The October Harvest

It was late October before something shifted.

Pip had assumed they were dead. The plot was largely dormant now. Even the pre-enclosure carrots had yellowed, their intense historical field-smell retreating slightly into the earth. The sky above was grey and heavy.

She wore a thick coat and carried a thermos, kneeling near the patch of 2042 amaranth, preparing to finally give up and plant winter onions there.

She plunged her trowel into the grey-brown earth.

The trowel hit something hard, right under the surface.

She scraped away the soil.

She uncovered concrete. A smooth, exceptionally clean slab of pale, aggregate-flecked concrete, a few inches below the soil level.

Pip froze.

This soil had been entirely dirt when she planted the black seeds.

She immediately dug wider. The concrete extended outwards in a perfect rectangle about two metres long by a metre wide.

She touched the surface. It was slightly warm.

She looked up.

The sky was not grey anymore.

It was a terrifyingly lucid blue. The air smelled of sharp ozone and filtered dust, entirely lacking the normal damp tang of October. The allotment fence was gone. So were all the other plots.

She was standing on a balcony, very high up.

Below her, Rowan Street did not exist.

There was a city skyline entirely composed of white, modular buildings criss-crossed with what looked like intensely green elevated parks spanning the gaps between the towers. The A-road bypass was gone; instead, there were wide transit corridors where silent, oblong shapes moved extremely fast.

Pip gripped the trowel very tightly. She was deeply terrified but also profoundly aware that if she moved her feet off the concrete patch of balcony—the small rectangular space defined by the amaranth seeds—she would likely fall the three hundred feet down to whatever level of the city was below.

She stayed very still.

She heard a hum, like an electric motor, extremely close by.

Turning slowly within her safe space, she saw, growing not from soil but from a sleek ceramic trough mounted on the side of the balcony structure, the amaranth plants.

They were enormous, thick-stemmed, violently crimson rather than red, their leaves wide and perfectly unblemished. They looked heavy and metallic.

A small, disc-shaped drone hovered near the flowers, spraying a micro-mist of something before zipping away to the next balcony down.

Pip understood immediately what she was looking at. The pre-enclosure carrots had brought the past forward into her hands. The amaranth had pulled the future backward to her feet.

She wrote in her notebook: *East Terrace. Block 4. 2042.*

She touched the crimson leaves of the amaranth.

They were coarse and waxy. They belonged here. But so did the seeds in her tin. Someone in 2042 had harvested these seeds and put them in a biscuit tin that belonged to Mr Albright.

Or rather, Pip realised, a tin that *she* had put them in.

Because Mr Albright had not written the label for the 2042 seeds. The handwriting was neat, modern, and in generic ballpoint pen.

It was her handwriting.

She recognised the shape of the 't', the slightly curled tail on the 'y'.

Mr Albright had said: *For Pip. Start with the seed tin.*

He hadn't been collecting the seeds from the past. He had inherited the tin from someone else. And someone, eventually, had to collect the seeds from the future.

Pip stood cautiously from the concrete balcony slab.

She gently pinched the base of the largest crimson flower head on the amaranth plant. The seeds were black, spherical, perfectly round.

She put six of them in her pocket.

Then she took a deep breath, stepped backward, off the edge of the smooth concrete, and immediately planted her right foot heavily into the cold, damp, completely normal grey-brown earth of the Rowan Street allotment.

The city vanished. The dizzying clear sky disappeared. The sharp ozone smell was gone.

She was standing by the shed, in late October, holding six black seeds.

It was just dirt again.

The old man had left her an allotment, she thought, looking at the biscuit tin under her arm. And a great responsibility.

She placed the six black seeds in a small envelope, took out her ballpoint pen, and very carefully wrote:

*Amaranth, red-leaf. East Terrace balcony, Block 4. 2042.*

She dropped it into the very bottom of the biscuit tin and closed the lid.

Then she picked up her fork, entirely unafraid now, and began to turn over the soil ready for spring.