Chapter 16: Unspoken

By the fourth week, the greenhouse had acquired its own weather.

Condensation gathered on the underside of the grow lamps and fell in slow, fat drops. Warm soil breathed against the carrier’s colder metal. The beans had climbed their first strings, lettuce crowded the shallow trays, and a tray of herbs refused every kindness Ava offered it.

She recorded each failure in the journal Gabriel had given her.

Basil: too much water.

Second sowing: fungus at the roots.

Third sowing: Marcus dropped a wrench on it.

She had just underlined the last entry when Marcus arrived with a crate balanced against his hip.

“Before you accuse me,” he said, “there are no tools in this one.”

Inside were filter mesh, irrigation clamps, and three jars of seeds with their labels worn away.

“Where did you get these?” Ava asked.

“Cora’s private kingdom. She said you could have them if I stopped asking.” He placed the crate safely on the floor. “Gabriel’s team checked in, by the way.”

Ava’s hand stopped above the jars. “You could have started with that.”

“I thought I did.”

Gabriel had been gone for six days on a supply run to two abandoned outposts. Six days was not long by the crew’s measure. It was long enough for Ava to notice the absence of his boots outside the greenhouse, his habit of stealing the bitter leaves she told him were not ready, and the way every unfamiliar engine note made her look toward the docking bay.

She had begun saving things to tell him. Marcus’s wrench. A leaf that smelled unexpectedly of lemon when crushed. The argument she had won with Cora and the better answer she had thought of afterward. By evening the list could make his absence feel crowded.

It irritated her that she knew which shirt he wore off duty. She could remember the stretched collar, the dark patch where he had carried something wet against his shoulder. Yesterday, washing soil from her forearms, she had imagined his hands there and turned the tap off too hard. There had been nothing frightening about the thought until she realized she wanted to keep it.

“They’re safe?” she asked.

“Safe, irritated, and one axle short of a smooth ride home. Jenna expects them tomorrow.” Marcus watched her turn one of the seed jars in her hands. “You know, you could ask him why he does this.”

Come home.

“Does what?”

“Leaves places where people need him, finds other places where people need him, then acts surprised that anybody worries.”

Ava set the jar down. “He told me his parents died. Not what happened.”

“Not to me.” Marcus nudged the crate farther from the table edge with his boot. “Might talk to you.”

He left her sorting the irrigation clamps, rehearsing a question she was not sure Gabriel would welcome.

That afternoon Jenna came to inspect the water figures. She read Ava’s columns twice, checked the tank gauge, and frowned at the beans.

“They’re using less than the projections,” Jenna said.

“The projections assumed runoff. I catch it.”

“Of course you do.”

Jenna touched one leaf with the back of a finger. The gesture was so tentative Ava almost pretended not to notice.

“My sister kept a plant in a cooking pot,” Jenna said. “After our mother died, it was the only thing in our quarters she remembered to water.”

Ava waited. Jenna spoke of her sister as Gabriel spoke of the fortress dead: without tense, until the tense became unavoidable.

“The infection took her?”

“Yes.” Jenna removed her hand from the leaf. “I knew the symptoms. I knew the protocol. Knowing did not help as much as I had built my life around believing it would.”

The confession did not ask Ava to forgive the sealed rooms or the hazmat suit. It explained nothing away. Jenna picked up the water ledger and tapped a calculation with one short nail.

“Your reclamation estimate is optimistic.”

“By four percent.”

“Six.”

They argued until it became almost pleasant.

Jenna closed the water ledger, but Ava kept one hand on its corner.

“There’s something else.”

Jenna waited. She had a commander’s talent for making silence feel scheduled.

“It isn’t about the greenhouse.” Ava released the ledger. “Or my health.”

“That removes most of my useful expertise.”

“It’s Gabriel.”

Jenna’s expression did not change. Somehow that was worse than surprise.

Ava turned one of the irrigation clamps until its teeth pressed a red crescent into her thumb. “I think about him when he’s gone. I save things to tell him. Stupid things. And when he is here, I—”

I want him to touch me.

The rest would not cross her mouth.

“You want something from him,” Jenna said.

“I don’t know if he could want it from me.” Ava looked at the amber lines beneath her wrist. “And if he does, what if I ruin him?”

Jenna set the ledger back on the table.

“Gabriel was making reckless choices long before he found you,” she said. “You don’t get sole credit.”

Ava gave her an irritated look. Jenna let the corner of her mouth move, then became serious again.

