Chapter 49
Sanctuary is alive by the time we hit the main corridor.
The day shift is already at it—hauling trash, breaking up crates for firewood, untangling bundles of scavenged cable with a kind of patient resignation.
The air is heavy with detergent and last night’s beer, but there’s a new, sharper note: the mineral scent of fresh-cut concrete drifting in from the hall where they’re expanding the quarantine wing.
Rosie is there, face slick with sweat, barking orders at a pair of teenagers who look like they’d rather eat their own shoes than stack another minute of bricks. She catches my eye and winks but doesn’t break cadence.
Kang and I move in sync, shovelling our way through the drift of bodies. There’s an ease to it, as if our legs still remember the pattern from the last escape: move, scan, move. The Authority may be gone, but the habits are hardwired.
I glance around at the workers bent over their tasks, some chatting amongst themselves. “This…” I murmur, surprised to hear my own voice, “this is the closest thing to peace I’ve seen.”
“Peace, huh?” Kang hefts a broken crate onto a pile, the muscles in his forearms flexing. “You’re easy to impress.”
“Stitch would’ve hated it at first,” I say, brushing plaster dust from my fingers. “Too many rules, not enough freedom. But she would’ve made a home out of it. She always did.” A twinge of grief ripples through me. She’ll never see this place.
Kang bumps my shoulder, dry humour in his eyes. “She’d have painted the walls neon and started charging rent.”
I huff out a laugh. “Yeah. And Jackson…” My throat catches. “Jackson would’ve given you a run for your money.”
“Jackson?” Kang asks.
“A friend,” I say. “More like a grumpy, sarcastic uncle. He’d have argued with you over every little thing.”
Kang’s expression softens. “Sounds like my kind of guy.”
Before I can answer, Maven steps from behind a collapsed beam, gloved hand gripping the strap of a battered leather satchel. One shoulder cocked, chin tilted—broadcasting intent.
“Morning, lovers,” Maven calls, tone pitched for maximum penetration. The words snap the air like a wet towel.
I flinch, more out of habit than offense. Kang just rolls his eyes.
Maven closes the gap in four strides, stopping a hair too close. A stinging blend of moss and solvent clings to them like a second skin.
“There’s a meet tonight,” Maven says, eyes flitting between us. “Big one. Council wants all hands, and you’re on the agenda.”
I raise an eyebrow. “For what? We just got here.”
“Exactly.” Maven grins, exposing a flash of metal from an old incisor crown. “Fresh blood means fresh ideas.” They glance at Kang. “And Authority knows the other side’s playbook.”
Kang’s jaw tics, but he doesn’t bite.
“Is this about the node?” I ask, keeping my voice low.
Maven shrugs. “What isn’t? Rumour is Petrov’s running hot. If we move now, we can catch them with their pants down.”
My shoulder aches, right on cue. “Fine,” I say. “We’ll be there.”
“Eighteen hundred, mess hall. Don’t be late.” Maven pivots and melts into the flow of bodies, already barking at some poor soul about the colour-coded bins.
Kang watches them go. “They always like this?”
“Only when they’re sober,” I say. “When they’re drunk, they hug.”
He makes a face. “Noted.”
We keep moving, weaving through knots of workers until the job board by the old hydroponics lab lists us for “debris control” and “reclamation,” which translates to trash duty. Rosie meets us at the service hatch, handing each of us a pair of gloves and a grainy plastic face shield.
“Don’t let Maven get to you,” she says, voice pitched low. “They like making people jump.”
I nod, but my mind is already on the work. I remember the old Authority doctrine: stay busy, stay sane.
We spend the next hour hauling bags of wet garbage down to the sub-basement, where the composters convert it into a thick, stinking slurry. The smell is indescribable—something between dead rats and a field hospital during a blackout. The gloves do nothing.
Kang doesn’t complain, but his eyes narrow with every trip. By the fifth run, he’s stopped scanning for threats and started scanning for shortcuts.
“You think they give all the newbies the shit jobs?” he asks, wiping a streak of grime from his forehead.
I flex my hand, feeling the ache in my fingers. “No, just the ones who look like they might kill someone if they stay idle too long.”
He grunts, but I see the corner of his mouth twitch.
On the way back from the last load, I catch a glimpse of the kids again—same cluster as last night, now dragging a busted water heater down the hall. They see Kang and fall into line behind him, mimicking his stride, faces set in exaggerated Authority scowls.
Kang ignores them at first, but one of the braver girls peels off and plants herself in front of him.
“You’re supposed to salute,” she says, chin lifted.
Kang stares down, deadpan. “Says who?”
“Manual says so,” she retorts, then mimes a stiff, two-fingered salute. The other kids giggle.
Kang hesitates, then gives her the sloppiest, laziest version of the gesture I’ve ever seen. The girl beams, then runs back to her squad, already plotting her next attack.
I watch the scene, something tight and old tugging at my chest. The world may be ending, but here, the game is still alive.
We finish the haul and check in with Rosie, who sends us to the old rec room to clear out debris from last week’s ceiling collapse.
