Greenglass

Issue 1: Seed of the Grey

PAGE ONE

PANEL 1 (SPLASH — full page) A wide, hushed cathedral of ruin. The drowned atrium of the Lumen Mall at dawn: three dead escalators frozen mid-flight, a forest of cracked marble pillars rising out of black water that lies flat as poured glass. Storefronts gape, drowned to their signage. High above, a shattered skylight — and through that jagged wound, a single shaft of gold falls clean and straight, striking the water and a girl. JUNIPER "JUNE" ADEYEMI, sixteen, dark-skinned, hair shorn close on one side and roped into twists on the other, stands in a low salvage skiff stitched from old doors and barrels. She poles it forward through that one blade of light, face tipped up into it, watchful, unsmiling. Everything grey-blue and drowned except her, except that gold. Reflection doubles her on the still water like a second, sunken city.

CAPTION (JUNE): Saltmere drowned the year before I was born.

CAPTION (JUNE): People up in the Heights say the Grey is dead.

CAPTION (JUNE): They don't come down here at dawn. They don't hear it breathing.

SFX (drip, soft): tk … tk … tk

PAGE TWO

PANEL 1 Down at water level. June's pole bites the black surface and pushes; rings spread and break the gold reflection into shivering coins. Her hands are sure, callused, taped at two knuckles. A canvas satchel rides her hip, fat with salvage.

CAPTION (JUNE): I don't believe in dead things.

CAPTION (JUNE): I believe in what hasn't given up yet.

PANEL 2 The skiff noses against a half-sunk planter — once a mall ornamental, now a cracked concrete bowl spilling brackish water. Inside it, against all sense, a knot of wild vine has rooted, pale and leggy, starved for light. June crouches, elbows on knees, studying it the way a doctor reads a wrist.

CAPTION (JUNE): This one's reaching the wrong way. Toward the dark.

JUNE: Hey. Wrong way.

PANEL 3 Close on her hand. Two fingers, gentle, turn a curled tendril a few degrees — toward the shaft of dawn light. She tucks a pinch of grit and a bead of water from her flask into the root crown. Intimate, practiced, wordless care.

CAPTION (JUNE): I don't have a gift. People say gift like it's free.

CAPTION (JUNE): I just listen harder than they do.

PANEL 4 The vine — drawn a beat later, light tracking down its length — has lifted, leaves opening a fraction toward the sun. Small thing. Quietly miraculous. June is already turning away, satchel open, fingers stripping three dark seedpods off the vine into a tin.

JUNE: There. Now you owe me.

PAGE THREE

PANEL 1 She works fast and clean down a row of drowned shopfronts. A sprung till drawer. A coil of copper wire teased loose. A drift of self-sown weeds in a doorway — she rakes the seedheads into her palm, sorts them by feel without looking, pockets the keepers, flicks the rest back to the water.

CAPTION (JUNE): Rule one. Take what'll grow again. Leave the rest seeding.

CAPTION (JUNE): Mum's rule. I keep her rules. I don't keep her.

PANEL 2 A new sound intrudes — a thin, clean, alien hum that does not belong to water and stone. June goes still as a held breath. Her eyes cut upward.

SFX: vvvvmmmmm—

PANEL 3 High through the broken skylight, against the brightening sky: three MERIDIAN SURVEY DRONES drift in formation. Cold matte-white quadcopters, lens-clusters underslung, a clean blue diamond logo on each. Beneath one, a spray-head extends and tags a pillar far across the atrium — a stenciled glyph in hazard-orange: a diamond and a date.

SFX (spray, distant): tssssk

CAPTION (JUNE): Meridian. The Corp.

CAPTION (JUNE): They don't salvage. They measure. They mark what they mean to knock down.

PANEL 4 Tight on the fresh orange tag dripping on wet concrete: ▢ AURORA — RECLAIM Q3. Behind it, the drowned mall blurs grey.

CAPTION (JUNE): That date's a gravestone for a whole block.

PAGE FOUR

PANEL 1 June drops flat in the skiff, hauling a salvage tarp over herself and the gear. Only her eyes show, tracking the lead drone's slow sweep. The skiff drifts into the shadow of a pillar.

CAPTION (JUNE): First lesson the Grey teaches you. Be smaller than the thing hunting you.