“You are dangerous,” Jenna said. “So is a carrier this size. So am I when I give an order people follow into contaminated ground. Danger is something we account for. It is not an answer to every question.”

“That sounds like an answer from a commander.”

“It is the one I have.” Jenna tapped the closed ledger. “Don’t decide what Gabriel feels because you are frightened of hearing it from him. And don’t decide what you feel because you think he needs protecting from the answer.”

Ava’s face had grown hot. She busied herself aligning the seed jars Marcus had brought, though they were already straight.

“I’m not asking you to tell him.”

“Good. I have enough work.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.” Jenna picked up the tablet, then paused at the door. “Start with one thing you know is true. You don’t have to solve the rest tonight.”

Ava looked at the empty doorway Gabriel usually filled before entering.

“I miss him,” she said.

Jenna nodded once. “That will do.”

Gabriel returned the following evening with a split lip, a torn glove, and a crate of plumbing seals the carrier actually needed. Ava met him in the vehicle bay before deciding whether she meant to.

He climbed from the transport and saw her between two unloading crews. His exhausted face changed.

He came back.

“Hey,” he said.

She had imagined this moment often enough to resent every version of it. In none of them had she stood speechless with potting soil on her cheek.

“Your lip is bleeding.”

“Good to see you too.”

“What happened?”

“A cabinet.”

Rhea, passing with a coil of cable, said, “The cabinet was stationary.”

Gabriel took the cable from her and carried it without being asked. “Hostile architecture.”

Ava smiled despite herself. Only when he moved past did she see the fatigue in the set of his shoulders. She reached for the lighter end of the coil.

“I can carry that,” he said.

“I know.”

He let her take it.

Later, Gabriel found the three unlabelled seed jars still lined up on the greenhouse table.

“You waited for me,” he said.

“I waited for time to test them.”

He looked at the cleared trays, the prepared soil, and the folded paper markers beside Ava’s hand. “Of course.”

She opened the first jar and tipped six flat brown seeds into her palm. None looked familiar enough to trust. “One row from each jar. If something germinates, I might identify it from the first leaves.”

Gabriel reached for a seed.

“Not yet.” She showed him how deep to press it. “Twice its width. Gently.”

His first disappeared to the first joint of his finger.

Ava stared at the hole.

“Twice is an imprecise instruction,” he said.

“Only if you’ve never seen a seed.” She dug it out and placed it back in his palm. “Again.”

The next three formed a tight cluster.

“Do plants require personal space?” he asked.

“These will require surgery.”

She laughed before she could preserve the severity of the lesson. Gabriel brushed soil from his knuckle with a pleased expression that made clear he had been aiming for exactly that.

They worked down the tray together. His hands were built for heavier tasks, scarred across the fingers and careful only after she corrected them. Ava knew how much pressure would settle soil without compacting it. The knowledge lived in her hands before she had to think.

Then amber light moved beneath the skin of her wrist.

She stopped with one fingertip resting in the soil.

Gabriel noticed. He did not reach for her. “Pain?”

“No.”

That should have ended it. Instead Ava watched the light fade and said, “Sometimes it doesn’t feel like my hand.”

He waited beside her.

“My whole body,” she said. “I know where everything is. I can use it. But I don’t always know what it will do before I move.” She rubbed soil between her thumb and forefinger until the grains became too fine to separate. “I want to wake up without checking what changed. I want to look in a mirror and not have to find myself in pieces.”

The pumps moved water through the tubes overhead. Gabriel rested his dirty hands on his knees.

“I don’t know how to give you that,” he said.

Relief hurt more than reassurance would have. He had not called her normal or promised that the changes would stop.

“I know.”

“I can listen when it doesn’t feel like yours.” He nodded toward the tray. “And I can keep ruining seeds until your hands remember they know more than mine.”

“You ruined one seed.”

“Three, according to the surgical prognosis.”

Ava nudged his clustered seeds apart. “They may survive.”

“Then I have a gift.”

When the last row was covered, they carried the tray to the warm shelf together. Ava wrote the date on its marker and, beneath it, contents unknown.

They sat between the greenhouse beds with their backs against the water tank. The grow lamps had dimmed to evening levels. Gabriel ate lettuce straight from a tray while Ava slapped his hand away from the stronger plants.

“Marcus says you frightened an axle into breaking,” she said.

“Marcus talks too much.”

“He says you don’t talk enough.”

Gabriel stopped reaching for the lettuce. “About?”

“Why you joined the rescue crews.”

