They each claimed a cart of living samples, stored in their little glass containers, afloat in life-sustaining fluid. Samantha peered into each one, searching for flowers. There was no point in pretending she wasn’t partial to them now, and no value in it either.
She saw a hint of blue and slid her fingers between the containers to pull up the right one. She grinned when she saw the little flowers—tiny, really, not even the size of her fingernails, and light sky blue. Or likely, she thought, considering what Hagen had told her, just a very specific shade of purple.
She carried the container to her lab station, flipped on the work light, and jiggled the mouse to wake up the computer screen. The plant was simple: waxy, thick leaves at the base, with a somewhat fragile center column, like a vine. The flowers branched off at the top, in clusters of blue and white. Each one had three petals that came to teardrop points and three sepals, blue and white spotted. At the bottom was a small labellum with furry edges, also blue, though darker than the petals and sepals that framed it. In the center of each flower was a dusting of yellow pollen.
It looked like an orchid, but she would have to verify that with the microscope. She opened the container and used a pair of long scissors to clip one of the flowers from its stem. This would be delicate work—orchid seeds were already tiny, and these orchids were the smallest she had ever seen, if indeed they were orchids. She picked up the delicate metal tools at her station that reminded her of the dentist’s office—the one that scraped between your teeth in particular.
The others were already talking about their discoveries, Averill bending over something that resembled a cherry blossom, Dan squinting at a vine with veiny leaves, and Josh poking at some variation of a protea that had not yet been logged. Samantha set about preparing a slide, then dragged the heavy microscope over and plugged it in.
She had seen enough seeds in Hagen’s greenhouse to identify an orchid seed’s telltale lack of endosperm, the starchy tissue in most seeds that provided nutrition after fertilization. An orchid likely didn’t have it, meaning most of their seeds would come to nothing, failing to find the right fungus to aid in their growth.
Samantha let out a little yelp.
“What?” Dan asked from across the room.
“It’s an orchid,” she said.
“Cool,” Josh said. “What kind?”
“No idea,” she said. She slid over to the computer and selected Orchidacae, logging all the plant’s details: height, number of petals, number of sepals, appearance of leaves and central column, color. The screen then presented her with a row of photographs, close-ups of flowers with relative sizes noted beneath.
“Huh,” she said.
“What?” Averill, seated at the next station, frowned at her.
“I’m not sure, but… I don’t think I have a match,” she said. “Second opinion?”
Averill abandoned her station and went through the same steps Samantha had: looking at the tissue sample on the microscope, measuring the plant with a ruler, tapping the container with the tip of her pencil as she counted petals and sepals, noting symmetry, labellum, pollen, column, country of origin (Brazil).
She, too, sat back from the computer screen at the end and frowned. By then, Dan and Josh had left their own samples and were staring at the container from either side, the work light casting odd shadows on their faces.
“It’s new,” Averill said finally, saying out loud what Samantha had been thinking but couldn’t dare say herself.
“It can’t be new,” she said. “That’s just. I mean.”
“Think about it. We had only discovered, like, ten percent of all plant species at the start of this project. And orchids are one of the most diverse groups, so…” Averill gestured at the container. “It’s new.”
Samantha sat down on an empty lab stool.
“It’s new,” she said.
For some reason, she felt heavier now.
That evening, when the others were at dinner, Samantha took the container from the laboratory and put it in an insulated bag, the kind they used to transport hot food. She put on her boots and her coat, her gloves and her scarf, her hat and her goggles. She zipped herself up and fastened all the straps and buttons and walked out into the snow.
It was dark, and her way was lit by floodlights casting wide circles of yellow onto the packed snow. The path to Hagen’s greenhouse was well trod now from her frequent visits, but she had still taken her snowshoes with her, just in case she needed to wade back. The wind whistled around her, but otherwise all she could hear was the scuffle of her own feet over the ice.
She hugged the container tight to her chest as she walked, breathing heavily, though the walk wasn’t taxing. There was a lump in her throat that she couldn’t explain. She pushed through the outer door of the greenhouse and set down the container, gingerly, before removing her outerwear and tossing it in a pile in the corner.
Hagen had heard her come in, evidently, because he was standing in the greenhouse when she carried the container in. He wore a lumpy gray sweater, and his salt-and-pepper hair was more rumpled than usual, its curls sticking up in the back.
“Hi,” she said. “I need you to verify something for me.”
“Okay,” he said, looking confused. She unzipped the insulated bag and took out the plant in its glass sleeve.
“I thought the identification had stopped, since we can’t transport anything new to the Ark,” he said.
“Officially, it has,” she said. “But you know us horticulturists—we love a good last hurrah.”
“It seems to me,” he said, “that you need some less boring hobbies.”
“Hilarious,” she said. “Have a look, would you?”
Hagen took the container from her and carried it back to his worktable, which was littered with plant cuttings. He had taken to making little bouquets and putting them all around his small cabin. She had seen them the day before when she used his bathroom and drank a small tumbler of whiskey in his living room as he talked to her about plants, plants, always plants, never the people and things they had both lost, or would soon lose.
She forced herself to sit at his desk while he looked the plant over under his own work light, clipped to the shelf above the worktable. He was silent as he evaluated the plant and then disappeared into his cabin, returning a few minutes later with a book. He searched it for a while and then disappeared again. This time he was gone for so long that she lost her patience and peeked into the cabin, attached by a heavy door to the greenhouse. He was sitting at the computer in his office, searching.
The lump in her throat was swelling like she had swallowed a distended seed pod. The longer he was gone, the more certain it became that she had found something new, and the more twisted and strange she felt. She thought of the Naomi, stocked with cans of food and bottles of water and spare fuel for the journey. The map next to the steering wheel of the boat, marked with the spot in the middle of the nothingness that she had chosen to put down the anchor and watch the apocalypse.
Hagen finally came back, his glasses dangling from pinched fingers. He was smiling, but then, Hagen was always smiling a little, his cheek creased with it, eyes crinkled with it. She had gotten used to that smile.
“What shall we call it?” he said. “The Samantha orchid?”
She scowled at him.
“So it’s true,” she said. “It is new.”
“It appears to be,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
“Well, I could never claim absolute certainty about anything in science, really, but—” He frowned at her then. “Why do you seem angry? You’ve just found a new species, in the last forty-eight hours of human occupancy of Earth. That is—”