The last strawberry on Earth grew in Old Man Hira's secret garden, hidden behind a rusted gate wrapped in chains.
Rumor said it glowed.
Rumor said it could cure any sickness.
Rumor was usually wrong—but not today.
Twelve-year-old Kavi scaled the wall at midnight, her bare feet silent on the warm bricks. She wasn’t here to steal. She just needed one seed. Just enough to grow another. Just enough to save her brother, whose fever had turned his skin the color of storm clouds.
The garden was a graveyard of empty pots and cracked soil—except for the center plot, where a single strawberry pulsed like a heartbeat. It was glowing.
Kavi reached out—
And the earth moved.
Vines lashed around her wrist, thorns biting deep. The strawberry’s glow brightened, and suddenly Kavi remembered things that weren’t hers:
A woman in a lab coat, weeping as she buried the last genetically pure fruit. A war fought over sugar and soil. The taste of sunlight on her tongue, so sweet it burned._
The vines tightened. The strawberry wasn’t just fruit—it was alive. And it was hungry.
Kavi’s free hand found the knife in her pocket.
She left the garden at dawn, her palm wrapped in bloody cloth.
In her pocket: three seeds.
And in her brother’s tea that evening: a single drop of juice, red as a warning.
By morning, his fever broke.
By spring, the first new leaves unfurled in their backyard.
And in the city’s abandoned labs, something in the soil began to stir.