There. Asked. Ava turned the journal pencil between her fingers and resisted the urge to apologize for wanting an answer.

“You can tell me it’s none of my business,” she said.

“It isn’t.”

She nodded once.

“That doesn’t mean I won’t tell you.” He drew up one knee. The torn glove had left a red line across his palm. “My father taught me to fight fire. Mostly that meant teaching me not to. You close a door, clear a building, kill the fuel. Heroics are what you do after the plan fails.”

“Did you work together?”

“For a while. My mother hated both our schedules.” The beginning of a smile passed over his mouth. “When the spores reached our district, I was across the river on a factory call. Quarantine sealed the bridges before I got back.”

Ava set the pencil down.

“I spent two days trying other routes. By the time the cordon opened, there was nobody left to rescue.”

“Gabriel—”

“So I kept going. Different district, different people. There’s always another route to try if you arrive early enough.”

The greenhouse pumps clicked on. Water travelled through the tubes in a series of small knocks.

Ava understood the shape of his kindness then. It was not certainty. It was an old refusal sharpened into a profession.

“My parents never knew what happened to me,” she said. “That hurts more than knowing they’re dead. They might have searched. They might have blamed each other. For them, I never stopped being missing.”

Gabriel did not tell her they would have been proud. He looked down at his injured hand and said, “That’s cruel.”

The plainness of it undid her.

She had spent the afternoon arguing about water with a woman who could still say my sister and remember a cooking pot. Ava wanted one object that belonged that certainly to her parents. A voice, a coat, the way one of them would have stood in a doorway. The harder she reached, the less reliable each fragment became.

“I’m forgetting them,” she said. “I don’t even know how much I’ve forgotten.”

The words tore loose faster after that. “I want them back. I want one day—one stupid ordinary day where they’re angry I worked late and I know which one of them is speaking.”

Gabriel shifted beside her, but there was no answer he could offer. She was grateful and furious that he understood that.

She covered her face. Gabriel moved closer, then stopped before touching her.

“May I?” he asked.

Ava nodded.

His arm settled around her shoulders. His coat smelled of cold air, smoke residue, and the harsh soap from decontamination. She leaned into him until the water tank pressed a chill line down her spine.

“I’m glad you came back,” she said into his shirt.

“I said I would.”

“People say many things.”

“I’m trying to be selective.”

She lifted her head. They were too close for the moment to remain innocent, close enough that she saw the fresh cut inside his lip and the darker ring around his blue irises. Gabriel’s attention dropped to her mouth. Neither moved.

Then a pipe coughed above them and emptied a spoonful of cold condensation down the back of his collar.

Gabriel swore and jerked upright. Ava laughed so hard she had to brace a hand against the floor.

“Your greenhouse attacked me.”

“Hostile architecture.”

He pointed at her as if promising retaliation, but he was laughing too.

The almost-kiss remained between them, altered but not erased.

In her quarters that night, Ava undressed and stood before the small mirror with her shirt still in her hands. The silver in her hair was brighter here than beneath the grow lamps. She gathered it back, let it fall, tried the face she thought she had made when he looked at her mouth. It looked ridiculous practiced alone. She smiled anyway.

Then she saw the marks below her ribs and lowered the shirt in front of them. Did wanting to be seen mean she had to be ready for him to see everything? She had no idea what she would do if his expression changed. Pity might be worse than disappointment. She could imagine surviving disappointment by being angry.

Someone passed outside. Ava pulled the shirt back on, though the door was shut, then sat on the bed with her bare legs tucked beneath her. She opened the journal past the crop records.

I wanted him to kiss me.

There it was. No mention of being rescued, no argument about whether she deserved it. She touched the end of the sentence with the pencil, tempted to add an explanation, and closed the book instead.

Over the next several days, Ava found reasons to work near the vehicle bay when Gabriel had a shift. He found reasons to inspect irrigation fittings that had not leaked once. Neither mentioned the water tank.

One night she found him outside the greenhouse door with a mug in each hand.

“Caf?” he offered.

“I thought you liked me.”

“This is how people show affection now. Civilization changed.”

She accepted the mug. Below the carrier, a settlement’s work lights marked a rough square in the snow. Figures crossed between them, unloading medicine and repaired filters from Haven’s Vanguard. No grand future waited beyond the glass. There were only people still awake because something needed doing.

Gabriel touched his cup to hers. “To the fourth basil planting.”

“Third.”

“The wrench counts.”

Ava leaned her shoulder against his. “Fine. To the fourth.”

Neither of them stepped away.