The Wanted Poster
The greenhouse smelled of wet earth and desperation.
Kael stood with his back against the far wall, arms crossed, watching Lyra adjust the UV lamps above Ember. The rose sat in its ceramic pot like a queen on a throne, its petals the color of dying embers, its stem curved with a grace that made his chest ache. He’d painted a thousand flowers from memory—blue poppies, ghost orchids, flame lilies—but none of them had ever looked like this. None of them had ever been real.
“We can’t keep it here,” he said.
Lyra didn’t look up. Her fingers moved with practiced precision, testing the moisture in the soil, brushing a speck of dust from a leaf. “We’ve been over this.”
“No, we’ve talked about it. We haven’t done anything.”
She straightened and turned to face him. Her eyes were tired, ringed with shadows, but there was a stubborn set to her jaw that he was starting to recognize. “The backpack is damaged. The root system needs at least forty-eight hours to stabilize before I can move it again. If I try to transplant it now, I’ll kill it.”
“And if we stay here, VexCorp will kill us.”
“Then we find another option.”
Kael pushed off the wall and walked to the table where he’d laid out his tools. Spray cans, stencils, a roll of plastic sheeting. The mural he’d painted on the greenhouse wall—a ghost orchid climbing toward a fake sun—stared back at him. He’d finished it last night, unable to sleep, his hands moving on autopilot while his mind raced through escape routes that all ended in dead ends.
“I used to work for them,” he said quietly. “I know how they think. They don’t stop. They don’t give up. Once Marcus Vex decides he wants something, he’ll burn the entire city down to get it.”
Lyra’s hand drifted to Ember’s stem, her fingers hovering just above a thorn. “Then we make sure he doesn’t find it.”
“He already knows it exists. That’s the problem.”
The words hung in the air between them, heavy as the acid rain that drummed against the greenhouse roof. Kael remembered the look on Dravin’s face when they’d escaped the patrol—the cold, calculating fury of a man who didn’t lose often. He’d seen that look before, in the labs, when a test subject died before they could extract the data. It was the look of someone who would tear the world apart to get what he wanted.
A buzzing sound cut through the silence. Kael’s hand went to his pocket, pulling out the cracked datapad he’d scavenged from a trash bin three months ago. The screen flickered, then resolved into a news broadcast.
“—breaking news from VexCorp headquarters. CEO Marcus Vex has issued a public statement regarding the theft of a rare biological specimen from a company research facility. We go live to spokesperson Elara Chen.”
The image shifted to a woman in a crisp blue suit, standing at a podium with the VexCorp logo glowing behind her. Her smile was polished, professional, and completely empty.
“VexCorp regrets to announce that a valuable genetic sample has been removed from our secure storage without authorization. This sample is of significant scientific importance and poses no threat to public safety. However, we are offering a reward of five hundred thousand credits for information leading to its safe return.”
The screen split, showing two images. The first was a photograph of Ember—Kael’s breath caught in his throat. It was a perfect shot, taken from above, the rose’s petals spread wide like a flame frozen in time. The second image was his face.
He stared at his own eyes staring back at him. The photo was from his VexCorp ID badge, taken three years ago, before he’d grown the stubble and the hollows under his cheeks. He looked younger. Cleaner. More naive.
“The suspect is Kael Vance, a former VexCorp employee. He is considered armed and dangerous. Citizens are advised not to approach him and to contact VexCorp security immediately.”
Lyra stepped up beside him, her shoulder brushing his. He felt the tension in her body, the way her hand clenched at her side.
“They put your face on every screen in the city,” she said.
“Yeah.” He turned off the datapad and shoved it back in his pocket. “That’s what they do.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You look different now.”
“I grew a conscience. It ages a person.”
A ghost of a smile crossed her lips, there and gone. “We need to leave. Tonight.”
“You just said the root system needs forty-eight hours.”
“I know what I said.”
Kael turned to face her fully. “Then what changed?”
Lyra looked at Ember, then back at him. Her eyes were wet, but she wasn’t crying. Not yet. “They have your face. They have the rose’s image. It’s only a matter of time before someone recognizes you. The lower wards are full of people who would sell their own mother for five hundred thousand credits.”
“I know.”
“Then we can’t stay.”
“We can’t move the rose.”
