We Dream In Ones and Zeros: An Anthology

The Secret Garden

"I was expecting a prison cell, not a garden."

Sabi's hands froze in place, pruning knife stuck mid-cut on an aloe's leaf. Long green lashes fluttered as he blinked himself awake from a sleepless dream, the dazed look shifting to a weary one when he lifted his head to peer up at the stranger standing over his kneeling body.

"Is there a difference?" he asked.

The stranger in question, a tall short haired woman who'd been staring intently at the giant proteas behind Sabi, turned a careful gaze over to him.

Even under the warm, bright light of the heat lamps, her pitch-black eyes only shone darker, pupils perpetually eclipsed by shadow.

Like two black holes swallowing up all the light. Sucking him in.

"For someone like you, none, I suppose." The woman smiled, a lazy curling of lips that struggled to reach her eyes. "At least you have a nice view."

She looked away from him then, casting a sweeping gaze over the vast expanse of greenery, each of the various species of trees and shrubs and flowers, that surrounded them.

The urge to follow that gaze was there, strong and instinctual, like an itch, but Sabi's green eyes didn't so much as flinch away from the woman's face. The garden had nothing new to offer him; he knew every leaf and every bloom there like he knew each scar and bruise on his body.

But he didn't know this stranger in front of him.

As if feeling the heat of his stare on her white rose skin, the woman's eyes shot back to his, narrowing down on him with just the slightest twitch of a dark eyebrow before her expression smoothed out into something less readable.

"Dr Park Ji-Yeong," she said, offering him a black clad hand and a gracious smile. "But you can call me Yeong. Pleasure to meet you."

Sabi spared the extended hand no more than a second's worth of consideration, before ignoring it and turning back to his work. With slow, careful movements, he cut the rest of the aloe leaf and resumed trimming the rest of the sick, brown-tipped ones.

"Sabi," he said after a while, voice barely louder than a whisper. "Just Sabi."

Dr Park smoothly retrieved her hand, slipping both of them into the deep pockets of her dress pants, paper thin smile only stretching wider. "Like the flower?"

There was a sudden movement in the corner of Sabi's eye, followed by the crunching sound of dry soil and stones being misplaced. When he looked up, the woman was already a couple of steps into the succulent plant bed he was working on, gloved fingers rising to brush over the star-shaped petals of the Sabi flowers sprouting from one of the shrubs there.

"They're poisonous, aren't they?" she asked, bending over and tilting her head to examine the pink and white blooms up close.

Biting down a sigh, Sabi wrenched his eyes away from the woman to return to his work. His movements were jerky and rough as he ripped out the aloe from the soil, exposing its roots, but his voice remained calm and even.

"Yes, the old humans used the poison to hunt larger animals back on Ear-" He cut himself short, chocking on the word to stop it from slipping past his lips. But it was too late for that. "... back on Earth."

There was silence for a moment, heavy and thick in the humid, perfumed air of the garden. Sabi could feel those black eyes on him, burrowing into his skin, peeling off the layers there and digging for something. Something he refused to give.

"Do you miss it?"

Blinking, Sabi looked up, not surprised to find Dr Park staring up at the ceiling.

This time, he did follow her gaze, staring through the glass dome that covered the entire greenhouse and into the black void of space, where a lone planet floated; a dusty barren sphere covered with merely a couple of small, hopeful sprouts of green and blue.