They stood like tiny sentinels in the dust, silent witnesses to our strange little experiment.

As I retraced the steps we’d taken together, the knot in my stomach coiled tighter. Something was wrong. The space beside me felt hollow—too still. Chris should’ve been here. My breath quickened, my boots stirring up fine plumes of dust that clung to the heat-thick air. The absence of his voice, his shape hunched in concentration, his quiet muttering—it unsettled me more than I wanted to admit.

Where the hell is Chris?

The question pounded through my mind, a dull, relentless drumbeat. I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Chris!” My voice cracked the quiet. I spun on the spot, scanning the horizon, my eyes catching on every shadow and shimmer. Nothing. Just the endless sprawl of dust and rock.

I turned toward the hillier section in the distance, my legs pushing forward before I had time to weigh the decision. “Chris!” I called again, louder now, as much a plea as a command. My voice echoed back at me, swallowed by the openness.

Then, just as panic began to curdle into fear, he appeared—emerging from behind a jagged outcrop of rock like some reluctant apparition. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next, there he was. Not far, and yet far enough to have vanished from my world completely for a breathless few minutes.

Relief punched through me with such force I had to pause, catch it, ride the wave as it turned swiftly to irritation. My heart hadn’t quite settled when I snapped, “Where the hell have you been?”

The words were out before I could soften them, riding the sharp edge of my adrenaline. I folded my arms tightly, my whole body rigid with unspent worry. I wanted him to understand what that short absence had cost me, the vivid mental detours I'd taken—his body crumpled, some unseen danger, anything.

Chris, in typical fashion, was unbothered. “I had to piss,” he said flatly, as though the urgency and gravity of my concern were just so much static noise.

I stared at him, momentarily lost for a response. Of course he’d say that. The bluntness, the indelicate choice of word—it cut through me like a slap. You know I don’t like that word, I thought, the irritation simmering hotter for the fact I didn’t say it aloud. Instead, I shot him a look I hoped would do the talking for me: pointed, unamused, loaded with all the things I didn’t have the patience to spell out.

But before I could lecture him or retreat into silence, he offered something unexpected. “I found a shovel.”

My irritation was gone before I could cling to it, replaced by a jolt of hope that fluttered somewhere just beneath my ribs.

“Where’d you find that?” I asked, stepping closer. Already my mind was leapfrogging to what we could do with it: dig deeper, take more samples, stop wrecking our hands with every attempt to scratch through the crust.

Chris hesitated, then delivered the news with a careful balance of humour and caution. “I believe I’ve stumbled across a toilet site.”

My eyebrows shot up, the corners of my mouth twitching before I could stop them. Of course he had. Of course the first useful tool we’d manage to find would come with a side order of human waste and awkward logistics.

Still, Chris seemed almost proud, even amused. “Where did you think they were going to go when nature called?”

I let out a small, involuntary laugh, grimacing as I glanced around the terrain. Suddenly, the entire landscape felt far too intimate. It was one thing to talk about survival—but another entirely to live it. This wasn’t just an abstract exercise in adaptation anymore. It was real. And sometimes, real was unfiltered, undignified, and unavoidable.

The practicalities of life in Clivilius were beginning to reveal themselves in all their unvarnished honesty.

Chris drew my attention back to the matter at hand. “Yeah, we’ll need to do the same,” he stated, his voice imbued with a practicality that grounded me. That unflinching pragmatism of his—something I’d often admired—now felt like a cold hand settling on my spine. There was no dancing around it. The necessities of this place weren’t going to shape themselves to our sensibilities. We'd have to adjust to them.

I exhaled slowly, the breath catching a little as it passed through the dry air. The dust clung to everything—even the act of breathing felt like an effort. “I suppose it’s no different to our camping trips, really,” I murmured, searching for something familiar in this increasingly alien reality. But even as the words left my mouth, I knew they rang hollow. Camping, for all its discomforts, had always come with a return ticket. This... did not.

“No,” Chris echoed, and then added, “Well, maybe a little.” There was something in the way he said it—a small pull in the corner of his mouth, the shift in his eyes—that suggested more than he was letting on.

I watched him for a beat longer, my gaze catching on the subtle set of his jaw, the slight furrow between his brows. His invitation, “Come take a look,” was calm, almost casual—but I could sense the undercurrent of significance beneath it. A question posed without words.

