The Weight of Light

The first time Jora saw the sun, she was twelve years old, and it was already dying.

Her mother had dragged her to the Surface, violating every law of the Under-City, their home buried deep beneath the frozen crust of a world that had forgotten warmth. The air above ground bit Jora’s lungs like shattered glass, and the sky hung low and bruised, a sickly indigo smeared with ash. But there, on the horizon—a sliver of molten gold, bleeding through the clouds.

“That’s light,” her mother whispered, her voice cracking. She gripped Jora’s shoulders, her gloves worn thin at the fingertips. “Real light. Not the glowworms. Not the biolamps. Remember it.”

Jora didn’t understand. Light was the dim blue haze of the Under-City’s fungal farms. Light was the flicker of a ration-stove. But this… this was alive. It hurt. She squinted, tears freezing on her cheeks. “Why’s it angry?”

Her mother didn’t answer. Three days later, the Patrolmen came for her.

Ten years later, Jora became what the Under-City feared most: a Glow Thief.

She crept through the abandoned transit tunnels, her boots crunching over ice and the brittle bones of those who’d tried this before her. The air here was thinner, poisoned by surface toxins that seeped through cracks in the planet’s skeletal remains. Her mask’s filter wheezed, its charge dwindling.

“You’re insane,” her brother Kael had hissed the night she left, blocking the door of their pod. His eyes, the same storm-gray as their mother’s, flicked to the stolen Patrol gear in her hands. “They’ll execute you.”

Jora adjusted her thermal scarf. “They execute us anyway. Slow or fast—what’s the difference?”

The truth was in the ration bars: half-portions now, laced with sedatives to dull the riots. In the coughs rattling through the ventilation shafts—Blacklung, eating the Under-City alive. In Kael’s hands, trembling as he repaired biolamps for Patrol officers who’d never know his name.

She was doing this for him. For the ghost of her mother. For the memory of that dying sun.

The tunnel narrowed. Jora’s gloved fingers brushed the wall, dislodging a shard of ice. It shattered like a sob.

Then she saw it.

A crack in the ceiling, no wider than her thumb. Through it spilled a thread of gold.

Sunlight.

She scrambled up the rubble, ignoring the tear in her glove, the blood smearing the ice. Pressing her eye to the crack, she gasped.

The sky was a feverish crimson now, the sun swollen and furious, its edges blurred by heat haze. But beneath it, sprawled like a corpse, lay a structure the Patrol had never mentioned: a glass dome, its surface webbed with fractures. Inside, something glowed.

A garden.

Jora returned to the Under-City with a petal in her pocket.

It was translucent, veined with bioluminescent blue, and warm as a heartbeat. She’d found it wedged in the dome’s broken seal, alongside a skeleton in a rotted Patrol uniform. The garden inside was dead—except for one plant, its roots clawing through the corpse’s ribcage, crowned by a single flower.

“It’s a solaris,” breathed Old Tam, the Under-City’s last botanist. His shop was a coffin of rusted shelves, stacked with jars of pickled algae and mushroom spores. “Thought they went extinct after the Collapse.”

Jora hovered her palm over the petal. “Why’s it warm?”

“They were hybrids. Part plant, part… something else.” Tam adjusted his cracked goggles. “Fed on sunlight. The Patrol used them to purify air, back when the domes still stood. But without light—” He gestured to the petal. “This one’s starving.”

She closed her fist around it. The warmth seeped into her calluses. “What if it had more?”

Tam laughed, a wet, rattling sound. “Kid, the sun’s on life support. Patrol’s hoarding whatever’s left in their Sky Vaults. You’d have better luck stealing the President’s pulse-rifle.”

Jora left without paying him.

That night, she sketched the dome’s coordinates on Kael’s sleep-mat. He found her soldering a stolen energy cell to her mask’s filter.

“You’re really going back,” he said flatly.

She didn’t look up. “The solaris needs light. There’s a Vault three klicks west of the dome.”

“So you’ll waltz into a Patrol base? With what army?”

“The one they don’t see coming.” She tossed him the petal. It pulsed faintly in his palm. “Keep it alive.”

