They banned grief on a Tuesday. Turned up the city lights. No obituaries. No candles on kerbs. The lifts spoke in slogans about moving on.

I kept a patch of dark under my sink.

Under the cloth: seeds the size of peppercorns with glassy tips—memory kernels, smuggled before the Orderlies wiped last seconds clean.

“You’ll get yourself lifted,” Owen said from my doorway, rubbing his thumb over his wedding ring—the one the law said he should have melted five years ago. He never crossed the threshold any more.

“I’m already lifted. Just slower.”

He watched the seeds. “You sure about El’s? First bloom broadcasts. The whole street will see.”

“That’s the point.”

“Or it’s a flare that brings the vans.”

He wasn’t wrong. The Department of Civic Quiet ran the GS-13 affective grid through every neighbourhood; kerb beacons sniffed for lagging pulse and tear-salt. Too slow a heartbeat and they knocked. Too long at a memorial—there weren’t memorials any more. They ran it from a glass tower; at noon the Cabinet Secretary smiled from every screen, explaining laws.

I pinched the soil. The kernel rolled into place. It felt heavier than it looked.

El loved neon trainers and loud birds. She died with an apology half-spoken because I wouldn’t let her say goodbye. I’d believed discipline could bargain with time.

I covered the seed and pressed two fingers flat. “Sleep,” I said, like I had when she was little and the dark asked questions.

By the third night a wet green hook prised a seam in the soil.

I carried the tray to the allotment before first light. The plot wore rust and optimism. We told the Council we grew tomatoes. The front beds were leaf and innocence. The back held screens, copper filament, sugar, and blue-gel feed that kept the lumens steady. Rebellion needs maintenance.

The greenhouse smelled of mint and damp earth. Flowers shifted in sleep: bell-shaped, spoked, frilled, each with a glow, like pondlight. People call it gold. It isn’t.

Edith, who’d taught physics, raised an eyebrow. “You waited.”

“It had to be here. El would want friends.” The word snagged, then passed.

Hannah lifted a cloth. “You can still turn back.”

“That law took her twice,” I said. “Once at the hospital. Once when they told me not to say her name again. I’m planting her.”

We sat in a circle, ID cards pegged to a line to muffle them. Tea first—never suspicious if interrupted. Then we called the seeds by their names.

“Eleanor,” I said. “El.”

Owen touched my shoulder. “For El.” The others echoed it, under breath.

I eased the seedling from the tray. A root filament traced my skin—pale line, like a gel-pen promise. I set it in the bed, packed soil. Edith fed the line through copper wire.

“First bloom in three days,” she said. “If it takes.”

“If?”

She watched the glass above us mist. “It needs a strong last image to fuse a stem.”

El’s last image: ceiling tiles; my face; a cartoon fox on her blanket. And the pieces; memory is a magpie: her name tag bleeding blue; the bus stop she called an island.

“What if it’s not enough?” I asked.

“Give it yours,” Edith said, gentle. “Flowers like a story.”

At dusk on the third day the bud opened. Petals shone from within. Veins sketched a simple map. I touched a petal. It was warm—blood-warm, not lamp-warm. We clicked off the lamps. The flower brightened. The light climbed my spine.

“Go on,” Hannah said.

“El when she was six at the sea,” I said. “She pretended to swim where the sand was wet and the gulls laughed at us. El at ten, stealing strawberries and leaving the stalks like we wouldn’t notice. El at twelve, pointing at a city fox and calling it handsome. El at thirteen—” I stopped, because thirteen was the bed and the drip and the diagnosis that emptied my mouth.

The flower flickered, then steadied.

“She liked the morning radio,” Owen said. “Phoned in and requested the oddest songs.”

“She wasn’t shy,” Hannah said.

“She was,” I said, and smiled, because both were true. “She pretended not to be.”

The petals lifted like a hand.

The greenhouse door rattled. We froze.

Edith went to meet the noise. She always took the shocks. A cheery official voice drifted in. “Allotment check. Tomato blight inspection.”

Hannah mouthed, Keep it dark. I cupped the flower. Light leaked between my fingers. Not bright enough for the road. Not for the grid.

Edith spoke training phrases. “Community health through greens.”

A second voice cut in, clipped. “Step aside.”

A torch found the soil. The latch scraped and gave. The door slid for an eye.

A boy—seventeen, Council jacket too big. Torch down. He looked at the glow pushing through my fingers.

“We’ve had reports,” he said, voice shaking. “Someone’s been leaving lumens on windowsills. That isn’t gardening.”

“Tomatoes glow under the right lamps,” Edith said.

His mouth twitched. He lifted the torch. The beam hit the flower; the light sharpened to near-white. Heat pulsed under his sleeve. He didn’t flinch. He just watched, like someone remembering what warmth felt like.

He breathed in. I thought he’d call out. Instead he whispered, “What’s its name?”

“El,” I said, too fast to stop. “Eleanor.”

His jaw loosened. “My gran was a Nell,” he said. “Made Welsh cakes. Burned the first batch every time.” He blinked it away. “We’ll be on our way. Make sure your lamps are registered.”

His gaze returned to the flower. “Don’t leave them on windowsills,” he said. “Walls remember.”

“How?” I asked.

He pushed up his sleeve. A strip of matte black ran from wrist to elbow—an absorber, humming. “You think they’re looking for gatherings,” he said, under his breath. “They’re looking for colour. They’ve doped the plaster. It drinks it. Especially the kind that comes from inside.”