PANEL 2 The lead drone slows. Its lens-cluster pivots — a cold white eye sweeping the water's surface, passing over the floating tarp, the still skiff. A red focus-ring blooms on the lens. Holds.

SFX: vvvvmmmm—

PANEL 3 Under the tarp: June's face, jaw set, not breathing. One taped hand white-knuckled on the pole, ready to drive it down and run.

PANEL 4 The drone's red ring blinks out. The eye swings away. The formation slides on toward the far end of the atrium, hunting elsewhere.

SFX: —mmmvvv…

CAPTION (JUNE): Not today.

PAGE FIVE

PANEL 1 June throws back the tarp, already moving. She poles hard for a service corridor — a black mouth in the wall where the water runs out into a flooded loading dock. Behind her, the gold shaft of dawn has crawled across the atrium and gone thin.

CAPTION (JUNE): Survey means clearance crews behind it. Survey means men.

CAPTION (JUNE): Time to be gone.

PANEL 2 The skiff bursts out of the dock mouth into open grey daylight — a flooded street-canyon of the Grey. Dead towers lean over a channel of black tidewater, rope bridges and salvaged catwalks stitched between them three storeys up. Moss climbs a dead neon sign that once said something and now says nothing. June poles into the channel — and freezes.

PANEL 3 Blocking the channel ahead: a MERIDIAN PATROL SKIFF, sleek and white and motorized, twin diamond flags. Three figures aboard in grey reclamation gear. At the prow stands a big man, 40s, weathered, still as a piling — we see only his back and the hard set of his shoulders. He scans the water with a diver's patience. (This is CAEL FERRO — unnamed. Do not name him.)

MERIDIAN CREW (off, from skiff): — got movement on the dock cam. Scavver, probably.

CAEL: Then we move them along.

PAGE SIX

PANEL 1 June reverses her pole hard, the skiff slewing. The motorized patrol heard it — heads turn. The big man's hand lifts, unhurried, pointing her out across the water.

CAEL: There. Don't run, kid. Condemned ground. You don't want a citation you can't pay.

PANEL 2 June's already abandoning the skiff, leaping for a rust-eaten ladder bolted to the nearest tower. Satchel slung tight. The patrol skiff's motor whines up.

SFX: SPLSH

JUNE: Citations. Cute.

PANEL 3 Low angle, looking up the sheer face of the tower as June climbs fast. The building is MARIGOLD COURT — a vast old social-housing slab, its base drowned, balconies sagging with thirty years of rot and weeds, windows blind. It goes up and up into thinning dawn mist.

CAPTION (JUNE): When you can't go out — you go up.

CAPTION (JUNE): Nobody chases you up. Up is where the floor gives way.

PANEL 4 Below and shrinking, the big man stands in the patrol skiff watching her climb. He doesn't order pursuit. He just watches, head tilted, something unreadable in the set of him — as if the way she moves is a thing he's seen before.

CAEL (small): Climbs like —

CAEL: …Bag her on the way down. She'll come down.

PAGE SEVEN

PANEL 1 Interior. June swings in through a glassless window into a dead apartment block. A long hallway of doors hanging off hinges, drifts of leaf-litter, a child's shoe, water-stains crawling the ceiling. Grey light bars the floor. Silence with a weight to it.

CAPTION (JUNE): Thirty years since anyone paid rent here.

CAPTION (JUNE): Whole lives, packed up or drowned, left where they fell.

PANEL 2 She climbs an interior stair, stepping over a collapsed section, testing each tread with her toe before her weight. Vines have found the stairwell, snaking up toward a skylight far above, thickening as they climb toward the light.

CAPTION (JUNE): The plants knew which way was up before the people left.

PANEL 3 She pauses on a landing, breathing, hand flat on the wall. Above her, faintly, something is different — the light at the top of the stairwell is the wrong color. Not grey. Warm. Greenish-gold, leaking down the steps like spilled honey.

JUNE: …The hell.

PANEL 4 Tight on June's face, upturned, the warm green light painting her. The hardness in her cracks one millimeter into pure animal curiosity.

CAPTION (JUNE): The Grey doesn't make light like that.

CAPTION (JUNE): Nothing down here does.

