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We lift our torches It’s a room full of cupboards Rows of cupboards Heavy wooden ones, tall, with glass doors Trunks an metal chests Boxes an crates an barrels cut in half Anythin that could be fitted with a shelf seeether There’s shelfs in every single one An every single shelf is filled with jars Glass jars with lids

The jars hold seeds Seeds of all colours an sizes an shapes

It’s a seedstore, I says

A Wrecker seedstore, says Jack

He starts toone of the rows I make my way down the next one Starin, touchin This feels like a dream It don’t seeht to the top In some only a small handful of seeds There ain’t a speck of dust It’s all perfectly clean Shelfs, jars, floor The air is dry an cool A bit musty but there ain’t no damp Each jar has a bit of old paper stuck to it with a hand-drawn picture of what the seed is Flowers Vegetables Fruits, trees, grasses With a figger of aa neorld, one blade of grass at a tie my torch between two ht The seeds inside gleaive ’e, dry sleep

Jack’s voice falls dead in the muffled air There’s tree seed here, he says If I’ood fer drylands His torchlight bobs on down the row

Now it ed wine an his guard was down Jest before he passed out inIf it’s what I think it is, it’s going to change everything

He could reseed the whole earth with all this

Saba, c’ent note With clumsy hands, I put the jar back where it came from I hurry to find him at the far end of the room It’s clear of cupboards here There’s four tables bin pushed together totable Books an papers cover the top of it, piled in neat stacks There’s stone fatlights to work by A chair A cot with a blanket An a half-empty bottle of wine DeMalo He works here Sleeps here sometimes, it seems

Jack’s lookin at the end wall Starin up at it There’s big sheets of heavy paper tacked the length of it They’re coloured, e With thick blue snakes an thin blue lines an blue splodges of all sizes Words in black Nuly lines

What is all this? I says

They’re maps, says Jack

I only seen dirt ood, he says He takes my hand an pulls me to the furthest map on the left This one’s New Eden, he says Divided into sectors See the nuht? Sector One

Uh huh, I says

He puts his finger on the er that puts us about here, he says Got that? Okay He tugs in, he says You see the shape? This is how it sits in the land all around it It’s the one an only green patch That rowth Becuz we know all these yellow bits an they’re bleak We got the Raze to the east, to the west lies the Waste, to the south--d’you see?--here’s the Black Mountains, an south of them lies where Hopetoas, an here’s Sandsea--

--Silverlake’s there somewhere, I says

It won’t be on no map, he says An here, to the north, it’s the Shield all the way to this big stretch of blue Must be water

New Eden looks so small, I says

He moves me to the next map On this one, it’s even smaller, he says On the next one, New Eden’s jest a dot Saba, d’you see? This is the world beyond Beyond any place you an me ever bin This is a world we never heard of, never dreamed of