THE CULTIVATOR - CHAPTER 1. PART 1
CHAPTER 1. PART 1:
Iona Hexis shook her soil-caked hands, observing her nails blackened by stubborn dirt. With a sigh, she placed her old watering can, a model that might have been displayed in an antiques museum, on her floating side table that had the annoying habit of drifting out of reach.
She unclipped her tablet from her belt. Her fingers, clumsy from fatigue, navigated the screen to check the growth data of the young Kardiosa shoots. Despite harsh conditions, the shoots were sprouting surprisingly well under the artificial spotlights of an aging spacecraft.
Like these resilient plants, Iona had acclimated to her metal prison, navigating the cosmos, but at this point, she would have given anything for a simple shower.
When had she last felt water running over her skin? It was hard to say. Precious H2O was reserved primarily for the bubbling engines, then for their smuggled greenhouse—an oasis of greenery in a metal desert—followed by the pirates who commanded the ship and their space zoo that produced the compost.
But slaves like her? Well, they received just enough to keep from drying out to the last drop. Most often, she cleaned herself with old rags moistened by the steam-laden air of the greenhouse, which she coated with a soap that smelled as if someone had squeezed an aged lemon into an old sock.
She didn't dare ask where this rare hygiene product supplied on the ship came from—some mysteries were better left unsolved.
The light flickered yet again above her head, and Iona resumed counting the days. Exactly 1099 marks, discreet and aligned with meticulous precision on one of the metal walls of the greenhouse.
They were barely distinguishable, drowned among the other cracks and fissures of a hull visibly patched up more times than should have been allowed. Iona detached a small metal badge with a pointed end from her chest. The Latin inscriptions were gradually fading, erased by the constant rubbing of her fingers when she handled it.
She approached the wall and, with a nonchalant but assured motion, used it to carve the 1100th mark. It had been a little over three years since her abduction, and each day seemed a carbon copy of the previous, a loop of survival and servitude.
The pirates who had snatched her from her home, the planet Virven13, at the dawn of her 15th year, were part of a crew of brutes without finesse who ran the ship with iron fists and wooden heads. Ignoramuses, in her opinion, barely capable of planting a seed.
They reveled in their arrogance, oblivious to the subtle and complex mechanics that kept their business afloat.
Not to toot her own horn, but without Iona and her fellow convicts, their little plant trafficking enterprise would have sunk long ago. But the young girl knew that when one lost their freedom, they hardly had a say in anything.
The young cultivator took a leaf of Kardiosa between her index and middle fingers and examined it under one of the beams of light that crossed the cabin.
With squinted eyes, she detected a series of intricate patterns, similar to circuits, that lit up and then faded in rhythm with the movement of her hand. She easily read these complex intricacies as signs of a plant healthy enough to survive the next harvest cycle.
Iona was Virvenian. Plants almost grew in her hands.
The Virvenians were known across the worlds for their cultivation skills, honed by years of methodical work in the fields of their remote planet. But even among her peers, Iona had stood out from a young age by whispering to plants better than anyone else.
For her mother's birthday, she had grown a miniature Voisieh tree, splendid, which proudly stood in the garden of her childhood. A specimen of this species, particularly, had not been brought out of the ground on their planet for hundreds of years; the ancestral cultivation techniques had been lost over the course of their planet's history.
Her feat had sparked admiration throughout her entire village and had earned her a letter of recommendation from the dean, propelling her into the agricultural apprenticeship program in the capital, Naolia. An unheard-of privilege for a country girl.
Within the prestigious guild of cultivators in Naolia, Iona had been a diligent presence, tirelessly devoting herself to the delicate art of cultivation in all its specialties: agriculture, arboriculture, and horticulture of rare and exotic plants, whether endemic to her planet or not.
She had become familiar with intergalactic botany, learning the secrets to thriving plants from every corner of the universe, even in the most ungrateful soils or under the most hostile atmospheres.
Virvenian science and know-how had gained renown for this unique ability to cultivate the impossible, transforming arid deserts into lush gardens and making life bloom where void reigned.
Three years of hard labor had passed. She saw herself graduating next spring, just months away, choosing the plantation or greenhouse where she would put her talent to use. It was the royal greenhouse that coveted her, the pinnacle of Virvenian expertise in cultivation, a promise of excellence and recognition within her community.
But fate had traced an unexpected trajectory.