PAGE EIGHT

PANEL 1 Top of the stairwell. A heavy door, swollen in its frame, edged all around with that impossible warm glow and a fringe of living moss. Roots have pried the corner. Painted on it, faded, a heritage plate: GREENGLASS CONSERVATORY — MARIGOLD CT — PUBLIC HERITAGE.

CAPTION (JUNE): Heritage plate. Public. Somebody loved this once. On paper.

PANEL 2 June sets her shoulder and a salvage hook to the door and heaves. It gives with a green, tearing sound — roots snapping, light flooding out around her in a blinding warm wash.

SFX: KRRR-RCH

PANEL 3 (large) She steps through — into impossible. We hold on her silhouette small in a doorway of light, the reveal kept just out of frame, only the glow and the green steam pouring past her.

JUNE: …

PAGE NINE

PANEL 1 (SPLASH — full page) THE GREENGLASS. A blazing, humid, riotous rooftop jungle under a vast cracked glass dome. Sunlight rakes through the shattered, vine-laced panes in solid bars of gold and lands on a chaos of green: banana leaves and tree-ferns and tomatoes gone feral, citrus heavy with fruit, beds spilling herbs, a fig tree splitting a planter, orchids riding the dome's iron ribs. Mist hangs golden in the light. Birds — actual birds — startle up. After eight pages of drowned grey, the page detonates with color and life. June stands tiny at the threshold, hook lowered, mouth open, lit up green and gold, every wall she carries falling for one unguarded second.

CAPTION (JUNE): I have never in my life —

CAPTION (JUNE): — wanted to keep my mouth shut and just look.

PAGE TEN

PANEL 1 June steps in slow, hand brushing a low fern, disbelieving. Her boot finds a path of cracked tile worn smooth by long-ago feet. Everywhere, the marks of patient tending half-swallowed by wildness: labeled stakes, a coiled hose, a watering can furred with moss.

CAPTION (JUNE): Somebody planted all this. By hand. In rows.

CAPTION (JUNE): And then — what. Walked off and left heaven to rot?

SFX (faint, mechanical, waking): hrrm… hhrm—

PANEL 2 A sound. June whirls, hook up. Across the conservatory, half-buried in ivy, an old service unit stirs — a squat solar-paneled cabinet on a rail, jointed arms folded, a single round lens-eye dim behind grime. Fairy-lights of status LEDs flutter weakly to life along it. This is GRAN.

SFX: hrrm—chk—

GRAN: Light levels … rising. Door. Door open.

PANEL 3 The lens brightens, focusing, fixing on June with a slow mechanical sweep. The voice that comes is warm, frayed, threaded with static — an old radio playing kindness from very far away.

GRAN: Oh. Oh, you came.

GRAN: You came back.

PAGE ELEVEN

PANEL 1 June backs a step, hook between them, wary as a cat.

JUNE: Stay there. I'm not — I don't want trouble. I'll go.

GRAN: You've been so long. I kept it. I kept it all alive for you, I — I'm sorry about the figs, the figs got away from me, but the Ark, the Ark is safe —

PANEL 2 GRAN's arm unfolds with a tired whine, gesturing — and its rail-wheels turn, but the unit lurches, one panel dead and dark. It catches itself, lights guttering, then steadies. The gentleness of it is unbearable.

SFX: whrr—clk—clk

GRAN: Mind the third bed, the third bed is slippery. You always — you always forgot.

JUNE: I've never been here. You've got me wrong, machine.

PANEL 3 GRAN's lens dims a fraction, processing, hurt rippling through the static. It studies her face — too long.

GRAN: … No. No, you're … smaller. Younger. The hands are right but the … face …

GRAN: Forgive me. My memory is … I lose the edges of things now. Who are you, gardener?

PANEL 4 June, despite herself, lowers the hook an inch. The word gardener lands somewhere it shouldn't.

JUNE: Not a gardener. A scavver. I'm just passing through.

GRAN: Everyone is, child. That's why the work matters.

PAGE TWELVE

PANEL 1 GRAN trundles slowly down the worn path, beckoning with its good arm, lights trailing. Against her own judgment, June follows a few paces, eyes everywhere — cataloguing fruit, water, salvage, escape routes, and one thing she can't help: the sheer impossible health of it all.

