Chapter 23 — The Last Seed Keeper

Chan Kien was healthy enough to continue walking after three days of mandatory rest, but the cost of that delay was clearly visible in the water rations table that Dinh Bach Lam flipped through every night, his face becoming more and more tense.

“We're four days behind schedule,” he said on the third evening after leaving the ruins, the group sitting around a small solar lamp, the only light they allowed themselves at night to avoid attracting unnecessary attention. "The distillation unit has been fixed, but its performance depends on air humidity, and the past few days have been drier than expected."

"How much water is left?" Khe Mien asked, even though she knew the answer wouldn't be easy to hear.

"Enough for five days if we keep our current rations," Bach Lam replied. "Six days if we cut back another quarter. Sand Dome is about seven days away at the current rate."

A heavy silence enveloped the group. Diem Quynh looked down at her hand, and Kien, still limping a bit because the wound had not yet fully healed, bowed his head as if feeling guilty again for the delay.

“We can speed things up,” Ngan The Binh said, though his voice was uncertain. "But going faster in the heat of the day means sweating more, requiring more water to compensate. It's a calculation with no easy solution."

Khe Mien sat still, her mind reeling with numbers, but at the same time, another part of her — the part that had spent fourteen years learning how to observe the land, how to read the smallest signs of life left in the harsh environment — began to search through memories of Co Diem Ninh's lessons.

"Wait," she said slowly, remembering something. "Miss Diem Ninh once taught me about some plants that can survive in the driest soil, by storing water deep in their roots — not to drink directly, but enough to extract if you know how. She called them storage roots, often growing in hollows in the ground where moisture lingers longer after rain."

"Is there such a species here?" Bach Lam asked, his eyes immediately became sharp again, no longer the tired look of a few minutes ago.

"I don't know for sure," Khe Mien admitted. "But if they do, they usually grow near places where water used to flow — like the rock crevices where we took shelter from the storm the other day, or areas of land that are unusually darker in color."

Ngan The Binh nodded slowly. "I saw some dry bushes like that, many years ago, in another part of the Ash Field. Didn't think much of them at the time."

The next morning, as the group continued on their way, Khe Mien walked a little slower than the formation, her eyes scanning along the crevices and low rocky ledges, looking for any signs of life left in the monotonous gray landscape. Near noon, when the group stopped for a short rest under the thin shade of a large rock, she discovered it - a cluster of low bushes, the leaves had dried up and turned gray-brown to almost blend into the soil, but the trunk still retained a certain flexibility when she touched it, different from the brittleness of a completely dead tree.

“Here,” she said, her voice shaking with excitement, kneeling down next to the bush. "Look at this tree trunk — it's still alive, just in a dormant state waiting for water. If I'm right, its roots will store moisture deep underground."

Bach Lam knelt down next to her, observing how she carefully dug around the base of the tree with a small shovel, each layer of soil being pushed aside with the meticulousness of someone accustomed to working with the most fragile creatures. When the tree's roots were exposed, a root tuber bulging unusually compared to the size of the tree, Khe Mien couldn't hold back a soft cry.

“That's right,” she said, lifting the root, feeling its weight outweigh the withered appearance of the aboveground stem. "It has stored water over many dry seasons, maybe many years."

The whole group gathered, and that afternoon, under Khe Mien's guidance, they found four more similar bushes within a radius of a few hundred meters — not many, but enough for Ve Diem Quynh, using her technical knowledge, to devise a crude method of pressing and filtering using cloth and a small pipe, extracting a small but significant amount of water from those roots.

"If you put two layers of fabric together, a thick layer to filter out sediment, a finer layer to filter out small impurities, the water that flows out will be much cleaner," Diem Quynh explained, her hands still constantly adjusting the rudimentary structure she had just built from the few materials she brought. "I learned this method from fixing a broken water filter at the Respiratory Station, when Ms. Khe Mien's father showed me the basic principle."

"My father will be happy to know that his knowledge saved us in Dong Tro," Khe Mien said, a smile flickering across her tired face, the image of Vu Dinh Khoat standing next to the pipes of the Respiratory Station appeared clearly in her mind, distant but warm.

Kien, even though his leg still hurt, tried to lend a hand, holding the pipe tightly while Diem Quynh squeezed each crushed root through the filter cloth. "I never thought a dry tree could hold so much water," he said, his voice full of surprise as he watched the clear drops of water slowly drip into the small vase they used to catch it.

“Plants are better at keeping secrets than people think,” Khe Mien replied, observing the process with the eyes of a worker witnessing the theoretical knowledge she had learned over the years finally prove its practical value in the midst of life and death circumstances. "That's why seed keepers are always taught to patiently observe before concluding anything is completely dead."

“It's not enough to completely solve the problem,” Bach Lam said, as they sat back to calculating the numbers later in the evening, but his voice carried a palpable sense of relief. "But enough to extend the safety period by two, maybe three days. Enough so that we don't have to risk pushing the speed too much."

"Miss Diem Ninh once told me," Khe Mien said, looking at the small fire they were allowed to light tonight to partially cook the dried food, "that the soil never really dies completely, just waits. I always thought that was more of a metaphor than a scientific fact. But now I think maybe you meant both."

Bach Lam looked at her through the firelight, and in his eyes, Khe Mien saw something she had never seen so clearly before—not just respect, but a kind of silent admiration, the kind of feeling a pragmatist had for someone who can find solutions where he saw only dead ground.

"In the ten years I've been walking through Dong Tro," he said, his voice slow, almost more to himself than to her, "I never thought about finding water from the same trees that seemed to be dead. I only thought about rations, about speed, about avoiding dangerous areas. You see this land in a completely different way."

"Maybe because I was taught to seek life, not to avoid death," Khe Mien said, smiling slightly even though her body was tired after a long day. "Those two perspectives, maybe we need both to survive this place."

"Maybe so," Bach Lam agreed, and in that moment, as the small firelight danced between the two of them, Khe Mien felt a new closeness, different from the professional trust that had formed between them over the past few days — a closeness she hadn't dared to name, but she no longer tried to deny.

Ve Diem Quynh, sitting not far away, glanced at the two discreetly, then turned to Kien with a small smile that he, even though he was still busy with his bowl of food, still recognized and responded with a thoughtful eyebrow raise.

Ngan The Binh, the only person in the group who seemed not to care about the private moment taking place by the fire, stood up to check the perimeter of the camp one last time before going to bed, as he did every night, but as he passed Bach Lam, he gently patted his long-time partner's shoulder, a brief gesture that no one else in the group noticed, carrying a meaning that only two men who had gone through many dangers together could fully understand.

That night, while writing in her notebook under the small light, Khe Mien paused for a long time before putting down her pen, trying to find the right words to record what she felt:

*Today I found water from what looked like death. I think about what Ms. Diem Ninh taught me last year: the land never really dies, it just waits for the right time to come back to life. I wonder if that's true of other things too — defensive walls, hearts closed by loss. Perhaps they were just waiting, like roots under dry soil, until someone had the patience to dig deep and find life still there.*