Himawari Wa Yoru — Ni Saku

They weren't blooming for her. They weren't blooming for the arcology. They were blooming because that was what they were made to do. In the dark, in the dead soil, in the belly of a dying world — they opened their petals and turned toward a sun that no one else could see.

Oriko smiled.

The next night, there were two.

She went back to the hydroponic bays and began filling her pockets with more seeds.

She didn't report it.

A child wandered down one night and saw the flowers. She didn't scream. She sat down in the middle of the golden light and laughed.

She didn't plant it in the hydroponic rows. Those were monitored. Instead, she took a broken clay pot, filled it with smuggled compost, and hid it in the deepest corner of the sub-levels, where the night was absolute and no cameras watched. Himawari Wa Yoru Ni Saku

It wasn't a harsh light — not the sterile white of the arcology's lamps, not the angry orange of the flares. It was soft. Golden. The color of honey, of candlelight, of a sunrise she had only seen in old videos. The petals unfurled one by one, each one a tiny lantern, and the warmth that came off them was not heat but something else — something that made her chest ache.