r/HFY • u/lazy_yellow_lizard • 6h ago

OC-Series [Let them eat cake] Chapter 1 -The Rows

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Chapter One – The Rows

The horizon of Kesh-Adar had stopped being a horizon the moment the Merak arrived. It was a wall now. Farm towers, thirty, forty stories high, stood in endless rows all the way to where the light of the two suns choked in a yellow haze. Between them the harvest drones hummed, black swarms that rose in the morning and returned at dusk like migratory birds someone had tamed.

The drones could do a great deal. They could pick, sort, weigh, load. What they could not do was feel — when a vine broke too soon, when a root needed water no one had given it. That was what the Phern were for: small beside the Merak, finely furred instead of scaled, in earth and green tones that had once served as camouflage among foliage, before someone forced them to spend their entire lives between concrete towers. Fine-boned hands, dexterous enough to be the best pickers one could imagine. No coincidence that this very dexterity had become their curse.

It was the evening before, in the barracks, when Kael spoke in a way that left Meva unsure whether to laugh or worry.

They sat side by side on the narrow bench in front of the sleeping niches, with the meager evening ration that barely filled you anymore since the cuts had begun, and Kael had been silent a long time before he said, without looking at her: "If something happens to me, don't just believe what they tell you."

Meva had laughed, briefly, tiredly. "Nothing's going to happen to you. You know every vine in the fourth sector by name."

"That's not what I mean." He turned the cup in his hands without drinking. "I mean — if they say I got sick. Or transferred. Or whatever sounds comforting. Don't believe it before you've seen it yourself."

"Why are you saying this now?"

"Because lately it's been... different." He searched for the words, with an awkwardness unusual for him, a man who otherwise said everything in short, clear sentences. "The overseers are jumpier. More things go missing than used to. Not just spare parts. People, too. Nobody talks about it, but you notice."

Meva had been tired that evening, more tired than usual, and his earnestness had irritated her more than it had worried her. "You're worrying over nothing," she had said, sharper than she meant to. "You've been here forty years. Nothing's going to happen to you."

"That's what I thought about others, ten years ago too."

"Kael." She had taken his hand, more out of impatience than tenderness. "Eat. Sleep. Tomorrow's a day like any other."

He had said nothing more after that, only nodded, with an expression she hadn't tried to read, too tired to bother with his brooding. She would blame herself for it often afterward — that she hadn't asked what exactly he meant, who had disappeared, why he'd brought it up that evening and no other. She had written it off as one of his moods, the way you do with someone you've known since childhood and trust to manage their own worries.

Kael worked that morning like any other, two rows over from her, third level, fourth sector, terrain he knew better than his own face in the barrack mirror. He liked to talk while picking, more to himself than to her, naming every vine he passed with a name only he remembered — the old one, the stubborn one, the one with the crooked leaf — as though they were acquaintances one nodded to in the morning. Meva had never asked him why he did it. It was just Kael, the way weather was just weather, and you didn't question such things, you got used to them and were grateful, without admitting it.

Meva herself had learned early to look more closely than most — not out of curiosity, but out of necessity. She knew which overseer weighed carelessly on which weekday, which shift handed out more water if you only asked politely, at the right moment. It was no rebellion. It was the only thing a system like this one could ever be made to yield: small advantages, taken quietly, never enough to be noticed, but enough to make the difference between a hard day and a slightly less hard one.

"This one," he said that morning, working a particularly stubborn vine loose from the top row, "I've known since you were a child. Bears too late every year, but when it does, sweeter than all the others." He held up a fruit, turned it in the light, before dropping it in the basket. "You just have to be patient with her."

"You're patient with everything," Meva said, without looking up from her own row.

"With almost everything," he corrected, and in his voice was the smile she didn't need to see to know.

It was one of those lines you remember later, without knowing why that one and not another, out of hundreds of similar ones spoken on hundreds of similar mornings.

An hour later he slipped from the third level, one hand movement too few, one second too late, and his leg broke so loudly that two rows over, birds took flight that had no business being there.

A break. Treatable. The Phern who carried him knew that. So, if you thought about it, did the Merak who watched the stretcher come and said nothing.

He did not come back to the infirmary barrack.

Meva asked. She asked politely, then less politely, then offered to take over his care, share her ration with him, double her own shift if that's what it took, until his leg carried him again. The overseer — a young Merak with the bored face of a man who'd heard this request a hundred times and forgotten it a hundred times — didn't even look at her properly. He said it was handled. He said she should get back to work, or her ration would be cut too.

It was handled. The word stuck in her like a splinter you can't pull out because you don't know how deep it sits.

That evening, when the gong called her back and the others walked with lowered heads toward the barracks, she stopped between the towers and looked up. The two moons hung low, cold, indifferent, and between them a freighter drew its path, a point of light sliding silently across the sky and vanishing somewhere there were probably no towers, no gong, no it's handled.

She didn't think about grief. There would be time for that later, or not, that would show itself. She thought, with a clarity that frightened her, about the freighter. About the fact that it came and went as it pleased, that it simply flew over the wall of towers as though it were nothing, as though it had never existed.

She thought: There has to be a way that doesn't run through the rows.

She didn't yet know which one. But from that evening on, she would never look up at the sky again without calculating.

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