Turns out ancient palace refuse is basically a treasure chest if you know what you’re looking for, and by lunchtime the next day, Mei comes back from her first scavenging run looking like she just robbed a bank.
“Nobody stopped you?” I ask, eyeing the bundle in her arms.
“Nobody looks at kitchen scraps twice,” she says, tipping the contents onto a cleared patch of ground.
“Or at me..
.”
Which, fair, and also a little sad, but I file that away for later, because right now I am busy sorting through a truly excellent haul.
Carrot tops, still with a stubborn inch of orange clinging to the green.
The root ends of scallions, pale and fibrous but very much alive.
Something that might be ginger, judging by the knobby shape and the smell when I break it open.
A few sprouted garlic cloves that someone decided were too far gone for cooking, which is exactly the state I want them in.
“This is incredible,” I say, already sorting into piles.
“This is basically a starter kit.”
“It’s garbage.”
“It’s a starter kit made of garbage, which is the best kind, because nobody’s going to fight us for it.” I hold up the carrot top like a trophy.
“Mei.
If you plant this, just the top part, in soil, with a little water, it grows a whole new plant.
Same with the scallions.
Same with the garlic.
We’re not starting from nothing here, we’re starting from what everyone else decided was nothing, which is a very different thing.”
She looks unconvinced but didn’t say anything negative, which at this point I’ve decided is basically her whole personality, and I love it for her.
We spend our morning pressing carrot tops into damp soil along the edge of the second bed, tucking scallion roots into neat rows, burying the sprouted garlic cloves root-down the way I remember doing back home in a life that increasingly feels like a fever dream I had once.the chicken, whom I have unofficially named Duchess because she behaves like she owns the deed to this garden, supervises from the trellis with the air of someone checking our work for competency.
“What about the amaranth,” Mei asks, nodding at the broad-leafed weed I flagged yesterday.
“Are we eating that today?”
“Today’s the day,” I confirm, standing up and brushing dirt off my knees for what feels like the hundredth time since I woke up in this body.
“Small batch first.
If neither of us breaks out in hives or starts hallucinating within a few hours, we scale up.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“It’s science, Mei.
Slightly improvised science, but still..it’s science.”
____
The kitchen (if you can call it that) is a soot-stained corner of the main room with a brazier that actually works once we clear the ash out and a single dented pot that’s seen better decades.
No stove.
No proper anything…
Just fire and metal and the stubborn will to make it function anyway, which honestly describes most of my old job too.
I chop the amaranth leaves finely, toss them into a small amount of boiling well water (boiled thoroughly, thank you, I have standards even in a crisis)and let them go soft and dark green.
It smells, cautiously, edible.
Not incredible, but edible, which after the last two days is basically a five-course meal.
I take the first bite myself, obviously, because if either of us is going to spend the afternoon regretting a decision, it’s going to be me and not the sixteen-year-old I’ve somehow acquired custody of.
“Well?” Mei asks, hovering.
I chew.
Swallow.
Wait a beat for my body to file a complaint.
“It’s fine,” I announce.
“Bitter, needs salt if we ever find any, but fine.
Congratulations, we have officially eaten something that grew here instead of something that got sent to us out of pity, which never happened anyway, so really we’ve eaten something that grew here instead of nothing, but let’s not focus on that part.”
Mei tries a small bite of her own, chews with the expression of someone bracing for death, and then blinks in surprise when death does not, in fact, arrive.
“It’s not terrible,” she admits.
“High praise.
I’ll take it.” I scrape the rest into two bowls, and we eat sitting on the edge of the ruined garden bed, watching the sun do something genuinely pretty to the crumbling wall, and for a second, just a second, this feels less like an exile and more like a picnic that got slightly out of hand.
______
The roof is next on my list, and the roof is, frankly, a… disaster.
There is no other word for it.
The east building has a hole in it large enough to see actual sky through, which is charming in a romantic sort of way until you remember that it’s getting colder every night and neither of us has a spare set of lungs to lose to pneumonia.
I climb up to look at the damage properly, which involves a rickety ladder Mei found in the shed and several moments where I question every choice that led me to this exact rooftop, in this exact century, with this exact lack of safety equipment.
The beams themselves aren’t rotten, which is the good news.
Whatever collapsed the section did it fast, probably a bad storm rather than years of slow decay, and that means the frame underneath is salvageable if we can patch the gap before winter really commits to the bit.
“We need thatch,” I call down to Mei.
“Or tile, but I’m guessing tile’s not exactly lying around for free.”
“There’s a reed bed near the old fish pond,” she offers.
“Past the second wall.
Nobody’s touched it in years.”
“Perfect.
Reeds it is then..”
We spend the rest of the afternoon hauling armfuls of overgrown reeds back from the pond, which is more of a swamp at this point but a swamp with exactly the resource I need, and I bundle them into rough thatch panels the way I remember doing on a shelter build years ago for a video that got exactly forty thousand views and, apparently, permanently lodged itself in my brain for exactly this moment.
Funny how that works.
You never know which skill’s going to save your life until it’s the only one you’ve got left.
By the time the light starts going gold and low, we’ve got one solid panel done and enough materials gathered for two more, and my hands are a mess of small cuts from reed edges, and I have never in either of my lives felt more satisfied with a day’s work.
“You’re smiling,” Mei says, looking at me like I’ve grown a second head.
“At the roof.
That has a hole in it.”
“I’m smiling at the roof that’s going to have a hole in it for maybe two more days instead of forever,” I correct.
“Perspective, Mei.
Everything’s about perspective.”
She’s quiet for a moment, twisting a loose reed between her fingers.
“Yesterday I thought I’d been assigned to serve someone who was going to waste away and die within the season,” she says finally.
“That’s what they told me..
when they sent me here.
Watch her fade.
Don’t get attached.”
“Well, that’s a horrible thing to tell a teenager, first of all.” I said.
“I believed it,” she says.
“I thought I’d be alone in this wing within a month.”
I set down the reed bundle I’m holding and look at her properly, this small stubborn girl who’s spent two days watching a woman she barely knows argue with a well and befriend a chicken and eat weeds out of pure spite toward the universe.
“Well, bad news,” I say, “you’re stuck with me indefinitely, because I don’t fade quietly, it’s not really in my skill set.
Good news, I hear the alternative to fading quietly is thriving loudly, and I’m significantly better at that one.”
Something in her face does the thing again, the small unguarded thing, like she’s letting herself believe it might actually be true.
“There’s an old cellar under the east building,” she says, almost shy about offering it, like she’s testing whether volunteering information is allowed now.
“I found the door yesterday but it was jammed.
Might be more supplies down there.
Might be nothing.”
I look at the setting sun, at the one thatch panel we’ve finished, at the garden bed with its neat new rows of scallion and garlic and carrot tops that are, impossibly, already just starting to perk back up.
“Tomorrow,” I decide.
“We’ve earned a good dinner and an early sleep first.
Cellars can wait one more night.
They’ve clearly been waiting a lot longer than that already.”
Mei almost laughs, actual and startled, like she forgot she still had one of those in her.
Somewhere in the dark, duchess, the weird chicken, makes a low, satisfied clucking sound, having apparently decided the day’s proceedings met her exacting standards, and honestly, that might be the best review I’ve gotten in either lifetime.