They stood there, locked in a stalemate, the rain hammering against the glass above them. Kael felt the weight of the past three years pressing down on his shoulders—the guilt, the fear, the desperate hope that had driven him to paint flowers on abandoned walls. He’d thought he was hiding. He’d thought if he kept his head down and his hands busy, he could outrun what he’d done.
But VexCorp had a long memory. And Marcus Vex never forgot a face.
“There’s someone I know,” Kael said slowly. “An old contact from my lab days. She runs a network of eco-hackers. They call themselves The Root.”
Lyra’s eyebrows rose. “Eco-hackers?”
“They believe in restoring natural ecosystems. They’ve been fighting VexCorp for years—sabotaging synthetic plant production, releasing modified spores into the air, that kind of thing. If anyone knows how to hide a real flower, it’s them.”
“Can you trust her?”
Kael thought about Fern. Gray-haired, sharp-eyed, with hands that had never stopped moving. She’d been a senior botanist at VexCorp when he’d joined, and she’d seen the same things he’d seen—the weaponization reports, the bio-weapon prototypes, the cold calculation behind the company’s green initiatives. She’d quit six months before he did, and she’d taken a lot of data with her.
“She’s the reason I got out,” he said. “She showed me the files. The real files, not the sanitized versions they gave the lab techs. She told me what Vex was planning to do with the synthetic plant program.”
“And you believed her?”
“I checked the data myself. It was all there. Genetically modified crops that could be triggered to release toxins on command. Pollen that could be weaponized to cause respiratory failure. Trees with root systems designed to collapse building foundations.” He paused, the memories crawling up his throat like bile. “I spent six months building the code that made those plants grow. I thought I was helping feed the city. I was building weapons.”
Lyra’s hand found his. Her fingers were cold, but her grip was firm.
“You didn’t know.”
“I should have known. I should have asked more questions.”
“You left. That’s more than most people do.”
He looked at her, at the stubborn set of her jaw and the fire in her eyes, and he felt something crack open in his chest. He’d spent three years alone, painting flowers on walls because he couldn’t bear to look at the synthetic ones without seeing the death they represented. He’d told himself he was done trusting people. Done hoping. Done believing that anything could change.
But here she was, holding a real rose in a city that had outlawed life itself, and she wasn’t afraid.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll reach out to Fern. But we need to move Ember to a safer location first. Even if it’s just a few blocks away.”
Lyra nodded. “I can stabilize the root system enough for a short transport. Give me six hours.”
“You’ll have them.”
She turned back to the rose, her hands already moving, checking the soil, adjusting the lamps. Kael watched her for a moment, then pulled out his datapad and began typing a coded message to an old, unused account. The words felt like stepping off a cliff.
*Need a safehouse. Bringing something valuable. Same problem, bigger stakes.*
He sent it before he could change his mind.
The hours passed in a blur of preparation. Lyra worked on Ember, carefully wrapping the root ball in damp cloth and securing it in a modified carrying case. Kael packed their supplies—food, water, medical kit, his spray cans and stencils. He didn’t know why he brought the art supplies. Habit, maybe. Or superstition.
The message from Fern came two hours before they were ready to leave.
*Old warehouse on Meridian Row. Third floor. Tell the door I sent you.*
No name. No confirmation. Just an address and a code phrase. It was exactly the kind of message he’d expected from her—short, cryptic, and impossible to trace.
“We have a destination,” he said, showing Lyra the screen.
She glanced at it, then back at Ember. “Meridian Row is in the industrial district. Lots of abandoned factories. Good cover.”
“Bad escape routes.”
“We don’t have a lot of options.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
They left the greenhouse at midnight, when the rain was at its heaviest and the streets were empty. Lyra carried Ember in the modified case, strapped across her back like a backpack. Kael walked ahead, his hood pulled low, his eyes scanning the shadows for drones.
The streets of the lower wards were slick with neon reflections—pink, blue, green, the colors bleeding into each other like a watercolor painting left out in the rain. The air smelled of ozone and wet concrete and the faint, chemical sweetness of synthetic flowers. Every few blocks, a VexCorp drone hummed overhead, its camera eye swiveling back and forth, searching.
They moved through alleys and maintenance tunnels, avoiding the main roads. Kael knew the lower wards like he knew the back of his hand—every dead end, every shortcut, every hole in the fence that led to a forgotten courtyard. He’d painted murals in half of them, his flowers glowing under the UV light, silent memorials to a world that no longer existed.
