Chapter 7: Hero of the Thirty-First Floor

Declan had believed Britt's lie in one breath, and he never asked about me again.

By the eighteenth day of the rain, the whole thirty-first floor was hungry.

I watched it all from my field on the hallway camera, with a bowl of warm rice porridge in my lap.

My little farm was already sprouting.

The first green shoots of lettuce stood taller than my knees.

Out in the hall, there were twenty people sitting against the walls in the dim emergency light.

Nobody had spoken for an hour.

Declan's mother stood in the middle of them with her arms crossed and her chin up.

Britt came out of their apartment carrying a single loaf of supermarket bread.

She had on a clean sweater, and she was smiling nervously.

"Everyone," she said. "I have something to show you. Please don't be scared."

She set the loaf on the floor, rested her hands over it and shut her eyes.

The bread grew.

It swelled past the size of her arms and then past the size of a coffee table.

It filled the middle of the hall, golden and soft, and the smell of it rolled over everyone.

Someone gasped.

A child began to cry with relief.

"It's a hundred times bigger," Britt said, and her voice cracked. "I can do this with anything. Please, take it. Take as much as you want."

Nobody moved for a second.

Then Declan's mother stepped forward and tore off the first piece.

She chewed it slowly, and her face changed as she worked out what Britt was worth.

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