Chapter 3 — The Last Seed Keeper

"We won't stay at the Grain Warehouse today," Co Diem Ninh said as soon as Khe Mien walked in, causing her to stop in the middle of the doorstep. The old woman had put on a thick cloak, the kind one only wears when going to less heated areas of the Green Dome. "Put on some clothes. I'll take you out today."

"Get out?" Khe Mien asked, her heart beating a beat faster. In the language of Green Dome children, "out" is a phrase that carries its own weight — not necessarily a taboo, but also not a place where people take children arbitrarily. The edge is where Roof Filter meets Dong Tro, where the living world and the dead world are only separated by a layer of resistant glass more than thirty centimeters thick.

"I've been a disciple of Kho Hat for three days now," Co Diem Ninh said, walking out of the room, forcing Khe Mien to run after him. "I think it's time you see what we're protecting from, before you spend your whole life learning how to protect it."

They passed through areas of the Green Dome that Khe Mien rarely visited — not a densely populated area, not green terraced fields, but a long industrial corridor, flanked on either side by large gray pipes running parallel to the ceiling, occasionally emitting a soft vibration like the breathing of a giant sleeping creature. The more we walked, the colder the air became, and the familiar warm yellow artificial light of the residential area gradually gave way to a cold, utilitarian white light that had no intention of making anyone feel comfortable.

At the end of the hallway is a small observation chamber, one of the few places in Green Dome where you can see directly through the Filter Roof without being obscured by other buildings. A guard — dressed in the gray uniform of the Border Patrol — nodded to Co Diem Ninh as if he had known her for a long time, then quietly backed away to give the two of them their own space.

"Come closer," Co Diem Ninh said, standing at a sufficient distance from the glass to observe.

Khe Mien stepped forward, and in that moment, for the first time in nine years of her life, she saw Dong Tro.

It was unlike anything she had ever imagined through the illustrations in her textbooks, which were always drawn in soft, almost poetic colors, as if trying to ease the truth for children not yet old enough to face it. The reality that stretched before her eyes was a flat land, cracked into a thousand irregular pieces, covered with a layer of pale gray ash that stretched to the horizon, where the sky—the real sky, not the simulated sky under the Filter Roof—was a dull yellow as if the light had to filter through an eternal curtain of dust that would never dissipate. Not a shadow of a tree, not a single streak of green to break that monotony. There were only ash, cracked rocks, and in the distance, rough shapes that it took Khe Mien a moment to realize were the ruins of old structures — perhaps from before the Great Transformation — that were now just warped metal skeletons protruding from the ground like the ribs of a giant animal that had died long ago.

"That's..." Khe Mien started, then didn't know what to ask first.

"Dong Tro," Co Diem Ninh said. "The general name for the entire dead land that surrounds us. No one knows exactly how far it stretches, for no one has ever traveled the whole of it and returned to tell the whole story. But caravans that have crossed parts of it to other Arches say that it goes on and on, for hundreds of miles, sometimes thousands, varying only in severity — some places have a little moisture left under the earth, others are so completely dry that no living thing, not even those that have liked it, over many generations, can last for more than a few days."

Khe Mien pressed her palm against the cold glass, feeling its thickness through her fingertips, and for the first time she understood - not intellectually like what was taught in books, but understood with a cold feeling running down her spine - how thin the line between life and death was. Thirty centimeters. That's all.

“Before the Great Change,” she asked, her voice low, “was this place as green as the Arch?”

"Many times greener, according to what is still recorded," Co Diem Ninh replied. "There are rivers, there are forests, there are lands so vast that people grow crops without any cover, rain falls naturally from the sky, not through a regeneration system. I don't say this to make you sad. I say it to make you understand why each seed in the Granary is so precious - they are the last evidence, the only remaining living memory of a lost world, a world that even I only know through stories, but have never seen with my own eyes."

They stood silently for a long time in front of the glass, and in that silence, Co Diem Ninh began to tell - her voice was even, as if she was telling a story that had been told many times before, to many other children, even though Khe Mien didn't know it.

"Have you heard of the Mist Dome?"

Khe Mien shook her head.

"That's another Arch, not too far from here in terms of the distance a caravan can travel in about fifteen, twenty days. It collapsed when I was a little younger than you are now, less than twenty years ago." She paused, as if sifting through the words in her head. "Their water regeneration system failed — not suddenly, but gradually, little by little, over many years, to the point that by the time they realized the severity, it was too late to fix it on the spot. They had to evacuate the entire population, across Dong Tro to find the nearest Vòm that could still accommodate them."

"So what? Did they arrive?"

"Partly." Co Diem Ninh said, and in those two words, Khe Mien heard a heaviness that she did not try to hide. "A good portion of them did not survive the journey. Dong Tro does not tolerate delays, does not tolerate unprepared groups, and a community that has just lost its home often does not have enough time to prepare properly. I tell you this, not to scare you, child, but because it is the most important lesson that Green Dome has learned from the tragedy of Dome Suong: we must not let things deteriorate to the point of running out of options." We have no choice but to run away. We must always foresee, always prepare in advance, always keep every system — the Respiratory Station, the terraces, this Grain Warehouse — strong enough to never fall into that situation.""

Khe Mien thought of her father, of the nights he stayed up late with a set of technical drawings spread out on the table, and of the words "the number three filter element is louder than usual" that he said this morning as a trivial thing. She didn't say anything, but a small, almost invisible seed of worry had begun to take root somewhere in her heart, though it would be a long time before she realized what it had grown into.

"So... what can I do to not be like the Mist Dome?" she asked.

Co Diem Ninh turned to look at her, and this time her eyes no longer had the sadness of the story she had just told, but returned to the usual sharpness of a teacher waiting for his student to find the answer for himself.

"What do you think?"

Khe Mien looked back at the scene of Dong Tro stretching out in front, then looked back at the fragile glass layer under her palm, then thought about the rows of red shelves in the Seed Warehouse, the varieties with only the last few dozen seeds remaining.

"I have to keep checking, always pay attention to the smallest signs," she said slowly, as if convincing herself as she spoke. "Because perhaps the Mist Dome also had small signs like that, long before everything became too late. No one just noticed, or did notice but no one did anything."

There was another silence, longer than the last, then Co Diem Ninh nodded, slowly but decisively, as if Khe Mien had just answered correctly a question that she had been waiting for someone to answer correctly for a long time.

“That,” she said, “is why I chose you.”

On the way back to the Grain Warehouse, passing through the cold industrial corridor, Khe Mien turned her head to look back one last time, even though the observation window had disappeared around the corner. She could no longer see Dong Ash, but the image of it — the cracked land covered with gray ash stretching endlessly, the opaque yellow sky without a real cloud, the warped metal frames like the bones of a dead world — was imprinted in her mind in a way that no theoretical lesson in a book could. That night, when she wrote in the notebook under her pillow, she only wrote a single line, shorter than the previous days, but heavier than all of them:

*Today I see the outside world. I will never let the Green Dome become the Mist Dome.*