They were three blocks from Meridian Row when Kael heard the footsteps.
He grabbed Lyra’s arm and pulled her into a doorway, pressing her against the wall. The footsteps grew louder, accompanied by voices—low, casual, the sound of men who weren’t in a hurry.
“—heard the reward is half a million now.”
“Yeah, but you gotta find him first. Good luck with that. The lower wards are a maze.”
“Doesn’t matter. VexCorp’s got drones everywhere. They’ll find him eventually.”
“And then what? They get their flower back, we get our money, and life goes back to normal.”
“Nothing’s normal anymore. You seen those murals he painted? The blue poppies? They look real. Like, actually real.”
“So? They’re just paint.”
“I dunno. Makes you think, doesn’t it? What else did they take from us?”
The voices faded as the men turned a corner. Kael let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.
“They’re talking about your murals,” Lyra whispered.
“Yeah.”
“They like them.”
He looked at her, surprised. “What?”
“They said they look real. That means something. It means people remember.”
Kael didn’t know what to say to that. He’d painted the flowers because he needed to remember. He’d never thought about what they meant to anyone else.
They moved on, faster now, the warehouse coming into view. It was a hulking structure of rusted steel and broken windows, its walls covered in faded graffiti. The third floor was dark, but Kael saw a faint light flickering in one of the windows.
They climbed the fire escape, the metal groaning under their weight. The door at the top was locked, but Kael knocked three times, paused, then knocked twice more.
A slot slid open. A pair of eyes peered out.
“Who sent you?”
“Fern.”
The slot slid shut. Bolts clicked. The door swung open.
A woman stood in the doorway, her gray hair pulled back in a tight bun, her face lined with years of hard living. She was holding a crowbar, but she lowered it when she saw Kael.
“You look like hell, kid.”
“Good to see you too, Fern.”
She stepped aside, letting them in. The room was sparse—a few cots, a table covered in maps and data pads, a portable generator humming in the corner. But it was dry. Safe.
Lyra set down the case and opened it, revealing Ember. The rose’s petals caught the dim light, glowing like embers in the dark.
Fern stared at it. Her hand went to her mouth.
“Is that—?”
“The last real rose on Earth,” Kael said. “And we need your help to keep it that way.”
Kael stood with his back against the far wall, arms crossed, watching Lyra adjust the UV lamps above Ember. The rose sat in its ceramic pot like a queen on a throne, its petals the color of dying embers, its stem curved with a grace that made his chest ache. He’d painted a thousand flowers from memory—blue poppies, ghost orchids, flame lilies—but none of them had ever looked like this. None of them had ever been real.
“We can’t keep it here,” he said.
Lyra didn’t look up. Her fingers moved with practiced precision, testing the moisture in the soil, brushing a speck of dust from a leaf. “We’ve been over this.”
“No, we’ve talked about it. We haven’t done anything.”
She straightened and turned to face him. Her eyes were tired, ringed with shadows, but there was a stubborn set to her jaw that he was starting to recognize. “The backpack is damaged. The root system needs at least forty-eight hours to stabilize before I can move it again. If I try to transplant it now, I’ll kill it.”
“And if we stay here, VexCorp will kill us.”
“Then we find another option.”
Kael pushed off the wall and walked to the table where he’d laid out his tools. Spray cans, stencils, a roll of plastic sheeting. The mural he’d painted on the greenhouse wall—a ghost orchid climbing toward a fake sun—stared back at him. He’d finished it last night, unable to sleep, his hands moving on autopilot while his mind raced through escape routes that all ended in dead ends.
“I used to work for them,” he said quietly. “I know how they think. They don’t stop. They don’t give up. Once Marcus Vex decides he wants something, he’ll burn the entire city down to get it.”
Lyra’s hand drifted to Ember’s stem, her fingers hovering just above a thorn. “Then we make sure he doesn’t find it.”
“He already knows it exists. That’s the problem.”
The words hung in the air between them, heavy as the acid rain that drummed against the greenhouse roof. Kael remembered the look on Dravin’s face when they’d escaped the patrol—the cold, calculating fury of a man who didn’t lose often. He’d seen that look before, in the labs, when a test subject died before they could extract the data. It was the look of someone who would tear the world apart to get what he wanted.
A buzzing sound cut through the silence. Kael’s hand went to his pocket, pulling out the cracked datapad he’d scavenged from a trash bin three months ago. The screen flickered, then resolved into a news broadcast.
