Sunflower in a dotwork diamond on a calf

The lamp in the east corridor finally went dark on the ninth day of the dimming, and the sunflowers in Bed Seven turned their heads after it anyway. I watched them from the observation ring with a cup of tea going cold in my hands. Forty-one plants, each one a little stubborn, each one still hunting for a sun the station no longer makes.

You asked in your last transmission whether the old seed ledger still matters now that the ground colonies print their own. It does, though not for the reasons the council gives. Mr Okafor, who kept the ledger before me, drew a diamond beside every line of entries, a shape he said made the rows easier to count by eye. I used to think it was a dull habit. Last week I found the original sheets in a locked drawer, and every diamond had been filled with tiny dots, hundreds of them, pressed in one by one by a man with nothing else to do during the long watches.

So I did what he did. I marked the last viable seed of the Mammoth line inside a diamond, dotted the field around it until my wrist ached, and planted it in the bed nearest the lamp housing. It came up this morning, two leaves and a stem no thicker than thread, bending toward a light that is now only a memory on the wall.

Come up when you can. Bring a magnifier, and I will show you the diamond, and the seedling inside it, still reaching.

Love, Nadia