Aya couldn't sleep that night.
Not with the fire whispering like Jaden used to. Not with the silence pressing down like snow. The others had drifted into uneasy rest, curled near flickering lanterns and coded maps, but she remained sitting, her back pressed to a crumbled pillar of the old tunnel.
Sleep wouldn't come. Not tonight.
Not while she could still see the spot where he'd been where the glitch had torn through reality like a blade and swallowed him whole.
It hadn't been dramatic. There was no scream. No final glance.
Just silence.
And absence.
---
She stood quietly, taking care not to disturb anyone, and stepped out into the fractured street above the tunnel. The night sky above the ruins twitched in its broken way clouds frozen mid-motion, stars flickering like bad reception.
She walked toward a quiet patch of scorched dirt. It was empty, save for the cinders of what might've once been a garden. A sad little plot of land choked by the war the System had declared on nature.
Aya knelt down and touched the ash.
She thought of Jaden again.
Not just his silence. Not just his dry humor or the way he always seemed tired but trying anyway.
She thought about the things he didn't say the way he carried his grief, like it was too sacred to share.
She'd seen it once. Just once.
---
Flashback- Aya Awakening
It had been after a particularly brutal fight. The kind that ended with too much blood and not enough medicine.
They'd lost someone. A stranger they hadn't even known for long, but still someone who laughed and shared their last protein bar with Kael and told Rowan his paranoia was "mysteriously hot."
Aya remembered trying to stitch up a wound with shaking hands. She kept messing it up. She wasn't fast enough. Smart enough. Good enough.
She'd snapped. Nearly broken down in front of everyone.
But Jaden had taken over without a word.
He didn't comfort her. Didn't offer hollow encouragement.
He just worked. Quietly. Efficiently. His hands were steady even though his face was pale.
Later, when everyone had gone to sleep, she found him crouched by the edge of the camp, planting something.
"Is that… a flower?" she asked, startled.
He looked up, startled to be seen. Then nodded. "Found some seeds a while back. Figured… I dunno. Something should grow."
"Even here?"
He looked at her then. And in the dark, his eyes didn't look tired. They looked certain.
"Especially here."
---
Aya opened her eyes in the present and touched the dirt.
"Especially here," she repeated aloud.
Then she dug.
Fingers raw, pushing through the layer of ash and glitch-static until she hit actual earth. Her nails broke. Her skin stung. But she kept going.
She planted the seed Silas once mocked her for carrying.
Then she sat. Cross-legged. Palms pressed together. And waited.
---
Nothing happened.
Not at first.
But then heat.
Not fire. Not danger.
Warmth.
From inside her chest, a pulse.
The vines around her hands responded.
The ash shifted.
And from the ruined soil, green.
It started as a single leaf, trembling like it was afraid to exist. Then another. A stem. A bloom. Gold-threaded petals pushing through a world that no longer made room for softness.
Aya gasped but not in fear.
In reverence.
Because she felt it. Something open inside her. Something that wasn't strength or weaponry. Something old. Steady. Healing.
She wasn't burning through the world.
She was answering it.
---
Behind her, the System pinged faintly in the air:
> User Aya Tanaka – Talent Registered: Verdant Vein.
Growth-type Skill: Glitch-Aligned.
Status: Active.
A pulse of green light rippled out from her body like breath.
---
The others were waiting for her when she returned drawn by the light.
Rowan stared at the vine twisting up her wrist like a bracelet of living code. Niko tilted her head, eyes distant. Kael blinked like she'd just walked back from the dead.
Even Silas had lifted his head.
"You bloomed," he said, voice hoarse.
Aya met his eyes.
And smiled.
"No more waiting," she said. "No more silence."
She pressed her hand to the cracked map on the floor, and vines spread across it forming paths they hadn't seen before, lit up with faint points of energy.
"Jaden's not the only one who plants hope in broken places."
---
End of Chapter 13
Author's note:
I can grow a garden ಠ∀ಠ
Get it " grow a garden "