The place is a disaster: broken stools, shattered crates, a sea of empty beer bottles and twisted bits of metal.
The light is bad, filtered through a haze of old cigarette smoke and the orange sputter of a single oil lamp.
We start by shoving the big stuff to one side.
Kang uses a broken broom handle as a lever, prying loose slabs of ceiling with surgical precision.
I sweep glass and dust into makeshift piles, careful to keep pressure off my left arm.
The work is monotonous, but it clears my head — and makes me almost forget about tonight’s meeting.
We’re halfway through the room when I notice something off about the wall behind the bar. The concrete is newer here, patched with a different colour mortar. There’s a seam running down the middle, just wide enough to catch a fingernail.
I rap it with my knuckle. Hollow.
“Kang,” I say, keeping my voice level. “You see this?”
He sets down his lever and joins me at the wall. He runs his fingers along the seam, then presses his palm flat. For a moment, nothing happens. Then, with a soft click, the wall shifts. A section about two feet square pops open, revealing a narrow crawlspace lined with steel mesh.
We exchange a look.
“You first,” Kang says.
I squeeze through, the air inside thick with dust and old insulation. The crawlspace widens after a metre, opening into a chamber that hums with the low-frequency throb of hidden machinery. The temperature jumps at least ten degrees.
The chamber is packed with pipes, valves, and electrical panels, all meticulously labelled in a script I don’t recognise. But that’s not what stops me.
It’s the plants.
They’re everywhere—vines, ferns, clusters of flowers so bright they hurt to look at.
They spill from planters welded to the wall, climb the pipes, dangle from the ceiling in shaggy green ropes.
Some have blossoms like glass lanterns, others grow in tight blue spikes, but all are lush, thriving, utterly out of place.
The air is humid, almost tropical. It’s thick enough to choke a normal person, but I find it soothing. A world with too much oxygen and not enough poison.
I reach out, touch a frond. It recoils, then curls around my finger, sticky and warm.
Behind me, Kang climbs through the opening. He stops, stares.
“Well,” he says. “This is new.”
I want to laugh, but the sound won’t come. Instead, I kneel by a patch of moss, running my hand through its velvet surface. The sensation is overwhelming—soft, wet, alive.
For a long minute, we just stand there, the only noise the drip of condensation and the steady thump of water pumps.
“This is some kind of grow room,” I say, finally. “But why hide it?”
Kang shrugs. “Maybe no one knows.”
After a while, I start cataloguing the plants, mapping the pipes, tracing the wiring back to its source. There’s a whole irrigation network here, a closed-loop system feeding the garden. Someone went to a lot of trouble to build this, then buried it behind a false wall.
I wonder if Maven knows.
I kneel between some ferns, palms flat in the moss, and close my eyes. The scent is overwhelming: sweet, sharp, tinged with rot where the old leaves collapse into mulch. If I breathe deep enough, I can almost forget the burn of antiseptic and dead concrete that marks the rest of Sanctuary.
Kang stays at the threshold, arms folded, head cocked like he’s waiting for the room to attack. It’s not until I pluck a blossom—blue, delicate, with petals thin as memory—that he steps closer.
I hold it up, pinched between thumb and forefinger. “Scorpion grass,” I say, rolling the stem. “Or, if you want to get romantic, forget-me-not. Myosotis.”
Kang crouches beside me, careful not to crush anything. “You recognise all of them?”
“Most,” I say. “The Authority ran experiments on rapid-cycle mutation. Tried to get these bastards to clean up radioactive spill sites.” I smirk. “They mostly just mutated. But this one”—I wiggle the flower—”always came back the same. Blue, five petals. Like it refused to forget what it was.”
Kang watches my hands, not the flower. “Seems stubborn.”
“Yeah,” I say. “The scientists called it a control group, but I liked to think it was just… itself. Wouldn’t change for anyone.”
He takes the flower from me, gentle, and tucks it behind my ear. “Fits you,” he says.
I laugh, but it sounds wrong. “You’re the first person to ever compare me to a weed.”
He brushes dirt from my knuckles, then holds my hand in his, thumb tracing the bone. “Not a weed,” he says, voice almost shy. “Just hard to kill.”
We sit like that for a long time, the whirr of the pumps a lullaby for the desperate. I let my head fall to his shoulder, and he lets it stay. The silence is heavy, but not uncomfortable.
After a while, I say, “Funny how we name things after what we fear most.” I pluck another blossom and crush it between my fingers, blue pigment staining my thumb.
He nods, understanding more than he says. “You afraid of forgetting?”
I already have…
I think about the dreams, the missing hours, the days I wake up and don’t know what’s real. About the rumours, the experiments and Maven’s plan to burn it all down.
“Not anymore,” I say, finally. “If I go, at least something will remember I was here.”
He pulls me closer, wraps me in both arms, and kisses my forehead. “I’ll remember,” he murmurs, words lost in the green.
We stay there, in the quiet warmth of the grow room, while the world above plots its next disaster.