“—breaking news from VexCorp headquarters. CEO Marcus Vex has issued a public statement regarding the theft of a rare biological specimen from a company research facility. We go live to spokesperson Elara Chen.”
The image shifted to a woman in a crisp blue suit, standing at a podium with the VexCorp logo glowing behind her. Her smile was polished, professional, and completely empty.
“VexCorp regrets to announce that a valuable genetic sample has been removed from our secure storage without authorization. This sample is of significant scientific importance and poses no threat to public safety. However, we are offering a reward of five hundred thousand credits for information leading to its safe return.”
The screen split, showing two images. The first was a photograph of Ember—Kael’s breath caught in his throat. It was a perfect shot, taken from above, the rose’s petals spread wide like a flame frozen in time. The second image was his face.
He stared at his own eyes staring back at him. The photo was from his VexCorp ID badge, taken three years ago, before he’d grown the stubble and the hollows under his cheeks. He looked younger. Cleaner. More naive.
“The suspect is Kael Vance, a former VexCorp employee. He is considered armed and dangerous. Citizens are advised not to approach him and to contact VexCorp security immediately.”
Lyra stepped up beside him, her shoulder brushing his. He felt the tension in her body, the way her hand clenched at her side.
“They put your face on every screen in the city,” she said.
“Yeah.” He turned off the datapad and shoved it back in his pocket. “That’s what they do.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You look different now.”
“I grew a conscience. It ages a person.”
A ghost of a smile crossed her lips, there and gone. “We need to leave. Tonight.”
“You just said the root system needs forty-eight hours.”
“I know what I said.”
Kael turned to face her fully. “Then what changed?”
Lyra looked at Ember, then back at him. Her eyes were wet, but she wasn’t crying. Not yet. “They have your face. They have the rose’s image. It’s only a matter of time before someone recognizes you. The lower wards are full of people who would sell their own mother for five hundred thousand credits.”
“I know.”
“Then we can’t stay.”
“We can’t move the rose.”
They stood there, locked in a stalemate, the rain hammering against the glass above them. Kael felt the weight of the past three years pressing down on his shoulders—the guilt, the fear, the desperate hope that had driven him to paint flowers on abandoned walls. He’d thought he was hiding. He’d thought if he kept his head down and his hands busy, he could outrun what he’d done.
But VexCorp had a long memory. And Marcus Vex never forgot a face.
“There’s someone I know,” Kael said slowly. “An old contact from my lab days. She runs a network of eco-hackers. They call themselves The Root.”
Lyra’s eyebrows rose. “Eco-hackers?”
“They believe in restoring natural ecosystems. They’ve been fighting VexCorp for years—sabotaging synthetic plant production, releasing modified spores into the air, that kind of thing. If anyone knows how to hide a real flower, it’s them.”
“Can you trust her?”
Kael thought about Fern. Gray-haired, sharp-eyed, with hands that had never stopped moving. She’d been a senior botanist at VexCorp when he’d joined, and she’d seen the same things he’d seen—the weaponization reports, the bio-weapon prototypes, the cold calculation behind the company’s green initiatives. She’d quit six months before he did, and she’d taken a lot of data with her.
“She’s the reason I got out,” he said. “She showed me the files. The real files, not the sanitized versions they gave the lab techs. She told me what Vex was planning to do with the synthetic plant program.”
“And you believed her?”
“I checked the data myself. It was all there. Genetically modified crops that could be triggered to release toxins on command. Pollen that could be weaponized to cause respiratory failure. Trees with root systems designed to collapse building foundations.” He paused, the memories crawling up his throat like bile. “I spent six months building the code that made those plants grow. I thought I was helping feed the city. I was building weapons.”
Lyra’s hand found his. Her fingers were cold, but her grip was firm.
“You didn’t know.”
“I should have known. I should have asked more questions.”
“You left. That’s more than most people do.”
He looked at her, at the stubborn set of her jaw and the fire in her eyes, and he felt something crack open in his chest. He’d spent three years alone, painting flowers on walls because he couldn’t bear to look at the synthetic ones without seeing the death they represented. He’d told himself he was done trusting people. Done hoping. Done believing that anything could change.
But here she was, holding a real rose in a city that had outlawed life itself, and she wasn’t afraid.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll reach out to Fern. But we need to move Ember to a safer location first. Even if it’s just a few blocks away.”
