Chapter 2 — The Last Seed Keeper

The water ration siren sounded at exactly six o'clock in the morning, like every day, and like every day, Khe Mien had woken up a few minutes before, lying still in the pale darkness of the apartment, hearing the sound of water dripping from the public faucet in the hallway where neighbors had begun to line up.

Each household in the residential area is provided with a fixed amount of water each day — enough for drinking, cooking, and bathing at a minimum, no more. That's not intentional harshness, Co Diem Ninh once explained to her, but a simple calculation: Green Dome has a closed water regeneration system, and that system can only process a certain amount each day, it can't be more, it can't be less without causing an imbalance in the whole cycle. People don't argue about water rations at Green Dome, not because they don't want more, but because everyone understands, from an early age, that "more" simply doesn't exist.

Vu Dinh Khoat has been awake longer than his daughter. When Khe Mien walked out of the room, he was sitting at the small dining table, holding a steaming cup of something in his hand—mint leaf tea grown in the Central Nursery itself, a small luxury that each family was distributed a few times a month—his eyes still glued to a stack of technical drawings spread out in front of him, pipes, valves, and performance numbers scribbled in the margins in his hasty handwriting.

"Did you stay up all night at the Station again?" Khe Mien asked, pulling out a chair to sit opposite.

"Not all night. Only late." He closed the drawing book, as a reflex whenever his daughter was around, although Khe Mien had learned enough to know that he did so not to hide it but because he didn't want her to see the numbers that made him worried. "Filter element number three is making a louder noise than usual. It's probably just dust stuck in the valve, but I want to check carefully before reporting to the Council. No one wants to hear bad news in the morning."

The Respiratory Station is the technical heart of Green Dome, located deep in the valley core, where air from the outside — if that mixture of toxic dust and residual emissions can be called air — is sucked in, filtered through many layers of membranes and custom-made activated carbon, and then pumped back into the clean air that the entire Green Dome breathes every day. At the same time, the water regeneration system also operates in the same complex, filtering every drop of moisture remaining in the air, reprocessing domestic wastewater, closing the entire cycle so that not a drop of water, not a single breath is wasted.

Vu Dinh Khoat had been the Station's chief engineer since before Khe Mien was born, one of the few people in Green Dome who understood how the entire system worked, from the outermost filter layer to the deepest central processing core - what he jokingly called the "old heart" of the Dome, because it had been operating non-stop for nearly a hundred years, from the first days after the Great Change when the founders built the Dome Filter on the floor of this desolate valley.

"Your mother used to say the same thing," he said suddenly, without looking up. "About how no one wants to hear bad news in the morning. She used to joke that the whole Respiratory Station was full of bad news told in polite tones."

Khe Mien was silent. She rarely heard her father mention her mother so naturally — usually it was in fleeting moments, a name blurted out and then silenced, a distant look as she looked at a featureless corner of the room. Her mother died when she was four years old, in an accident at the Respiratory Station itself—a pressure valve failed during emergency maintenance, an accident that no one, not even her father, ever told her in detail about. She only retains a few fragmentary memories: the smell of her mother's hair, the deep laughter echoing through the door, and the one time her mother led her near the edge of the residential area, pointed at the ceiling of the Filtration Roof and said that one day you will understand why we must keep this place at all costs.

"Do you miss mom?" she asked, her voice quieter than usual.

Vu Dinh Khoat finally looked up at her, and in that moment, Khe Mien saw more clearly than ever the wrinkles around his eyes, the traces of fifteen years of working in dry filtered air and artificial light, of fifteen years of raising a child alone in a world with no room for error.

“Remember,” he said. "Every day. But I don't want you to grow up knowing me only through my sadness. I want you to know me through what you've done — because your mother always believed that the best way to remember someone is to live on with the things they left unfinished." He stood up and patted her shoulder. "Go away, you'll be late with Ms. Diem Ninh."

On the way to the Warehouse, passing by the small exchange market where the people of Vom Xanh exchanged ration cards for handicraft items, Khe Mien met Tang Dieu Lam waiting in a familiar corner, his arms folded across his chest, a look of pretended impatience on his face.

"You're three minutes late," Dieu Lam said, even though it was clear she had only just arrived. The same age as Khe Mien, the daughter of a family working in the Central Nursery care team, Dieu Lam had been her friend since they both could not walk well, the two families lived on the same floor in a honeycomb-shaped residential area. If Khe Mien was the type of person who quietly observes before speaking, then Dieu Lam was the type of person who spoke first, thought later, and it was that contrast that made the two strangely compatible.

"I'm not late, you're early," Khe Mien replied, and they both laughed, striding side by side toward the central greenhouse, where Dieu Lam began her morning shift — cultivating seeds, pruning leaves, checking soil moisture for hundreds of trays of seedlings that will be transferred to terraced fields when large enough.

"What did you learn yesterday? Tell me, Ms. Diem Ninh must be very strict, right?" Dieu Lam asked, her eyes shining with curiosity.

"Not strictly. Just... different." Khe Mien tried to find the right word. "She asked me what I thought a seed was. I answered wrongly."

"How can I answer wrong? It's a seed, nothing else?"

"That's the wrong answer," Khe Mien said, and when she saw Dieu Lam frown in confusion, she burst out laughing, a rare feeling of relief after a heavy-hearted morning because of the story about her mother. "I don't fully understand it either. But I think she wanted to say that if you just look at it as an object, you'll never be careful enough with it."

Dieu Lam nodded as if she understood, although her eyes were still half-confident and half-suspicious, then the two parted ways at the intersection - Dieu Lam turned into the greenhouse area glowing with light purple growth lights, Khe Mien continued to walk towards the heavy metal door leading down to the Seed Warehouse.

Co Diem Ninh was already waiting, sitting on an old wooden chair placed between two rows of shelves, holding a small magnifying glass to look at something on the desk.

“On time,” she said without looking up. "Good. The seed keeper is not allowed to be late, even for a minute, because the seeds wait for no one. Do you know why?"

"Because they need to be checked on schedule so they don't break?"

"Partly." Co Diem Ninh finally looked up and put down the magnifying glass. "But the deeper reason is this: every minute you're late, is a minute you forget that there's a world out there that doesn't value its time, and has paid for it with its very existence. The Green Dome has no room for procrastination, little girl — not because we're harsh, but because we don't have the luxury to waste anything, including time."

She stood up and led Khe Mien to another row of shelves that they hadn't passed yesterday, where the seed boxes were marked with a small red symbol in the corner — a sign, she explained, for strains that only had an extremely limited number of seeds left, not enough for trial and error, just enough for a successful one-time planting or lost forever.

"This is the scariest thing about this job," Co Diem Ninh said, her voice low. "It's not the sandstorm in the Ash Field, it's not the crop disease. It's the knowledge that one small mistake of yours, one time you forget to water on time, one time you leave the humidity a few percent off, can forever erase something that existed thousands of years before the Great Change. I don't say this to scare you. I say it so you understand, from today, that this job has no room for youthful inattention."

Khe Mien looked at the row of red shelves, feeling something heavy creep into her small chest — not exactly fear, but like the feeling she had when she first held Bach Diep bean seeds yesterday: an invisible but real weight, pressing on her nine-year-old shoulders in a way that she knew she would have to learn to carry, not for a day, but for the rest of her life.

“I won't forget,” she said, and this time, her voice had none of yesterday's hesitation.

Co Diem Ninh looked at her for a long time, then smiled slightly - a rare, short smile, but warm enough for Khe Mien to remember forever, every time she needed something to hold on to in the much more difficult days that lay ahead, farther than even that nine-year-old girl could imagine right now.