Green Rust

The cable snapped with a sound like a gunshot, sharp and final, cutting through the roar of the wind. Hellan didn't scream. There wasn't enough air in his lungs for that, and besides, the City didn't listen to screams. He just scrambled, his mag-gloves screeching against the wet, slime-slicked siding of the megastructure. Sparks showered down, fizzling out in the heavy, grey mist that passed for atmosphere this high up. He was falling. That was the simple, brutal fact of it. Gravity, the only honest thing left in the sector, reached up to drag him down toward the distant, hazy blur of the street level three hundred stories below.

He managed to twist in the air, his survival instincts overriding the panic that tried to seize his limbs. His right hand, the one with the reinforced hydraulics, slammed into a protruding cooling vent. Metal groaned. The impact rattled his teeth, sending a jolt of pure, white-hot agony up his shoulder, but the grip held. For a second. Then the vent, rusted through by decades of acidic condensation, sheared off.

He fell again, tumbling through a holographic advertisement for 'Synth-Joy' mood stabilizers—a woman’s face, fifty feet tall, smiling in a loop as he punched right through her pixelated teeth. He hit something hard. A grate. It bent under his weight, throwing him sideways onto a narrow, recessed platform hidden behind the colossal exhaust intake of the building’s climate control system.

Hellan rolled, his breath coming in jagged, wheezing gasps. The taste of copper and burnt plastic filled his mouth. He lay there for a moment, staring up at the underbelly of the city’s upper tier, waiting for the security drones to swoop down and fine him for unauthorized impact. Rain, heavy and tasting of sulfur, drummed against his blast-jacket.

He wasn't dead. That was a surprise. He pushed himself up, his joints popping, and checked the readout on his wrist. Shattered. Great. Another debt to add to the pile. He wiped the grime from his face, his eyes adjusting to the gloom of the recess.

That’s when he smelled it.

Not the usual rot of the city—not the burning garbage, not the chemical tang of the rain, not the stale exhaust of a million air conditioners. It was a smell he hadn't encountered since he was a boy, visiting the preservation domes before the ticket prices tripled. It smelled like... damp earth. Like something alive.

Hellan froze. He wasn't alone.

Six feet away, sitting on an overturned crate with a calmness that was almost terrifying, was a figure. A woman, maybe mid-twenties, though the grime on her face made it hard to tell. She wore a patchwork of scavenged gear—a medic’s thermal vest stitched to mechanic’s coveralls, boots that looked two sizes too big. She held a long metal pipe in one hand, resting it casually across her knees.

She didn't look surprised. She looked annoyed.

"You squashed the mint," she said. Her voice was flat, barely audible over the hum of the massive ventilation fans spinning nearby.

Hellan blinked, his brain still trying to catch up with his body. He looked down. Under his heavy, steel-toed boot, a small, green sprig lay crushed against the rust-flaked metal of the grating. "What?"

"The mint," she repeated, nodding at his foot. "Took me three months to get the pH balance right for that. You just... stepped on it."

Hellan lifted his foot slowly. Beneath it was indeed a smear of green. He looked around. Now that the adrenaline was fading, he saw what the shadows had hidden. The recess wasn't empty. It was a jungle. Or, at least, what passed for one in the Sprawl.

Plastic buckets, cut-open coolant canisters, and scavenged helmets were lined up in rows, filled with dark, rich soil. Tubes ran from the dripping HVAC unit above, feeding into a complex, jury-rigged filtration system that dripped clear water into the containers. And growing in them—defiant, scraggly, and impossibly green—were plants. Ferns with browned edges. spindly stalks of what might have been onions. A single, stubborn tomato plant tied to a rusty rebar stake.

"Who are you?" Hellan rasped, shifting his weight. His shoulder throbbed.

"Mero," she said, not moving the pipe. "And you're loud. Security sweeps are in ten minutes. You stay there, you get scanned. You get scanned, they find this. They find this, I have to throw you off the ledge."

It wasn't a threat, exactly. It was a logistical statement. Hellan respected that. He sat down heavily, leaning his back against the vibrating housing of the vent fan. "I'm not a snitch. Just... fell. Cable snapped on the uplink node two levels up."

Mero eyed his rig. "Cheap fiber. Corporate cutbacks?"

"Standard operating procedure," Hellan grunted. He reached for his side pouch, fumbling for a pain patch, but his fingers were numb. He dropped it. It skittered across the grate, stopping near her boot.

Mero looked at the patch, then back at him. She sighed, a short exhale of air that puffed white in the chill. She leaned forward, picked up the patch, and tossed it back to him. "Apply it. You look like you're about to pass out on my radishes."

Hellan slapped the patch onto his neck. The cool rush of synthetic analgesic hit his bloodstream, dulling the fire in his shoulder. "Radishes? Real ones?"

"As real as the acid rain allows," she said. She stood up, and he saw she was tall, lanky but moving with the efficient grace of someone who lived in the margins. She turned to the tomato plant, inspecting a leaf with the tenderness of a mother checking a child for fever. "It's Spring."

Hellan laughed, a harsh, barking sound. "Spring. Right. Calendar says so. Sky says otherwise."

"The sky is a liar," Mero said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, folding knife. "The calendar is a construct. But the cycle... the cycle tries. Even here. Even in the rust."

She sliced a small, red sphere from the vine. A tomato. It was lumpy, misshapen, and barely the size of a golf ball. It was the most beautiful thing Hellan had seen in ten years.

