Dark tattoos on thigh and forearm

The sprouting trays in Bay Nine came up overnight, all forty-two of them, and Oskar cried into his ration pouch like a child. You would have laughed. The ferns are from the old Kew cache, the ones grandmother kept pressed in her atlas, and they have unfurled in a perfect ring, the way the fern rosette in her atlas always looked like it was trying to hold its breath.

I have been thinking about that ring a lot. The ship's council wants the seed tithe logged by the solstice, and the registry clerk asked why I kept writing the word circle in the margins of my ledger. I told him it was a habit from home. He did not ask what home meant, which is the kindest thing anyone has done for me this year.

Yesterday I walked to the old greenhouse, where the vines still climb the ribs of the hull, and found the lattice Dad scratched into the bulkhead with a compass point. Someone has since added leaves in soft charcoal, shaded so carefully they seem to breathe in the damp air. I did not ask who. Some things on this ship are kept because they are beautiful rather than useful, and that is the only argument I have ever won with the council.

Send me a seed when the next resupply comes through. Not for planting. I only want to hold something that was grown under a real sky.

Love, Ada