Never leave the greenhouse unattended, because the greenhouse bleeds when nobody’s looking. Water sprayed my eyes. I clamped my hand around a split in the pipe.

“Ada!” I gurgled, the water smothering my shout. Where is that girl when I need her!

Humming sailed from the canopy made of metal struts and bursting with grapevines. I glanced up. “Ada,” I shouted, “get down from there!”

The water hissed between my fingers, blinding me and assaulting the new-green lettuces. I grabbed a nearby rag and strangled the pipe with it, knotting it with the last bit of grip strength I could dredge. The gush slowed to a drip. Salt would have to fix this pipe proper.

Ada popped her head through the grape trellises. “You called, Mae?” she chirped, a grape seed stuck to her juice-stained chin. Headphones squashed Ada’s tangle of jet-black hair, and she wore her “oops didn’t hear you” face.

I squinted at my apprentice through stinging eyes. “Stop mucking with that radio and help me.” The Warren’s centrifugal gravity tugged at my arms. Sweat smeared my back.

Ada tucked her chin into the collar of her scuffed jumpsuit. “This one might have been the supply ship.” She folded her arms.

I plowed fingertips up my temples. “When will you listen? They’ve forgotten about us.” Her naivete irks me. Hope didn’t grow plants. Icemelt did. “We’re losing water. Fetch Salt, will you?” Salt would have to leave his pigs for later. Pigs ate lettuce too.

When Ada stretched a curl, it sprang back into place. “How do we know?” 

I brushed past her. “Because they haven’t brought supplies in years, Ada.”

I passed a hand over the lettuces, shooting up in a grow bed. Their new-green leaves were tattered by the barrage of water. I knew that if Ada left the Warren, she’d be just like them: innocent one second and hurt the next.

I sighed, my arms sick of forcing old scrap to function proper.

I inspected the grow beds, each sporting a tangle of new plants, sustained by the hydroponics. Tomatoes blushed on their vines, and mushrooms peeped their heads above homespun compost bales. Lettuce reached up to the solar lights with leafy green-purple fingers.

I inspected the web of pipes on my way to the door. No more breaches—for now. The pipes twined with a canopy of grape vines, trained up a trellis that I had fashioned from metal beams. Trained, but not pruned.

Never pruned.

That wasn’t a clone’s job. The Earthies promised to send a research team to do that.

Thousands of days ago.

The greenhouse’s auto lights brightened, throwing mottled shadows onto the floor.

The loudspeaker nestled in a tangle of passion vines crackled. “Good morning, Watanashi Duplicate volunteers! Today marks the 8,031st day of the SpaceLife Microsphere program!

Briefing will begin shortly. Watanashi Corp: We Put Your Clone In Space While You Get the Bragging Rights!” The automated message clicked off.

Briefing—yeah, right. Hadn’t had one of those in ages. The final transmission was on day 5,029—and it didn’t have a cheery moderator like the others. Just screams. With our only lifeline to Earth cut, we sent out pod after pod of recon missions. None of them returned.

When all shook out, we had no supplies, no escape pods, and over half our colony was MIA. The other half, Ada, Salt, and I excepted, died during the last power outage. 02 stopped pumping through our air ducts. Ada and I were the lucky ones; the greenhouse’s 02-producing plants kept us barely breathing while Salt fixed the main system, using the suit he’d been wearing during a spacewalk. I could never leave the Warren—I owed my life to it.

I stepped over a sprawling vine. I bent over to move it where Ada wouldn’t step on it.

Even after two months out of the Biopod, she still tripped over things. All the time. But who was I to complain? She was our last reinforcement before the Pod shut down for good. I wondered if her donor was as lazy as her.

The pipes converged, rusty fingers pointing to the door.

I swiped my palm across the reader. It flickered, but made no sound. I pounded it. The door beeped, then stuck halfway open.

I made a brain-note to tell Salt to oil the door. Broken pipe first.

Beyond the greenhouse door stood a man wearing a suit whiter than pig bone. The harsh greenhouse lights reflected on his helmet, beaming my startled reflection back at me.

My hair looked awful. Stripped into greasy ribbons, the left side ravaged by Salt’s knife from that time my hair caught in the generator fan. My face scowled back at me, bruiselike craters dangling beneath my eyes.

The suit crinkled as the astronaut moved to hide a large satchel under his arm. “Sorry,” he yelped, voice higher than Salt’s, piercing in quality.

My mouth turned to rock. I tried to say something, but all that came out was a sound reminiscent of a strangled chicken.

