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He sets down his lever and joins me at the wall. He runs his fingers along the seam, then presses his palm flat. For a moment, nothing happens. Then, with a soft click, the wall shifts. A section about two feet square pops open, revealing a narrow crawlspace lined with steel mesh.

We exchange a look.

“You first,” Kang says.

I squeeze through, the air inside thick with dust and old insulation. The crawlspace widens after a metre, opening into a chamber that hums with the low-frequency throb of hidden machinery. The temperature jumps at least ten degrees.

The chamber is packed with pipes, valves, and electrical panels, all meticulously labelled in a script I don’t recognise. But that’s not what stops me.

It’s the plants.

They’re everywhere—vines, ferns, clusters of flowers so bright they hurt to look at. They spill from planters welded to the wall, climb the pipes, dangle from the ceiling in shaggy green ropes. Some have blossoms like glass lanterns, others grow in tight blue spikes, but all are lush, thriving, utterly out of place.

The air is humid, almost tropical. It’s thick enough to choke a normal person, but I find it soothing. A world with too much oxygen and not enough poison.

I reach out, touch a frond. It recoils, then curls around my finger, sticky and warm.

Behind me, Kang climbs through the opening. He stops, stares.

“Well,” he says. “This is new.”

I want to laugh, but the sound won’t come. Instead, I kneel by a patch of moss, running my hand through its velvet surface. The sensation is overwhelming—soft, wet, alive.

For a long minute, we just stand there, the only noise the drip of condensation and the steady thump of water pumps.

“This is some kind of grow room,” I say, finally. “But why hide it?”

Kang shrugs. “Maybe no one knows.”

After a while, I start cataloguing the plants, mapping the pipes, tracing the wiring back to its source. There’s a whole irrigation network here, a closed-loop system feeding the garden. Someone went to a lot of trouble to build this, then buried it behind a false wall.

I wonder if Maven knows.

I kneel between some ferns, palms flat in the moss, and close my eyes. The scent is overwhelming: sweet, sharp, tinged with rot where the old leaves collapse into mulch. If I breathe deep enough, I can almost forget the burn of antiseptic and dead concrete that marks the rest of Sanctuary.

Kang stays at the threshold, arms folded, head cocked like he’s waiting for the room to attack. It’s not until I pluck a blossom—blue, delicate, with petals thin as memory—that he steps closer.

I hold it up, pinched between thumb and forefinger. “Scorpion grass,” I say, rolling the stem. “Or, if you want to get romantic, forget-me-not. Myosotis.”

Kang crouches beside me, careful not to crush anything. “You recognise all of them?”

“Most,” I say. “The Authority ran experiments on rapid-cycle mutation. Tried to get these bastards to clean up radioactive spill sites.” I smirk. “They mostly just mutated. But this one”—I wiggle the flower—”always came back the same. Blue, five petals. Like it refused to forget what it was.”

Kang watches my hands, not the flower. “Seems stubborn.”

“Yeah,” I say. “The scientists called it a control group, but I liked to think it was just… itself. Wouldn’t change for anyone.”

He takes the flower from me, gentle, and tucks it behind my ear. “Fits you,” he says.

I laugh, but it sounds wrong. “You’re the first person to ever compare me to a weed.”

He brushes dirt from my knuckles, then holds my hand in his, thumb tracing the bone. “Not a weed,” he says, voice almost shy. “Just hard to kill.”

We sit like that for a long time, the whirr of the pumps a lullaby for the desperate. I let my head fall to his shoulder, and he lets it stay. The silence is heavy, but not uncomfortable.

After a while, I say, “Funny how we name things after what we fear most.” I pluck another blossom and crush it between my fingers, blue pigment staining my thumb.

He nods, understanding more than he says. “You afraid of forgetting?”