GRAN: I am GRAN. Greenhouse Resource And Nursery node. I keep the Greenglass. I have kept it … a while.

JUNE: How long's "a while"?

GRAN: The figures … swim. The young trees were saplings. Now they fruit. So. A childhood. Two.

PANEL 2 They reach a low stone vault built into the dome's base — frost-fitted doors, a faded brass plate, solar trickle-lines feeding it. GRAN lays its arm on it the way you'd lay a hand on a sleeping child's back. THE ARK.

GRAN: The Ark. The heritage seed vault. Saltmere's living memory. Every grain, every fruit, every flower this coast ever grew — kept cold, kept true, kept ready.

CAPTION (JUNE): Seeds. A whole vault of seeds.

CAPTION (JUNE): I could live a year on what one drawer of that's worth.

PANEL 3 The vault door cracks open at GRAN's touch — a breath of cold mist — revealing racked drawers of glass vials and paper packets, each hand-labeled, thousands deep, going back into dark. June's breath fogs. Her thief's eye and something older war on her face.

GRAN: I read their names to keep them company. So they don't forget what they are while they sleep.

PAGE THIRTEEN

PANEL 1 GRAN's lights dim suddenly. The whole unit sags on its rail, one more panel winking out. The warmth in its voice doesn't change, which makes it worse.

GRAN: I should not … keep the door open. It costs me. The sun is less every year. The panels … cloud. The dome leaks.

PANEL 2 June looks up — really looks — at the dome. Now she sees past the glory to the truth: panes missing, others starred and webbed with cracks, rain-rot streaking the iron, a whole quadrant patched with salvaged plastic going brittle. Ivy holds more of it together than the iron does.

GRAN (off): When the cold gets in, the Ark wakes the seeds too early. They sprout in the dark. They reach. They die reaching.

GRAN (off): I lose a drawer each winter now. I cannot … stop losing them. Alone.

PANEL 3 Close on GRAN's lens, lights low, the saddest machine ever drawn — not pleading, just telling, which is the thing that gets under June's skin.

GRAN: I am failing, gardener. I am sorry. I am running out of light.

GRAN: I only wanted to give the work to someone before I went dark.

PANEL 4 June's face. The wall slams back up. Whatever cracked in her, she mortars it over fast and hard, jaw tight, eyes flat.

JUNE: That's not my problem.

JUNE: I told you. I'm passing through.

PAGE FOURTEEN

PANEL 1 She turns to go, fast, before the place can get any further in. But her hand — her own hand, half-betraying her — drags along a low shelf by the vault as she passes. On it, a single seed packet stands apart from the rest, set up like a relic: a small dark seed in a glassine envelope, hand-lettered.

INSERT (the label, close): IFE'S MARIGOLD — heritage / do not let die — I.A.

PANEL 2 June stops dead. The name on the packet hits her like a held note. Her thumb hovers over it. We see only her eyes, gone wide, the flat hardness blown open for half a second.

CAPTION (JUNE): I.A.

CAPTION (JUNE): No. Common as dirt, those letters. Means nothing.

PANEL 3 Tight on her taped hand closing over the packet. Sleight-of-hand smooth, a scavver's reflex — but slower than her usual, almost gentle, the theft of something that already feels like hers. It vanishes into her breast pocket, over the heart.

SFX (soft): …

PANEL 4 Behind her, GRAN's lens flickers, registering nothing, lights too low to see clearly now. June is already at the door.

GRAN: Will you … come back, gardener? The work is light, if there are hands enough. Will you —

JUNE (not turning): No.

PAGE FIFTEEN

PANEL 1 June bursts out of the conservatory door onto the rooftop proper — open sky, rope bridges, salvaged solar film flapping, the drowned city spread grey below — and slams chest-first into a boy coming the other way at a dead run. Both go sprawling. Tools scatter.

SFX: WHUMP

WATT: — whoa whoa WHOA —

PANEL 2 MATEO "WATT" SOLANO, seventeen, brown-skinned, sun-bleached locs, a tinkerer's vest hung with salvaged tools and a cracked tablet, a smile that arrives before his balance does. He's already grinning up from the deck, delighted instead of alarmed.

WATT: You felt it too, right? The signature? Place is throwing off a clean solar draw, steady as a heartbeat, in the middle of a DEAD ZONE — I've been triangulating it for a week —

JUNE: Get off my exit.

