Four days out, the Tern set down on Meridian’s upper dock, and Mara saw trees.
A line of green through the terminal’s glass wall. Before she saw a single person. Before she saw the dock crew or the guards or the Compact’s seal over the terminal’s doors. Trees. Growing in an open courtyard beyond the glass, in the light of Meridian’s lamp, tall and full-leafed, their branches moving in a breeze she could not feel through the hull.
She had never seen a tree growing in the open. Cinder had none. On Cinder there were the orchard domes, with their false noon, and the scrubby hedges along the river road that died back every winter. Nothing like this. Nothing that stood in the open air under a lamp’s light and grew. One of the trees had dropped a leaf against the glass, and it lay there, broad and green, the size of her hand.
Meridian’s lamp was strong. That was the first thing the trees told her. Strong enough to grow trees in open courtyards. Strong enough that nobody had to build a dome or buy a contract or run a pump to keep them alive. It simply shone, and things grew.
