Realistic rose on a forearm

The roses were grey then. Not because they were sick. The lamps in that ring were all blue-white, and the petals took the light the way old pencil takes it, dark in the folds and pale along the lip. Keeper Oruwa Benn used to say a rose only shows you its heart when it is closing. She'd pull the tight centre apart with two fingers, a whorl that turned in on itself like water going down a drain, and show the children how the petals wrapped and wrapped until there was nothing left but a secret kept in a fold.

One winter the pumps failed for nine days. Forty people slept in their suits in the bunks. Benn went down every shift with a torch clipped to her collar and checked each bloom, leaf by leaf, because the leaves were the first to go soft. She found the buds on the lowest bed had shrivelled to tight grey knots, and she didn't throw them out. She wrapped each one in foil, tucked them inside her coat, and carried them through the dark to the pressure room where the others were.

When the pumps came back, the knots opened. Nobody believed her until the first one unfolded, layer by layer, into a bloom the size of a palm. Benn never told anyone how she knew they'd keep. She just laughed and said that anything which closes that tight has something worth waiting for. Now get off that hatch.