Lyra nodded. “I can stabilize the root system enough for a short transport. Give me six hours.”
“You’ll have them.”
She turned back to the rose, her hands already moving, checking the soil, adjusting the lamps. Kael watched her for a moment, then pulled out his datapad and began typing a coded message to an old, unused account. The words felt like stepping off a cliff.
*Need a safehouse. Bringing something valuable. Same problem, bigger stakes.*
He sent it before he could change his mind.
The hours passed in a blur of preparation. Lyra worked on Ember, carefully wrapping the root ball in damp cloth and securing it in a modified carrying case. Kael packed their supplies—food, water, medical kit, his spray cans and stencils. He didn’t know why he brought the art supplies. Habit, maybe. Or superstition.
The message from Fern came two hours before they were ready to leave.
*Old warehouse on Meridian Row. Third floor. Tell the door I sent you.*
No name. No confirmation. Just an address and a code phrase. It was exactly the kind of message he’d expected from her—short, cryptic, and impossible to trace.
“We have a destination,” he said, showing Lyra the screen.
She glanced at it, then back at Ember. “Meridian Row is in the industrial district. Lots of abandoned factories. Good cover.”
“Bad escape routes.”
“We don’t have a lot of options.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
They left the greenhouse at midnight, when the rain was at its heaviest and the streets were empty. Lyra carried Ember in the modified case, strapped across her back like a backpack. Kael walked ahead, his hood pulled low, his eyes scanning the shadows for drones.
The streets of the lower wards were slick with neon reflections—pink, blue, green, the colors bleeding into each other like a watercolor painting left out in the rain. The air smelled of ozone and wet concrete and the faint, chemical sweetness of synthetic flowers. Every few blocks, a VexCorp drone hummed overhead, its camera eye swiveling back and forth, searching.
They moved through alleys and maintenance tunnels, avoiding the main roads. Kael knew the lower wards like he knew the back of his hand—every dead end, every shortcut, every hole in the fence that led to a forgotten courtyard. He’d painted murals in half of them, his flowers glowing under the UV light, silent memorials to a world that no longer existed.
They were three blocks from Meridian Row when Kael heard the footsteps.
He grabbed Lyra’s arm and pulled her into a doorway, pressing her against the wall. The footsteps grew louder, accompanied by voices—low, casual, the sound of men who weren’t in a hurry.
“—heard the reward is half a million now.”
“Yeah, but you gotta find him first. Good luck with that. The lower wards are a maze.”
“Doesn’t matter. VexCorp’s got drones everywhere. They’ll find him eventually.”
“And then what? They get their flower back, we get our money, and life goes back to normal.”
“Nothing’s normal anymore. You seen those murals he painted? The blue poppies? They look real. Like, actually real.”
“So? They’re just paint.”
“I dunno. Makes you think, doesn’t it? What else did they take from us?”
The voices faded as the men turned a corner. Kael let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.
“They’re talking about your murals,” Lyra whispered.
“Yeah.”
“They like them.”
He looked at her, surprised. “What?”
“They said they look real. That means something. It means people remember.”
Kael didn’t know what to say to that. He’d painted the flowers because he needed to remember. He’d never thought about what they meant to anyone else.
They moved on, faster now, the warehouse coming into view. It was a hulking structure of rusted steel and broken windows, its walls covered in faded graffiti. The third floor was dark, but Kael saw a faint light flickering in one of the windows.
They climbed the fire escape, the metal groaning under their weight. The door at the top was locked, but Kael knocked three times, paused, then knocked twice more.
A slot slid open. A pair of eyes peered out.
“Who sent you?”
“Fern.”
The slot slid shut. Bolts clicked. The door swung open.
A woman stood in the doorway, her gray hair pulled back in a tight bun, her face lined with years of hard living. She was holding a crowbar, but she lowered it when she saw Kael.
“You look like hell, kid.”
“Good to see you too, Fern.”
She stepped aside, letting them in. The room was sparse—a few cots, a table covered in maps and data pads, a portable generator humming in the corner. But it was dry. Safe.
Lyra set down the case and opened it, revealing Ember. The rose’s petals caught the dim light, glowing like embers in the dark.
Fern stared at it. Her hand went to her mouth.
“Is that—?”
“The last real rose on Earth,” Kael said. “And we need your help to keep it that way.”