Profile portrait with peacock feathers on thigh

Out past the Calloway ridge, when the colony ships were still rusting in their cradles, there was a garden nobody had planted. Ysolde kept it. She had a headscarf the colour of pond weed, bartered off a dying weaver at Bell Station, and she tied it high so the scrubland wind couldn't tangle her hair. The peafowl came first, a flock of blue-throated birds that had escaped some zoo ship and bred themselves wild in the ravines. Where their feathers dropped, the eyes opened in the dust, rings of green like lanterns strung round a hall.

Every spring she grafted cherry wood onto the old hardy roses by the cistern, because the blossom reminded her of a road her mother once walked in a city that no longer existed. The pink roses sulked for a season and then opened all at once. At dusk the peacocks screamed as if someone had told them a secret.

Then the company men came with their survey drones and their papers. They wanted the ravine for a foundry. Ysolde did not argue. She rode out to the eastern ridge at dawn with her scarf streaming behind her, and the birds followed in a long bright line. By noon the surveyors were stuck in a hollow ringed with feathers and bloom, watching petals fall into their coffee. They were gone before the fourth dawn, and the garden stayed exactly where it had always been, with the peacock eyes still open and watching the road.