Smog and Peonies

My lungs burned. The smog in Sector 4 always tasted like chewed pennies and exhaust. I clung to the rusted rungs of the fire escape, my fingers cramping around the cold iron. Fifty stories down, the city was a black smear of rationing lines and broken neon. Up here, pressed against the glass dome of the restricted rooftop garden, the air started to change. It smelled wrong. It smelled clean.

"Hurry up," Jas whispered.

She was three rungs below me. I could hear her breathing, jagged and shallow.

"I'm trying," I said.

"Try faster. Drones do their sweep in four minutes."

I pulled myself up onto the maintenance ledge. The metal grated under my boots. Standard-issue rubber, two years old, the treads completely worn smooth. I slipped, my knee smashing into the steel grate. Pain shot up my thigh. I bit down on my lip hard enough to taste blood. I didn't make a sound. Noise up here got you a shock-baton to the teeth or a one-way trip to the labor wards.

Jas hauled herself over the edge. Her jacket was torn at the shoulder, exposing a dirty thermal shirt. She dropped her canvas bag onto the grate. It hit with a heavy, metallic clink. She pulled out the bypass rig. The screen on her datapad was cracked down the middle, a spiderweb of dead pixels masking the code.

"Get the panel open," Jas said.

I pulled the flathead screwdriver from my back pocket. I jammed it under the seam of the security terminal mounted on the dome's exterior. I twisted. The plastic casing groaned, then snapped off. Red wires and yellow wires tangled inside like a gut wound.

"Which one?" I asked.

Jas didn't look up from her screen. "Yellow. Strip it. Don't cut it."

My hands shook. The wind off the harbor was freezing, biting through my thin clothes. I pinched the yellow wire with my fingernails and stripped back the insulation. A tiny blue spark bit my thumb. I flinched.

"Done," I said.

Jas attached the alligator clips from her rig to the exposed wire. She tapped a sequence on her cracked screen. The terminal blinked from red to green. The massive glass hatch in the dome hissed. Pressurized air leaked out, smelling of damp earth and aggressive, unnatural spring.

"We're in," Jas said. She shoved the rig back into her bag. "Three minutes. Get the pollen. Don't touch the soil."

We slid through the gap.

The transition was violent. One second we were in the freezing, toxic dark of the city. The next, we were standing in a synthetic jungle. The air was thick, heavy with moisture and heat. It coated my skin instantly. Sweat broke across my forehead.

The garden was massive. Rows of bioluminescent night-jasmine glowed with a sickly, bright white light. Between them, fields of digital tulips pulsed in neon pinks and toxic greens. It was late spring inside the dome. The artificial season was cranked to maximum output. The colors were too bright. They hurt my eyes. It didn't look like nature. It looked like a screen set to maximum contrast.

"Bags out," Jas said.

She tossed me a collection vial and a metal scraper. The synthetic pollen from the night-jasmine was worth a month of rations on the black market. It was a primary ingredient in the neuro-stims the upper sectors used to stay awake during the ninety-hour work weeks. We just needed enough to buy real food. Something that didn't come in a gray foil packet.

I moved down the row of jasmine. The glowing flowers cast strange, hard shadows against the glass walls. I held the vial under a cluster of blooms and scraped the stamen. Fine, glowing yellow dust fell into the glass. It smelled like sugar and ozone.

I moved to the next flower. Scrape. Collect. Move.

My heart hammered against my ribs. The silence in the dome was heavy. Too heavy. In the undercity, there was always noise. Sirens, screaming, the hum of the air scrubbers. Here, there was nothing. Just the wet drip of condensation falling from the glass ceiling to the synthetic dirt.

I scraped another flower.

Then, the light shifted.

It was a physical sensation. A sudden drop in air pressure that made my ears pop. The hairs on my arms stood up. The white glow of the jasmine flickered, dimming into a bruised, pale yellow. The neon pink of the digital tulips stuttered like a bad video feed.

I stopped moving. My stomach dropped.

The shadows on the ground were wrong. They weren't pointing away from the flowers. They were stretching toward the center of the path, pooling together into a dark, dense shape. A shadow mass. It felt heavy. The silence turned into a high-pitched ringing in my ears.

"Jas?" I whispered.

She didn't answer. She was two rows over, her back to me, furiously scraping pollen.

I looked back at the path. The yellow dust I had accidentally dropped on the floor was moving. It swirled in the stagnant air, caught in a nonexistent wind. The glowing particles rose, spiraling upward. They clung to the shifting light, building a form.

Legs. A torso. Shoulders.

A face.

My breath stopped. My throat closed entirely.

It was Lenny.

He stood right there, waist-deep in the glowing pink tulips. He looked exactly the way he did two years ago, the night the sector enforcers dragged him out of our flat. He wore the same faded green jacket. He had the same dirt smudged across his jaw. The projection was hyper-real. I could see the individual threads fraying on his collar. I could see the slight crook in his nose.

