An elderly woman reached for the cellar handle. She bent, gripping the dusty, rusty metal bar with two seemingly frail hands and pulled. For an 80-year-old grandmother, she was stronger than one would have guessed. The heavy wooden door flipped open, unleashing a spray of dust.

“Follow me.”

She waved for the young woman standing close behind her to follow after her down the cellar. A wooden ladder was propped almost vertically against the wall at the bottom of the stairs and on it hung a lantern with a single wax candle sealed onto its bottom. Never once lit, the wick was pure white cotton, rigid and clean. The grandmother extended her left hand without pause in her step nor a glance in its direction and grabbed a matchbox lying on a wall shelf nearby. She struck a match and lit the lantern with the same intuition, match to wick with a precise whip of the arm. The candle light sparked and then gently illuminated the room, a flame flickering softly inside the glass walls that encased it. She picked up the lantern and continued, deeper and deeper into the cellar.

“Grandmother, no one uses candle-lit lanterns anymore. Why do you still have one?” The young woman asked curiously.

When the match was struck, she was struck by the beauty of an old glass lantern hanging elegantly from the ladder. Each panel was joined together with clean lines of metal. At the base, intricate iron detail was welded onto the frame and glass, creating a pattern of strange symbols running around the lantern. She had only ever seen such objects of obsolescence in books and movies. Today, people only used electric lights.

“You can cut off the electricity, but you cannot turn off fire. If you can make fire, you will always have light,” her grandmother simply replied.

It wasn’t that her grandmother distrusted technology. In fact, she was a whiz. She picked up the newest tech faster than a lot of kids. The longevity of her memory and robustness of her intelligence was no surprise, however. She was quite a successful engineer before her retirement.

The grandmother stopped, holding the lantern to a bookcase. She set the light down on the third shelf. From the left, she thumbed each book. Sapiens, Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Dark Materials… Eighth book. Her hand stopped moving, pulling the next book off the shelf. She opened it. The cover was intact, although its spine gave away its popularity. It was apparent that the book itself had been well-read, as were the other books on the shelf. But, this one was different. She flipped through the pages and laid the book down, open wide on two pages. Neatly tucked along the spine between these two pages was a long strip of cloth that matched the fabric backing of the spine. The book thick and its spine stretched and worn, the little treasure was unnoticeable to the naked eye. She peeled the cloth away and unraveled it carefully.

A seed.

She removed her locket – the locket she never removed for any reason. Hastily but deliberately, she inserted the seed inside and closed the locket. Without a word, she locked the necklace around her granddaughter’s neck. Her eyes, steady and piercing, said more than the words that came next. With her granddaughter’s hand in hers, for the first time in her elderly years, her own hands trembled.

“Listen to me carefully, Senna. Keep this safe. Guard it with your life. Remember that only what is mine can reveal it to anyone, even if they have the locket.” She paused, a hint of a smile appearing on her face. “Of course, try not to lose the locket.”

“Grandmother, I don’t understand. Why did you hide a seed here? Guard it with my life? Only what’s yours can reveal it? What’s yours? Reveal what? Why is this so important?” Senna shot off question after question. “What is this seed? Why have you been hiding it? I don’t understand where all of this is coming from!” The more she asked, the greater the fear grew in her heart. Something wasn’t right.

“I can’t explain it all, dear. There isn’t time.” Shaking her head once, she pulled her only granddaughter to her height and held her close in her arms. At 80, she was now much smaller than Senna. She hugged her tightly. You’ve grown so much, but you’ll always be my little girl. She felt a lump in her throat and she fought the tear preparing to spill over her eyes. A little girl with such huge responsibility. Such a heavy destiny on top of those small shoulders. It’s not fair.

“There is a book.” Her voice was firm, steady, strong. She held Senna at arms’ length, both hands on her shoulders. “It’s on one of the rescue or refugee ships that have already been launched. No one knows which one it is but I know you’ll know it when you find it.” She paused, her eyes once again serious and fierce. “Find it.” She turned on her heel and led Senna by the hand back upstairs, swiftly blowing out the candle and returning the lantern to its original place along the way.

“You need to leave, now.”