What Grows in the Dark

Mara found the first tendril behind the boiler, pale as a root that had never met the sun, and beautiful in a way that made her stomach turn. It had grown through the concrete — not cracked it, grown through it, the way water is patient and then suddenly isn’t.

She should have called someone. She had a whole list of someones for exactly this: the city, her supervisor, the botanist’s-guild hotline that mostly took messages. Instead she crouched in the dark of the sub-basement and watched it breathe, slow and green and certain, and felt the oldest part of her lean toward it like a plant toward a window.

“Okay,” she whispered, to the thing, to herself. “Okay. Show me.”