The city roared around them. Sirens wailed in the distance, the eternal soundtrack of Sector 4. Hover-transports buzzed by like angry hornets. But in this little pocket of shadow, there was a strange, suspended silence. A pause button pressed on the chaos.

Mero walked over to him. She didn't offer a hand up. She offered the tomato.

"Eat," she said.

Hellan stared at it. "That's... credits. Serious credits. You could sell that to a mid-tier manager for a week's worth of rations."

"It bruises easily," she said, shrugging. "Can't transport it. Besides. Eating is better than selling."

He took it. The skin was rough, warm from the heat of the ventilation unit. He wiped it on his sleeve, though that probably added more grease than it removed. He took a bite.

Flavor exploded. Acidic, sweet, savory. It tasted like sunlight. It tasted like dirt. It tasted nothing like the nutrient paste or the soy-caf he lived on. It was a shock to his system, violent and vivid. He chewed slowly, savoring the texture, the way the juice ran down his chin, sticky and real.

"Good?" Mero asked, watching him closely.

"Unbelievable," Hellan muttered. He finished it in two more bites. He felt a strange tightening in his chest that had nothing to do with his injury. "Why? Why do this? The risk... if housing authority finds this..."

"They won't," Mero said, sitting back down on her crate. "They don't look for green. They look for heat signatures and illegal weapons. Plants are... invisible to them. They don't register as a threat. They don't register as anything."

"It's a lot of work for a salad," Hellan said, wiping his mouth.

"It's not about the salad," Mero replied. She looked out through the grate, at the smog-choked skyline where the sun was just a bruised purple smear trying to break through the clouds. "It's about making something. Everything else... we just fix. You fix cables. I fix broken tech. We maintain the rot. We keep the machine limping along. But this..." She gestured to the buckets. "This makes itself. I just help it. It's the only thing in this whole damn sector that isn't dying or being rebooted."

Hellan looked at the crushed mint sprig under his boot. He felt a sudden, sharp pang of guilt. "Sorry about the mint."

Mero shrugged. "It'll grow back. Mint is a weed. It's stubborn. Like us."

They sat in silence for a while. It was an unexpected companionable silence. Usually, silence in the Sprawl meant danger—a predator stalking, a system failing. But this was different. It was the silence of growth. Of patience.

"I used to be a terraformer," Hellan said. The words came out before he could stop them. He hadn't told anyone that in years. "Before the contracts got cancelled. Off-world prep. We were supposed to go to Mars. Make it green."

Mero looked at him, her interest piqued. "What happened?"

"Funding cut. AI simulations were cheaper. They decided they didn't need to actually grow things if they could just trick the brain into thinking it was seeing green. So they laid us all off. I ended up running cable."

"Simulations don't taste like that tomato," Mero said.

"No," Hellan agreed. "They don't."

He looked at his hands. Rough, scarred, covered in conductive grease. Hands that used to know the pH of soil, now only knew the resistance of copper wire. "I miss it. The dirt."

Mero reached into a bucket near her feet and pulled out a small, plastic pouch. She tossed it to him. It was heavy.

"What's this?" Hellan asked.

"Seeds," she said. "Peppers. Hot ones. I don't have the room for them. They need more light than I can steal here."

Hellan held the pouch. It felt heavier than his tool belt. "I don't have a setup."

"You're a cable runner," Mero said, a faint smirk touching her lips. "You have access to the roof arrays. The solar collectors. Highest point in the sector. Best light."

"That's illegal. Highly illegal. Tampering with corporate energy infrastructure..."

"So is falling onto my balcony," Mero pointed out. "Take them. Or don't. But if you grow them, I want half the harvest."

Hellan looked at the pouch, then at the woman. A connection. A deal. Not for credits, not for data, but for peppers. It was absurd. It was reckless. It was the most hopeful thing that had happened to him in a decade.

"Deal," he said. He tucked the pouch into his breast pocket, right over his heart.

A low hum began to vibrate through the floor. The light coming through the grate shifted from grey to a harsh, sweeping red.

"Drone," Mero hissed. She was moving before the sound even fully registered, throwing a thermal tarp over the tomato plant and kicking the loose buckets into the deeper shadows.

Hellan scrambled back, pressing himself into the dark corner behind the intake manifold. The red light of the security drone swept through the grate, slicing through the gloom like a laser blade. It paused, hovering just outside the metal mesh. The mechanical whir of its optical zoom focused in.

Mero froze, her hand gripping the pipe. Hellan held his breath, his hand instinctively going to the seeds in his pocket.

The drone hovered. Searching. Calculating. It scanned the crushed mint leaf on the floor. It scanned Hellan’s boot print.

Then, a crackle of static from the drone's speaker. "Sector 84-G. Unscheduled obstruction detected. Clearing path."

A mechanical arm extended from the drone, holding a high-pressure solvent sprayer. It was aimed directly at the tarp covering the tomato plant.

Mero’s muscles tensed. She was going to move. She was going to try to hit a corporate enforcement drone with a rusted pipe. She was going to get herself killed for a vegetable.

Hellan couldn't let that happen. He looked at the sparking wires of the junction box next to him—the one controlling the fan speed. If he shorted it, the fan would spin up to maximum RPM instantly. It would blow the drone off course. It would also alert every maintenance crew in the building to his exact location.

He looked at Mero. He looked at the red light. He touched the seeds.

Unexpected joy. Unexpected connection. It was worth a fight.