He wasn't glowing. He looked solid. Real.

"Lenny?" My voice was a dry croak.

He turned his head. His eyes locked onto mine. The grief hit me so hard my knees actually buckled. I dropped the glass vial. It shattered on the grate. Glowing yellow dust spilled everywhere.

Lenny didn't speak. He just stared at me. His expression was completely blank, dead. The digital tulips around him continued to glitch, throwing sharp, neon pink light across his face.

This wasn't possible. It was a security measure. A psychological deterrent. The dome's AI was pulling data from my optic implants, projecting my own trauma back at me. I knew the tech existed. I knew the upper sectors used it to break dissidents.

Knowing it didn't matter. My body betrayed me. I took a step toward him.

"Lenny, I'm sorry," I said. Tears burned my eyes, blurring the neon lights. "I couldn't stop them."

He raised his hand.

Suddenly, the dome was flooded with harsh, blinding white light.

Not the soft glow of the flowers. High-lumen, militarized halogen beams. They cut through the glass ceiling, sweeping the rows of jasmine. The drones were early.

"Hey!" a voice barked over a megaphone. "Sector 4 security. Drop your gear. Put your hands on your head."

Heavy boots slammed against the metal grating outside the hatch. Radios crackled with static. The enforcers were already on the roof.

I couldn't move. I was paralyzed. The high-beam lights washed over Lenny, but his projection didn't fade. He remained perfectly solid, standing in the glitching tulips. He was pointing downward.

Fingers dug into my shoulder. Hard.

Jas wrenched me backward. I stumbled, nearly falling into the thick soil.

"Snap the fuck out of it, bro," Jas hissed. Her face was inches from mine. She was terrified. Sweat poured down her neck. "They're coming through the hatch. We're dead if we stay here."

"It's him," I whispered, pointing at the projection. "Jas, look."

Jas didn't even glance at the phantom. "There's nothing there! Move!"

She grabbed my jacket and yanked me down into a crouch. The flashlights from the enforcers swept over our heads, illuminating the thick canopy of jasmine leaves.

"Two targets inside," a deep voice said over the radio static. "Lethal force authorized. Flush them out."

We were trapped. The only exit was the hatch we came through, and they were standing right outside it. The glass dome was impenetrable.

I looked back at Lenny. He was still pointing. Not at me. At the ground.

He was pointing at the soil directly beneath the digital tulips.

My mind snapped back to reality. The survival instinct kicked in, overriding the artificial grief. I threw myself to the ground. I pushed past the glowing pink stalks of the tulips. I drove my bare hands into the synthetic dirt.

"What are you doing?" Jas whispered, crawling after me. "Are you insane? They track the soil!"

"Dig!" I said.

I clawed at the dirt. It was wet and dense. It packed under my fingernails, tearing at the skin. I didn't care. I dug like an animal. Three inches down, my fingers scraped against cold, hard metal.

I cleared the dirt away frantically. A rusted iron ring sat embedded in a square metal plate. A maintenance hatch. An old one, predating the biolab renovations.

"Help me pull," I said.

Jas saw the ring. Her eyes went wide. She didn't ask questions. She grabbed the iron ring with both hands. I gripped it next to her.

"On three," she said. "One. Two. Three."

We pulled. The muscles in my back screamed. The metal plate groaned, fighting against years of compacted soil and rust.

"They're in the east quadrant!" a guard yelled. Footsteps pounded down the row next to us. The beam of a flashlight cut through the leaves, landing inches from my boot.

"Pull!" I grunted.

The hatch gave way with a violent snap. It tore open, revealing a square hole of absolute, pitch-black darkness. A blast of foul, cold air rushed up from the hole. It smelled like raw sewage and old concrete. The undercity.

"Go," Jas said, shoving me toward the hole.

I didn't hesitate. I slid my legs into the dark and dropped. I fell for a second before my boots hit a slanted metal chute. I slid downward in the total blackness, the rusted metal tearing at my clothes.

Above me, I saw the square of the open hatch. Jas scrambled over the edge, dropping down right behind me.

Just as she fell, the enforcers breached the row. Flashlights flooded the space above the hatch.

"They went into the vents!" a voice yelled.

I looked up one last time before the chute curved. Through the square of light, standing at the edge of the hole, looking down at me, was Lenny. The flashlights didn't illuminate him. He was just a dark silhouette against the harsh glare. He lowered his hand. Then, the chute bent sharply, and the light vanished.

We slid in the dark for a long time. The metal groaned around us.

Eventually, the chute leveled out, dumping us onto a hard concrete floor. I hit the ground hard, rolling to absorb the impact. Jas landed next to me with a heavy thud.

We lay there in the absolute dark. The air was freezing. The silence was absolute.

I stared up at the black ceiling. My chest heaved. My hands were entirely numb, caked in wet, synthetic dirt. I brought my fingers to my face. Beneath the smell of sewage and rust, I could still smell the sweet, toxic ozone of the glowing yellow dust.