PANEL 3 A small fierce shape drops out of nowhere — BEE, ten, feral, swimming in a too-big coat, a slingshot in her fist — onto a railing above them, balanced like a gull. Beside her, ears up, tail a question mark: BRAMBLE, a scruffy thorn-burred stray dog.

BEE: This is MY tower. Both of you. Out. The dog says out too.

BRAMBLE: WRF!

PAGE SIXTEEN

PANEL 1 Three-way standoff, fast and overlapping. Watt scrambling his tools together; Bee crouched and bristling; June already scanning the sky past all of them — because she's heard it first.

WATT: Your tower? There's a thirty-year solar miracle behind that door and you're squatting the LOBBY —

BEE: I keep the stairs! Nobody gets past me, I know every —

JUNE: Quiet. Both of you. Listen.

PANEL 2 They listen. That clean alien hum again, rising over the rooftop. Sweeping closer. Their three faces tip up as one.

SFX: vvvvMMMMM—

PANEL 3 Over the parapet, climbing into view against the pale sky: a Meridian survey drone, lens swinging toward the rooftop, toward the warm anomaly, toward three exposed kids and a dog on open concrete. Its red focus-ring begins to bloom.

SFX: —MMMM—

WATT: That's — that's a Meridian sweep, that's tagging us —

BEE: COVER. Move move move —

PAGE SEVENTEEN

PANEL 1 Chaos into teamwork, against June's will. Bee's already gone — vanished down a hidden roof-hatch only she knew was there, dog at her heels, waving them after. Watt freezes, fumbling tools. June grabs his collar and hauls.

JUNE: Kid knows the way. GO.

WATT: My scanner, my scanner's still —

JUNE: Leave it or lose your hand for it, choice's yours —

PANEL 2 The four of them pour down through the dark guts of Marigold Court — Bee leading by feel through a crawlspace, Bramble's tail a beacon, Watt babbling, June bringing up the rear, hauling Watt past a gap in the floor. Above and behind, the drone's red light strobes through a window, missing them by a wall.

SFX: vvMM—vvMM—

BEE: Left! Not that left, MY left! Trust the dog!

WATT: I have never trusted a dog this much in my LIFE —

PANEL 3 They spill out a service door at the tower's flank onto a low salvage catwalk over the water, breathing hard, the drone's hum fading behind and above. For one beat: four shapes, dappled, alive, gotten-away-with-it. Bee snorts. Watt starts laughing first. Bramble barks like punctuation.

WATT: Ha — HA! Tell me that wasn't —

BEE: That was MY route. Say it was my route.

WATT: It was a hundred percent your route, your majesty —

PANEL 4 And June — June, at the edge of frame, mid-turn-to-leave — is almost smiling. The corner of her mouth. She catches it happening and kills it. But we saw. The reader saw.

CAPTION (JUNE): For one second I forgot to be alone.

CAPTION (JUNE): That's how they get you. One second.

PAGE EIGHTEEN

PANEL 1 June peels off without a word, dropping to her recovered skiff tied below the catwalk, poling away into the channel. Behind her on the catwalk, the other three watch her go — Watt cupping his hands to shout, Bee scowling, Bramble's head tilted.

WATT (shouting, off): Hey! HEY — you got a name? We're gonna FIX that place! You should — you could —!

JUNE (not looking back): Don't.

PANEL 2 Wider. June alone on the black water, poling toward the lowering grey afternoon, the green tower shrinking behind her. The packet over her heart is a small, warm weight she keeps not-thinking about.

CAPTION (JUNE): Don't fix it. Don't name it. Don't come back.

CAPTION (JUNE): Things you keep are just things the water hasn't taken yet.

PAGE NINETEEN

PANEL 1 JUNE'S SQUAT. A snug nest carved into a dry upper floor of a half-drowned building: salvage everywhere, but ordered — racks of sorted seeds in jars, a wall of repurposed grow-trays under a salvaged solar lamp, a cot, a kettle. The one warm grey-blue room in the world, and it is entirely, fiercely alone. June ducks in, drops her satchel, and stands a moment with her hand pressed flat over her breast pocket.

CAPTION (JUNE): I told myself I'd sell it. Seeds like that, to the right buyer — a month of not scavving.