The Vault was a obsidian spire, its apex piercing the sun’s underbelly. Jora crouched in the shadow of a collapsed drone tower, watching Patrolmen haul crates of glow-orbs—crystallized sunlight, smuggled from the dying star.

Her plan was simple: sneak in, overload the orb-chamber, and run like hell while the explosion distracted them. She’d done riskier things for half a ration bar.

She didn’t account for the child.

A girl, no older than six, perched on a crate near the Vault’s service entrance. Her Patrol uniform was tailored miniature, her boots polished. But her eyes—wide, unblinking—were the same storm-gray as Kael’s.

As their mother’s.

Jora froze. The girl tilted her head.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she whispered.

Jora’s knife trembled. She’d killed Patrolmen. Never a child.

“Go inside,” Jora hissed. “Now.”

The girl stood, clutching a doll with a cracked ceramic face. “You’re here for the light, aren’t you? Papa says thieves want to put the sun out.”

“Your papa’s wrong. The sun’s dying because he’s hoarding its light.”

The girl considered this. Then she reached into her doll’s chest, extracting a glow-orb the size of a plum. “Here.”

Jora recoiled. “What?”

“You’re skinny. Like the people in Papa’s videos. They’re always hungry.” She pressed the orb into Jora’s hand. It burned, sweet and vicious. “Don’t tell.”

Footsteps echoed. The girl scampered off.

Jora ran, the orb searing her palm through the glove.

The solaris bloomed when Jora fed it the orb.

Its stem thickened, snaking around Kael’s wrists as he stabilized it. The flower unfolded—a galaxy of bioluminescent petals, casting their pod in sapphire shadows. For the first time in decades, the air tasted clean.

“It’s working,” Kael whispered.

Jora traced the solaris’s veins. “We need more orbs.”

“We?” He grabbed her arm. “You nearly got caught! That girl—”

“Saved me.”

“And if she tells her Patrol daddy? They’ll gas the whole sector!”

The solaris shuddered. A petal detached, disintegrating before it hit the floor.

Kael’s grip tightened. “It’s eating itself. One orb wasn’t enough.”

Jora pocketed her knife. “Then I’ll get more.”

The girl waited at the service entrance each time.

Her name was Lira, and her doll was named “Captain Vex,” and her papa was the Vault Director. She gave Jora three more orbs, smuggled in Captain Vex’s hollow head.

“Why?” Jora asked on the fourth visit.

Lira kicked her boots against the crate. “You smell like the garden.”

“What garden?”

“The one in my dreams. Green and loud. Mama says it’s not real.” She plucked a glow-orb from her doll. “But this is real.”

Jora hesitated. “Come with me.”

Lira blinked. “Where?”

“To see the solaris. It’s… it’s like your dream.”

The girl’s smile lit the wasteland.

They never reached the Under-City.

The Patrol intercepted them at the dome. Jora shoved Lira behind the solaris, its petals lashing like blades. The Director’s snarl echoed through his helmet.

“Give her back, Glow Rat.”

Lira screamed. “Papa, stop! She’s good!”

The solaris lunged, roots spearing a Patrolman’s chest. Jora grabbed Lira, sprinting for the tunnel. A pulse-blast seared her calf. She fell, shielding the girl with her body.

The Director loomed overhead, his rifle aimed. “You stole my light. My daughter.”

Jora spat blood. “You stole the sun.”

Lira wriggled free, clutching Captain Vex. “I gave it! To fix the garden!”

The Director froze. “What?”

Jora laughed. “Your Vault’s a tomb. The real light’s here.” She nodded to the solaris, now coiled around the dome’s supports. “And she’s hungry.”

The Director fired.

Lira leapt in front of the blast.

Epilogue

The solaris devoured the Vault first, then the Patrol towers, then the obsidian spires. Its roots split the earth, birthing new domes, new gardens. The sun, freed from its parasites, cooled to a gentle amber.

Jora tends the largest dome now, her leg brace clicking against the soil. Kael teaches the Under-City children how to prune solaris vines. Some days, a storm-eyed girl visits, her laugh echoing through the leaves.

“Just the wind,” Kael insists.

But Jora knows better. She places a glow-orb at the base of the solaris each dawn, its light melting the frost.

Thank you, she whispers.

Somewhere, a doll with a cracked face smiles.