Following his lead, I picked my way through the terrain, every step a negotiation with the uneven ground. The rocks were scattered in chaotic formations, like remnants of a forgotten upheaval, their jagged edges half-buried in fine layers of ochre dust. There was no path here—just intention, forward motion, and the quiet grit of determination.

As we rounded a low cluster of boulders, I braced for something—I wasn’t sure what. What I didn’t expect was the impossible sight laid out before us.

Amidst the grit and stone and rust-coloured soil, nestled in a natural hollow where the sun hit just so, was a cluster of tomato seedlings. Small but thriving. Their deep green leaves were impossibly vivid against the burnt palette of the earth around them, each stem upright and certain of its right to exist. The sight stopped me cold.

The implications of their presence unfurled in my mind faster than I could contain them. These hadn’t been deliberately planted. They were wild—volunteers, nature’s unexpected gift. Or, more accurately... nature’s response.

I glanced at Chris, a sinking feeling blooming in my chest. “This isn’t a phenomenon we want to adjust to,” I muttered, my hand hovering over the tomato plants before instinctively pulling back. I couldn’t bring myself to touch them. Not just because of their likely source, but because of what they represented: the blunt realities of survival. The quiet, unceremonious way the world continues—life sprouting from waste without sentiment or shame.

“I know,” Chris said, his voice low and level, but his gaze remained fixed on the plants. “But it gives a good indication of the soil’s strength.”

I nodded, slowly, the motion automatic. He was right, of course. As always, there was information to be gleaned—data in even the most unpalatable of details. These seedlings, robust and thriving without any intervention, were a clear sign that the earth here could sustain more than just theoretical growth. It was fertile. Active. Alive in ways we were only beginning to understand.

And yet, the emotional dissonance lingered. I was trained to value every scrap of evidence, to chase understanding no matter the context—but there was a difference between recognising a fact and accepting it without flinching. The juxtaposition of vitality and decay, growth and refuse, churned in my stomach like unset concrete.

Still, I couldn’t ignore the implications. These plants weren’t just surviving. They were thriving. And if nature could turn even this into sustenance... maybe there was more here waiting to be uncovered. More promise. More danger. More questions.

Always more questions.

Caught in the midst of these reflections, the natural call of my body made itself known—a sudden, undeniable pull that reminded me, in no uncertain terms, of the inescapable tether we all shared with the physical world. No matter how cerebral our discoveries, how extraordinary the revelations of Bixbus might be, our biology remained achingly ordinary.

“May I?” I asked Chris, the words simple but imbued with quiet meaning. In their brevity lay the unspoken need for dignity and space in a place that offered precious little of either.

My fingers moved to the button of my trousers, and the act—mundane in any other context—took on a strange gravity. There was something almost reverent about it, as though acknowledging that even in a world so foreign, our most basic rituals remained the same.

“Of course,” Chris replied. His tone held no awkwardness, just a gentle understanding. He turned away without hesitation, folding his arms loosely as he gazed outward, giving me a bubble of privacy in the sprawling openness.

I moved away, picking my path through the rocks until I found a small crescent-shaped alcove—a modest offering of seclusion from the wide, watching sky. The stones, sun-warmed and time-worn, pressed up from the earth like ancient sentinels. I crouched down carefully, the cool shadow a contrast to the sun’s weight on my shoulders. And there, amidst the dust and stone, I allowed my body to do what it must.

A wave of relief moved through me, washing away tension I hadn’t realised I was carrying. It was grounding, this crude and necessary moment. Something about it felt more intimate than it should have—more connected. Not just to the land, but to something deeper. I was a living thing among living things. Contributing to the soil, perhaps. Marking my place, however temporarily, on the tapestry of this strange new world.

A strange, speculative thought brushed the edges of my mind—would even this most primal act leave a trace? Would it nourish? Corrupt? Would it matter?

I exhaled softly and rose, brushing grit from my fingers. There was no clear answer, but then again, Bixbus didn’t seem interested in answers—it dealt in impressions, reactions, transformations.

When I returned to Chris, he gave a small nod, nothing more, and the simplicity of that moment between us felt oddly comforting. No judgement, no awkward glances. Just the quiet acknowledgement that we were living organisms doing our best to exist in a place that refused to make itself easy.