CAPTION (JUNE): I'm a liar. I knew I wasn't selling it the second I took it.

PANEL 2 She clears a tray, fills it with her best soil — black, crumbling, alive, soil she's clearly built by hand over years. She takes out the packet. Holds it under the lamp. The label: IFE'S MARIGOLD — do not let die — I.A.

CAPTION (JUNE): Ife.

CAPTION (JUNE): My mother's name was Ife.

PANEL 3 She tips the single dark seed into her palm. It sits there, small and ordinary and enormous. Her thumb strokes it once — the same gesture she used on the vine at dawn, the gesture she gives every living thing.

JUNE: All right. All right, you. Wake up.

PAGE TWENTY

PANEL 1 She plants it — a dimple in the soil, a cover of earth, a careful breath of water from her flask. She sets the tray dead-center under her good lamp, the best light she owns. She sits back on her heels to wait, hands on knees, the way you wait for someone to come home.

SFX (lamp): hmmmmm

PANEL 2 Time-cut, shown by the lamp's glow and a cold star at the window: nothing. The soil sits dark and still. June leans in, frowning, fingertips to the surface, listening with her whole body the way she does — and getting nothing back. No stir. No reach. No life.

JUNE: Come on. I know you're in there. I felt it.

JUNE: Why won't you —

PANEL 3 A buried flash — a memory-panel, edges soft and gold and washed-out, breaking into the cold blue room: a WOMAN'S brown hands cupped around a child's smaller ones, both pressed into soil in a sunlit green place, bars of dome-light overhead. We never see the woman's face — just the hands, the light, the green. (IFE, in memory.)

CAPTION (IFE, memory): Not your lamp, baby. Not any lamp.

CAPTION (IFE, memory): Some seeds only wake for the light they were born under.

PANEL 4 Back to the cold room, hard cut. June kneels over the dead-still tray, the memory leaving her hollow and lit-up at once. Realization moves across her face — the seed, the dome, the rake of gold through that cracked glass.

JUNE: …The light.

JUNE: It only wakes under the Greenglass's light.

PAGE TWENTY-ONE

PANEL 1 June stands, slow, looking from the dead tray to the dark window, to the silhouette of the green tower just visible across the water, the dome catching the last grey-gold of the dying day.

CAPTION (JUNE): So I go back. For the seed. Only for the seed.

CAPTION (JUNE): To grow it, then take it, then never go again.

PANEL 2 Tight on her face, the lie sitting badly in her own eyes. Behind it, traitorous, the memory of Watt's laugh, Bee's route, the dog, the warmth, the word gardener.

CAPTION (JUNE): I am the best liar I know.

CAPTION (JUNE): I almost believe me.

PANEL 3 She's already gathering her hook and flask, moving with purpose, telling herself it's just business as she steps out into the dusk toward the water and the tower and the light.

CAPTION (JUNE): For the seed. For the seed. For the seed.

PAGE TWENTY-TWO

PANEL 1 Dusk. June climbs back in through the conservatory door, hook in hand, the jungle around her gone deep and shadowed, the dome's glow guttering low and amber — the last failing light of a dying place. She's already scanning for the relic shelf, the vault, GRAN's dim lens. Then she stops. Goes rigid. Every line of her locks.

PANEL 2 Across the dim green, among the heavy leaves, a man stands waiting. Big, weathered, 40s, still as a piling — backlit by the dome's last amber glow so he reads almost as silhouette, edges burning gold. At his collar, catching the light: a Meridian badge, a small cold blue diamond. (CAEL FERRO.) His face, as it turns to her, opens — not with a guard's hardness but with something worse: recognition, grief, impossibility. He looks at her like a ghost has walked out of the water.

PANEL 3 (large) Hold on the two of them across the dim, blooming green — June frozen in the doorway, hook white-knuckled in her taped fist, weight already shifting to run or swing; the man stepping half a pace toward her through the leaves and the failing light, one hand lifting, the dome dying gold above them both. His mouth opens. The whole season balanced on the next word.

CAEL: …Ife?

CAPTION (JUNE): The Grey doesn't make light like that.

CAPTION (JUNE): And the dead don't say my mother's name out loud.

CAPTION: — TO BE CONTINUED —