I poked the bag. Hope flared in me. “You brought supplies.” I didn’t allow it to be a question.

The man stepped away from me, jerking the bag.

I looked over his shoulder. “Did you bring soap?” I ran my hands through my lank hair. How I missed real, floral soap, not the bacon-y lye we used now. More important than soap were tools to repair what we’d lost—half our hydroponics were derelict because of rust. I gripped his arm. “Did you bring new pipes?”

Light glinted from the greasy yellow of his helmet, opaque and impassive.

“The supplies, astronaut! Where are they?” I began to doubt whether he spoke Mantonesi.

He twisted off his helmet and out popped the head of a young man with a face unlined by care. But a crease appeared between his unkempt eyebrows as he looked me over.

I yanked the bag from his shoulder. “We’ll get the rest of the supplies later.” 

“I need those to—” His face turned the color of a warning light.

I set the bag down and peeped inside of it. Hexagonal cylinders clanked against each other. A terminal on each read 12:00.

Bombs.

I mouthed a hundred questions, none of them finding voice.

The astronaut’s neck sunk into his bone-white suit. “They didn’t tell me it was still populated.”

Ada dashed around the corner, stopping short at the sight of the astronaut. She threw her dark arms wide. “You came back!” She turned a grinning face to me. “See? I told you they remembered us. Now we can go away from this place.”

I grabbed Ada and pulled her behind me, ignoring her squawk of protest. To the astronaut I said, “You need to dismantle these bombs. Throw them into space before we throw you.” Salt peeped around the corner, a shabby toolbag slung over his shoulder.

“I can’t defuse them,” the astronaut said. “Your home will hit Earth.”

I couldn’t believe the words out of his flaphole. “We’re far enough out of orbit. Always have been.”

“Have you spacewalked recent enough to check?”

I blew out a sigh, then jerked my finger at Salt. “Get the airlock. I’ll skadoosh him until we can bin him properlike.”

The astronaut held up his hands, still clutching the detonator but taking a step back. “Hold on—no need to act rashly. We have time to evacuate you, and enough ship fuel.”

I laughed. “And die like the last people who left? It’d be easier to bin you. Hope that suit can handle the micro-meteors—if it doesn’t run out of air first.” I kicked the detonator out of his hand. It clattered to the floor. I lunged for it, but the astronaut pinned me to the floor.

My ribs screamed. Gloved fingers raked my hair.

“Help me! He’s come to blow up our home!” I spat as the man’s palm ground my face into the sand floor.

A blur of curly hair above me, and Ada hit the man in the arm with a rusty lugwrench from Salt’s toolbag. He yowled, throwing up his arms to block. Scuffling above me, and Salt had the man’s arms behind his back.

I lay on the ground, chest heaving and head throbbing like driver spikes were jammed into my ears. Something irritated my back. I wriggled onto my knees to find the detonator’s button jammed into its casing, a crack across its surface. Its display read 11:27 and counted down fast.

The astronaut stiffened in Salt’s grip. His face turned the color of his suit.

“How many bombs?” I panted, struggling to my feet. My arms ached even more. The astronaut’s throat bobbed. “Twenty-three.”

Salt shook him. “How do we disarm them?”

The man grinned, all humor sapped from his face.

All sound drained from the room except for a nauseating thud-thud in my ears.

The astronaut looked between me and Salt, eyes wild. “We need to get into my ship before this asteroid blows.”

My stomach hit rock. “The last people to leave died, stranded in space with nothing but darkness to sing them asleep.” I jabbed a finger at the man. “You were supposed to help us!Bring supplies! Fix our home.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we’re running out of time. How many people live here?”

“Enough to fix what you did!” I roared. “We’re staying.” I jerked my head to signal the others.

Salt grunted. “Don’t speak for us, Mae.”

Ada scowled at her feet, the big toe of one foot rubbing the other.

I shook my head at Salt. “You’re trusting an idiotic, bomb-toting Earthie over me? Are you insane? You know we can’t leave–out there is death.”

The astronaut opened his mouth, but I grabbed Ada and marched away. “The researchers will come. Let’s disarm the bombs before—”

A light seared my vision. I sailed across the room, and my entire left side sparked with pain. When I opened my eyes, cyan rings swirled in my vision. Everything beyond was a black screen.

As my eyes adjusted, three humps swam into my vision. 

“Mae?” Ada squeaked. “What happened? Did the bombs go off?”

