They worked as the sun detonated overhead. Chia taught him the Anme breathing rhythm—a slow, deep pulse that matched the acacia’s resin-heartbeat. Together, they cracked the vent. The salt gas hissed in—gray, heavy, wrong. For one terrible moment, Chia felt the garden recoil. Mosses shriveled. The acacia’s light flickered.
“The garden is a museum. The Sinks are three hundred people.”
“You want to plant the gas?”
Chia stared at him. “That would kill the garden.”
“They want you to open the dome’s pressure locks,” Renn said, his voice muffled. “Flood the cavern with your oxygen. Dilute the gas.”
The problem arrived on a three-legged mule: a messenger from the Lower Sinks, a boy named Renn with a gas-sheet over his mouth and a data-slate clutched to his chest. The miners’ deep pumps had finally hit a cavern—not of water, but of salt gas , a corrosive, expanding fog that would, within seventy-two hours, eat through every lung, every seal, every glass facet of the Folly.
The girl looked at the flower, then at Chia Anme, and whispered, “You made this?”
