The sky cracked open on a Tuesday.
No warning. No tremor. Just a split — like a seam in silk — and a voice, neither male nor female, neither human nor god, echoing across the world:
"Survive. Evolve. Ascend."
That was all.
Then the light came. Golden. Silent. Inescapable.
It passed through walls, through skin, through memory.
And when it faded, every person over the age of thirteen carried a new truth inside them:
A Skill.
Some screamed. Some wept. Some lit fires with their hands.
I stood in the biology classroom, chalk dust still on my fingers, and watched the numbers on the invisible screen before me settle into place.
Name: Lena Vale
Skill: Botanical Empathy (F-Rank)
Status: Dormant
No flame. No blade. No armor.
Just… plants.
The boy beside me — Jason, who once flicked erasers at my head — leaned over, squinting.
"Botanical what? You mean… like gardening?"
Laughter rippled through the room. Even the teacher glanced my way, eyebrows raised.
I said nothing.
Skills like Pyrokinesis, Enhanced Regeneration, Tactical Analysis flashed around me like fireworks.
I watched a girl heal a paper cut in seconds.
Another boy lifted a desk with one hand.
And me?
I thought of my grandmother.
She used to sit in the back garden every morning, barefoot on the soil, whispering to the roses like they were old friends.
When I asked her why, she'd smile and say,
"They listen better than people do."
She died last winter.
The garden was the only thing I kept.
By nightfall, the city was burning.
Not from the System.
From us.
Looters smashed storefronts. Gangs claimed blocks. A helicopter crashed into the library.
I walked home through the smoke, past broken glass and abandoned cars, and found the nursery still standing — a small rectangle of green in a world turning to ash.
The sign — Vale Family Garden — hung crooked, but the door was intact.
Inside, the air was still.
The lavender drooped.
The tomato vines sagged, leaves curling at the edges.
Even the mint, usually stubborn, looked tired.
I knelt beside a dandelion growing through a crack in the concrete.
Weeds were the only things thriving now.
I didn't know what to do.
So I did the only thing that felt right.
I touched its stem.
And I said, softly,
"Hold on."
It answered.
Not in words. Not at first.
But in feeling — a pulse, faint, like a heartbeat under soil.
Then a voice, dry and ancient and amused:
"You're late."
I jerked back.
The dandelion swayed, seeds trembling like laughter.
"Three days. Three days of stomping around like a lost calf, and now you decide to talk? We've been waiting."
I stared.
My breath caught.
"You… heard me?"
"Of course we heard you. We always do. But most of you never say anything worth hearing."
I looked around.
The potted basil on the shelf — was it… watching me?
"Are all of you…?"
"Alive? Aware? Annoyed? Yes."
A cactus on the windowsill added, dryly:
"And no, I don't need more water. I've told her that every summer for seven years."
I laughed. Then stopped. Then wanted to cry.
Outside, a car alarm wailed into the night.
Somewhere, someone screamed.
But here, in this quiet greenhouse, the plants were alive — not just growing, but thinking, remembering, judging.
The dandelion's glow brightened.
Its yellow face turned toward me, and for the first time, I felt it — a thread, thin but unbreakable, connecting us.
"You're the Voice," it said.
"Took your time waking up."
Before I could answer, the old oak at the edge of the lot — the one struck by lightning last month — creaked.
Its bark shifted.
A deep, slow voice, like roots grinding through stone, rumbled through the soil:
"So the Green Heart wasn't wrong."
I stood frozen.
The tree's shadow stretched toward me, not like a shadow —
but like an arm.
And in that moment, I understood two things:
I was never given this skill.I was chosen.