“No,” Salt moaned. “The electrical systems blew.”

The astronaut groaned, flopping over in the dark. “What’s that hissing sound?” The air felt thin. I sucked in a breath. “The 02 chamber must be fritzing again.” Ada huddled over Salt’s shivering form. “Mae, we’ve gotta go. There’s no choice.”

Twenty-three years of work, all smashed to bits by an astronaut. I didn’t even know what the Earth would be—what if there were no plants?

That was it.

I had to save my greenhouse.

Without the light, I wandered. I fell inside the greenhouse door. I stepped on one vine, then two. I swatted away leaves, tripping over hydroponic grow beds. My boots flooded. My pant-cuffs dragged in three inches of water.

Silence brushed its fingers on my spine.

Silence, except for the sobbing of broken pipes. And footsteps. I shrank into the puddle covering the greenhouse.

Feet sploshed through the flood. “Where are you?” Ada’s voice. “It’s six minutes until the bombs blow!”

The feet stopped. “Wow. Guess you didn’t have the pipes handled after all.” Ada stood in front of me, her overalls slopping through the flood.

I stared, bleary-eyed at a greenhouse soaking in darkness. Plants growing far out of their boxes, cramped.

I never pruned them, and never would get the chance to. A broken cry fell, mingling with the hush of my bleeding greenhouse.

Arms wrapped around my neck. Ada slipped her warm hand into mine. “I’m sorry for not helping you.”

I hugged her closer, smelling her sweet scent. “I’m sorry for not seeing your loneliness. But I can’t leave the greenhouse. It’ll die.”

Ada nodded. “I know.” She slipped something cool and waxy into my hands. “I saved these for you. They’re ripe at last.”

I pressed the grapes to my chest, gently, so as not to smash them. A shadow emerged by the door.

“Come on!” the astronaut said. He carried Salt over his shoulder, who had a bandage wrapping his waist.

I let Ada lead me to the ship. Between the tears and the darkness, I could only see the next step in front of me.

***

My shoulder blade jutted into a tangle of wires in the ship’s cockpit. I was crammed with the window shedding light to my left and Salt to my right. He favored the wound in his torso, but the color had returned to his cheeks. His eyes were closed, which I took to mean he wanted time alone to nurse his wound. I cradled the grapes in my hands, like holding memories. We watched our asteroid recede into the backdrop of space. It bloomed, an orange flower fading to black. The shockwave rattled our ship despite the lack of sound. We huddled closer. Tears sparkled in zero gravity. For the first time since I could remember, the sound of breathing comforted me, especially Ada’s gentle huffing by my ear.

The ship’s window rotated across the black infinity. Years of tension unwound from my bones. I slipped into a cool void. Was I dying, like those who had left? It didn’t terrify me like I thought it would.

Ada’s poking on my arm snapped me back to consciousness. The floating sensation from earlier in the trip was replaced with a shaking.

The astronaut had left his place among the tangles of wire and pipe. He sat at the pilot’s seat, a radio pressed to his mouth.

“Mission Control, this is Sandez. Preparing for reentry.”

Ada pounced on me, laughing. “We’re seeing Earth! I wonder if we’ll meet your donor?” 

I shrugged. Didn’t care, really.

Ada stopped her bouncing and regarded me with her dark eyes. “Cal told me there’s greenhouses on Earth, too.”

The astronaut—Cal, I assume—glanced at me from the pilot’s seat. “In a minute you’ll be able to see Earth, once the ship rotates around.”

A glowing expanse unfolded outside the window, terrain stretching and swallowing up the space with joyous blues and greens. The rattling of our ship grew more pronounced.

The blue glow of oxygen in the atmosphere radiated warmth. As we approached, I saw wrinkles in the ground that revealed green shrubs, reminding me of moss.

We descended into the blue, all darkness shut out.

I looked into Ada’s eyes, wonder reflected in their mahogany depths. “We’re home,” she said. Her head of curly hair rested on my shoulder.

Maybe I could find home on Earth. What I thought of as barren wasteland wasn’t true. So much green, like my greenhouse’s moss spread over an eternity.

I could begin again. Fertile ground was still on Earth. I handed Ada my grapes. “Save me the seeds.”

Josephine Scheffrahn

Josephine Scheffrahn writes science fiction and fantasy inspired by her native East Texas. When she’s not spelling her surname to customer service, she’s gallivanting with her theatrical sword-fighting troupe or watching Dr. Who. You can reach her at author.josephinescheffrahn@gmail.com.