Bloom Day

The gravity is wrong.

That's Kira's first thought when her feet touch ground—this planet pulls at her differently, makes her lighter, untethered. She breathes air that tastes like metal and distance. The sky overhead is pale green fading to violet at the edges, washed out like old fabric. Not blue. Never blue again.

Her parents are already walking toward the settlement, their voices bright with something she doesn't feel. Behind her, the transport hums, preparing to lift back to orbit. She carries a bag of things from before—clothes, a reader, a flat stone from the old playground. Heavy things. Her mother turns back, smiling, gesturing. Come on, Kira. Come see your new home.

The landscape is gray-brown. Dormant. The ground beneath her boots looks dead, but her father says it's just sleeping. Waiting.

Everything here is waiting.

⁂

Nobody watches her.

That's what Kira notices first, after they've unpacked three boxes and her mother has pointed out her sleeping corner in the habitat. Everyone in the settlement is outside, gathering in clusters, pointing at the horizon, at the ground, at their instruments. Children younger than Kira bounce in the low gravity, excited. Adults check chronometers, adjust viewers, angle recording devices.

Everyone watches the planet.

No one watches her.

Her father leans out the habitat door, grinning. It's starting. You coming?

She wants to say no. Wants to stay inside, where the walls are familiar polymer and the light is regulated. Wants to open her reader and lose herself in stories from somewhere else. Wants—

But she follows him outside. Because what else is there?

⁂

The first change is small.

A plant near her foot—something low and gray she mistook for stone—splits open. Not violently. Gently, like a hand uncurling. Inside, a spiral of deep purple, tightly wound. It doesn't unfurl yet. Just shows itself. Breathing.

Kira stares.

Around the settlement, other plants do the same. Hundreds of them. Thousands. The ground shivers. Not an earthquake, just—movement. Life, shifting position. Getting ready.

On her old world, autumn meant leaves falling. Red and gold tumbling down, covering the ground in layers of ending. This is the opposite. This is everything beginning at once.

She thinks: I don't belong here.

But she doesn't look away.

⁂

At dusk, the lights start.

Bioluminescence, her mother whispers, wonder in her voice. Chemical reactions across the whole biosphere. Synchronized. Isn't it beautiful?

It is. Kira won't give it words, but it is.

Blue-green glows from beneath the ground, tracing root systems like veins. Plants unfurling now, their petals—if they're petals—rimmed with soft gold light. Things that might be insects or might be seeds drift upward on warm air, luminous, making constellations at ground level. The air fills with them. Fills with light.

Kira's hair stands on end. Static. The atmosphere itself is electric.

Across light-years, on a world with a blue sky and heavier gravity, her best friend is probably asleep. Dreaming ordinary dreams. Living an ordinary life that doesn't require words like biosphere and synchronized. A life Kira will never touch again.

She closes her eyes.

The light finds her anyway, pressing soft and warm against her eyelids.

⁂

By full dark, the bloom is a symphony.

That's the only word for it. The ground thrums with bass notes too low to hear but felt in her bones. Plants chime as they open—actual chiming, crystalline and strange. The wind carries spores that whisper when they brush against each other. And beneath it all, a rhythm. A heartbeat.

Kira walks deeper into it. Away from the settlement's lights, into the blooming dark. Her parents call after her—stay close, be careful—but their voices are distant. She's inside the transformation now.

A vine uncurls at shoulder height, its spiral opening into a flower the size of her face. The petals are translucent, glowing from within, veined with darker purple. It smells like honey and ozone. She reaches out, stops, reaches again. Touches.

The petal is velvet-soft and faintly warm.

Something in her chest that's been clenched since before the transport, since before the goodbyes, since before she knew she was leaving—it loosens. Just a little.

Everything closed is opening.

The thought arrives whole, not from her but from watching. Every bud splitting, every spiral unfurling, every seed cracking open to find the light. Nothing stays protected. Nothing stays small and safe and hidden.

She thinks: I am closed.

And then, terrifying and true: I could open.

⁂

She loses time.

Hours pass like minutes or minutes like hours—she can't tell. The bloom doesn't pause, doesn't give her space to think. It just continues, relentless and patient, reshaping everything. The landscape she saw this afternoon—gray and dormant—is unrecognizable. Lush now. Vibrant. The ground thick with growth, the air thick with spores and light and sound.

Her parents find her sitting cross-legged between two flowering trees, watching a patch of ground where tiny shoots press up through soil. Kira, we thought you went back to the habitat. You've been out here for hours.

She nods. She has. She chose this.

Her father crouches beside her, his face lit by the glow from below. Your first day, he says quietly, and you get to see the bloom. Once in a lifetime. Most colonists wait generations.

First day, Kira thinks. Bloom day.

The words feel the same suddenly. Both mean beginning.

⁂

Near dawn, the planet holds its breath.

The bloom reaches some invisible peak, and everything stills. No wind. No chiming. No movement. Every flower open, every leaf unfurled, every seed finding soil. Complete.

Kira stands in the middle of it, exhausted and awake, her skin tingling with static and pollen. She stayed. She watched. She was here.

And she's still here when the stillness breaks, when the planet exhales, when the first light of the binary suns touches the horizon.

⁂

Dawn is different colors here.

Gold and rose, but also violet and pale green, reflecting off an atmosphere she's still learning. The light spills across the transformed landscape, and Kira sees her new world clearly for the first time.

It's not her old world. It never will be.

But it's beautiful. Strange and alive and hers, if she lets it be.

Her mother appears beside her, wraps an arm around her shoulders. You stayed up all night.

Kira leans into the touch. Yeah.

Was it worth it?

She looks out at the blooming world. At the ground beneath her feet—solid now, familiar in its unfamiliarity. At the sky that's pale green and violet and slowly turning colors she doesn't have names for yet. At the plants still glowing softly in the sunrise, holding onto night for one more moment.

Yeah, she says. It was.

The ground feels different under her boots now. Not wrong. Just new. She can work with new.

Her father joins them, tired and grinning. Welcome home, Kira.

And this time, she doesn't correct him.

This time, she lets the words land.

Home.