She taps the glass once. The crack spiderwebs. A tendril of orange dust slips through the breach, curling around her wrist. It doesn't burn. It feels like a handshake.
Anya Oxi doesn’t run from the storm; she breathes it in. At twenty-eight, she is a climatologist for the last habitable arcology in the Northern Sinks, but her colleagues call her "The Barometer" because the pressure in the room always drops when she enters. She has silver-threaded hair tied in a loose braid and eyes the color of rust—permanently stained from staring at oxidizing skies. anya oxi
Three weeks later, the logs show that Anya Oxi walked into the Rust Sea. They never found her body. But the following spring—the first spring in a century—red flowers began growing through the cracks in the dead cities. Not poppies. Not roses. She taps the glass once
She doesn't flinch. "It’s singing to me, Vale." It doesn't burn
"The horizon is rusting," she says to the void. "Let me show you how to bloom instead."
"Oxi, get back from the glass," comes the voice of Commander Vale over the intercom.