He stepped back, straightened, and called down the path in a practised bark. “Blight inspection complete.”
Their boots thudded away. The flower softened to pondlight.

Edith shut the door. “Windowsills?”

“He warned us,” Hannah said.

Owen wiped his face with his sleeve. “We need to move the blooms.”

“Where?” I said. “They scan houses. They train the walls now?”

Edith nodded at the bed. “Under feet, then.”

We took spades into the dark. Planted flowers in verges, under bus stops, beneath benches. Stitched our dead into ground trucks had to cross.

Vans came faster; so did the knocks. We learned tricks: copper netting, vinegar for air, innocent rhythms. I wore my blank face. I said the slogans when I had to. When the Cabinet Secretary said on the afternoon broadcast that mourning was a luxury of inefficient eras, the bench-bloom brightened and a laugh went through me I hadn’t let out.

A paper bag appeared by my back door. No note. Inside: a black sleeve like the boy’s, and a Council card. On the back, in messy biro: Underside of the statue. Midnight. Bring three blooms.

“What if it’s a trap?” Hannah said.

“Then I’ll bring four,” I said. It came out sharp. She didn’t flinch.

At midnight Owen and I went to the square. The statue was the Cabinet Secretary’s favourite: a sensible woman holding a model city in her palm.

We knelt at the plinth. Owen slid his hand under the stone lip and hissed. “Hot.”

A panel clicked. A compartment opened. The boy crouched inside like a bat.

“You came,” he said. “Tom.”

“You risked your job,” I said.

“It isn’t a job. It’s an eraser.” He lifted the absorber. “I’ve been taking windowsills. I can’t carry another grandmother home in my sleeve.”

He reached for the cloth around the blooms, careful not to touch petals. “You’re Martha,” he said. Not a guess.

“I never told you my name.”

“You keep your garden in the old school’s boiler room. Everyone knows.”

Owen raised a brow. “Everyone?”

“Everyone,” the boy said. “There’s a conduit in the plinth—taps the city’s light bus. We can make the Cabinet Secretary wake the ground instead of the buildings.”

“That’ll bring the vans,” Owen said.

“They’re coming anyway. This way we choose why.”

We ran cable along gullies and gutters and up through the statue’s spine. We tucked blooms into hidden bowls—a hollow in the plinth, a drain. I left El under the stone woman’s palm.

Tom stripped insulation from the main feed and pressed bare copper into El’s soil. “The grid looks for resistance,” he said. “We’re giving it a heartbeat.”

“I thought you’d keep her safe,” the boy said.

“This is safe,” I said. “She liked an audience.”

At dawn the Cabinet Secretary climbed onto the stage. The crowd had been told to attend. Drones hovered.

She smiled like a dentist.

She pressed the button.

Green light bled from slabs, curled round ankles. A bus shelter held a father’s hands picking fish bones. Library steps carried turned pages. The river wall remembered sticky fingers. My street held El—trainers squeaking, mouth mid-song, laughing in the wrong place during films.

People stopped pretending. The Cabinet Secretary’s smile held until she turned to her aide. I saw her say,

“Cut it.”

The square dimmed.

It had been enough. One shout went up. Then another. Not a chant—messier. Names spoken out in daylight.
Vans rolled. The first line of officers held formation. The second wavered. The boy stood at the statue’s base, absorber humming. He looked at me and nodded once.

I didn’t run. I did what I’m good at: eased El from the hollow and lifted her high.

“Eleanor,” I said into a square full of cameras. The sound changed. Not silence—attention. “Thirteen. Called foxes handsome. Wanted neon laces. Favourite song was an old one about thunder.”
Someone beside me said another name. Then another. Shields lowered. You can’t meet that with a wall and keep your hands steady.

They arrested us anyway. The law is blunt when it’s embarrassed.

Two days. Lights on, time untied. On the third morning they released us. Charge sheet: unauthorised use of city power; public disorder; emotional incitement. They’d tried to add ‘grief without licence’ but the paperwork hadn’t cleared.

Chalk on the kerb: If walls won’t listen, make the floor sing.

Back at the allotment the glass stood. The beds had been turned over, neat as a lesson. “They took the lamps,” Edith said. “Left the tomatoes.”

“Yield report will be thrilled,” I said. “Ninety per cent lies, ten per cent salad.”
Hannah touched my arm. “They can’t unlearn.”

At home a glow lived under my ring finger—trapped light like a splinter. It brightened. The city carries bruises.

I don’t put flowers on windowsills. Not now the walls are learning manners. I plant verges and field edges and places no one checks. The Council sent a glossy pamphlet on civic duty. I mulched a bed with it.

When the adverts go soft and lifts stop chirping, the pavements breathe. People pause in doorways. Names pass mouth to mouth. The city isn’t grieving—it’s remembering out loud.

Some nights the square flickers. I like to think the statue’s shorting her wires, tired of pretending the model city in her palm weighs nothing.

El’s flower seeded. They do that, if you let them. At the allotment we pretended not to notice, then harvested like thieves. I sleep with earth under my nails and a tick of light under my skin. It doesn’t keep me awake. A pulse—the old kind.

When the Cabinet Secretary speaks now, her voice is the same. But a line runs along the bottom of the screen they can’t scrub fast enough. Not a slogan. A list of names rolling like credits with no last frame.
They still call it illegal.

I call it gardening.