And so we carried on, the boundary between human and habitat growing ever thinner with each passing hour. Here, nothing was irrelevant. Every gesture—no matter how small or seemingly base—was part of something greater. A new kind of existence was unfolding, layered with contradiction: discomfort and awe, survival and discovery, humility and wonder.

Planting the final coriander seed into the warm, grainy embrace of the soil, I pressed it down gently with the pad of my finger and murmured, “Last seed.” The words escaped me in a hush—half a farewell, half a benediction. Satisfaction flickered beneath my ribs, tempered by a reluctant sense of finality. I lingered, watching the seed vanish beneath the surface, almost expecting another flash of green to erupt like the others had, as though life here answered to our touch alone. These seedlings, springing so impossibly fast from dust, had become more than plants. They were anchors. Evidence. Hope.

“I thought you said we had plenty,” Chris said, his voice filtering in with that unerring sense of timing he had—curious, faintly puzzled, gently pulling me back to the practical.

"I did… We did." My eyes swept along the trail of tiny shoots we’d left behind, a delicate path of green threading through the red and brown monotony of the terrain. The seedlings marked not just distance but memory—each one a step away from confusion, each one a claim staked in the dirt. I could trace our journey through them, all the way from the river’s shimmer to the hard edge of our makeshift latrine. A line of life, drawn in chlorophyll.

Chris tilted his head, that telltale tilt that said his brain had started doing laps around something. There was comfort in the familiar motion, a reassurance that at least some parts of him hadn’t shifted with the strangeness of the world around us.

Pouting slightly—not theatrical, but just enough—I added, “We planted all of them.” It should’ve been obvious. But I’d long accepted that what I thought went without saying often needed translation where Chris was concerned.

“All of them?” He blinked. It wasn’t incredulous so much as mildly affronted, as if I’d somehow bypassed a mutually agreed seed-conservation policy.

"Yes, Chris. That's what I just said." My patience frayed slightly, though the fondness still lingered beneath the irritation. We’d been through this dynamic before. It was our rhythm. At least that hadn’t changed.

"And they all grew, yeah?" His eyes scanned the earth again, as though seeking confirmation from the shoots themselves.

"They all sprouted. Whether they continue to grow or not is an entirely different matter." My voice was quieter now, more measured. It was easy to get swept up in the miracle of it all, but the scientist in me couldn’t ignore the fragility of first growth. Conditions could shift. Miracles could wither.

Chris nodded slowly, absorbing it. “How many?” he asked, his curiosity undimmed.

"About thirty. I'd guess we've covered close to three hundred metres. We've still a few hundred metres back to camp." I did the rough mental maths without needing to stop and count. The span of our work felt both intimate and expansive when translated into distance.

“Shit!” The word burst from him, raw and startled. His eyes widened, eyebrows shooting upward. The momentary lapse in language etiquette drew a frown from me—an automatic twitch of disapproval, though not without affection. He caught it, naturally.

“I didn’t realise we’d gone so far. That’s great news if this healthy soil is this widespread,” he added quickly, recovering his tone.

"Healthy soil. That's putting it mildly." I gestured towards the sprout at our feet—its impossibly green leaves catching the sun like tiny flags of defiance. They didn’t just grow here. They surged.

I noticed Chris had gone still. His gaze stretched beyond the river, toward the horizon, where the landscape seemed to blur into an abstract smear of possibility and threat. His shoulders tensed, jaw slackened. That faraway look was all too familiar, and I felt a flicker of unease. Was he still with me, or had the vast unknown already pulled him away?

"You alright, Chris?" I asked, stepping closer, my hand finding his shoulder. I gave it a light squeeze—not just to comfort, but to anchor.

He blinked, his eyes sharpening as he turned to face me properly. “Yeah,” he said, voice clearer now. “We’re going to be fine.”

And maybe, just maybe, I believed him. As we turned and began the slow walk back along the river’s edge, the water burbled beside us, its soft cadence a balm against the uncertainty. The seedlings stood like tiny sentinels along the path we’d forged—fragile but upright, reminding me that even in this strange place, life hadn’t just adapted. It had insisted.

Chris’s words echoed in my mind as we walked: We’re going to be fine. I wanted to hold onto them, to let them become truth. But even as hope rose in my chest, carried on the breeze and the river’s hum, a quiet thought remained, tucked into the back of my heart like a warning.

But what if we’re not?

And beyond the water’s glint, across that stretch of silence and heat and dust, the future waited—unformed, unpredictable, and not yet ours.