Nara cooks a public breakfast from Mars seed stock and gathers survivor testimony through taste.
The first Mars breakfast on Earth was cooked in a fish market because rent respected neither history nor grief. Mika cleared a steel table between crushed ice bins. Nara set the red seed case down where everyone could see it and wrote the rule on butcher paper: one spoon per witness, no speeches until after tasting. Reporters hated the rule. Dock families loved it. Survivors loved nothing yet. They stood in a tight group, thin shoulders touching, afraid flavor would ask them to remember too much.
Nara opened the ironbean packet with a knife she had sterilized over the burner. Dr. Eleni Park, exobiologist and owner of three Mars scars, made a wounded sound. "That strain is viable." "I know." "We have eight seeds left." "Seven after breakfast." The market quieted. Nara did not pretend the cost was poetic. She placed one seed in the pan, crushed it with a spoon, and mixed it with gray yeast starter, onion peel, and Earth barley because honest substitutions belonged in public.
Harlan Voss arrived before the first steam. Of course he did. He wore a charcoal suit and the expression of a man attending a regrettable charity event. "Ms. Sol, traumatized survivors should not be encouraged to ingest unverified colony material." Mika held up a ladle. "Then do not eat." Voss smiled for the cameras. "My concern is public safety." Nara stirred until the broth thickened. "So was ours when your packets changed after month four."
The breakfast smelled wrong to Earth people and exactly right to the survivors: nutty, metallic, faintly sweet where the yeast broke the bitter edge. Eleni tasted first. Her eyes closed. "Greenhouse two," she said. "Before the filters failed." Another survivor tasted and named the week the ration changed. A mechanic named Solan tasted and said, "This was after the official last contact." The reporters finally stopped whispering. Nara handed him the butcher pencil. "Write the date."
A small girl near the fish bins tugged her grandmother's coat. "I know that soup." Her grandmother tried to hush her. The girl held up a cracked audio charm with a red dust sticker. A child's voice came from it, singing a breakfast rhyme about ironbeans and borrowed sunlight. Nara went cold. The colony's official death date was three weeks before that rhyme could have been recorded. Voss stepped toward the charm. Mika's fish cleaver came down into the cutting board between his hand and the child. Nobody mistook it for cooking.
Eleni argued for saving the seed until Nara handed her the colony meal log. Month seven listed ironbean breakfast for the children's room, then no ironbean after. Eleni touched the empty future line and went silent. "We keep seeds to grow life," Nara said. "Today the life we grow is witness." The exobiologist hated the sentence, which was how Nara knew it had not become easy.
The grandmother tried to pay for the spoonful with three folded bills. Nara pushed them back. "Testimony is payment." Mika, less sentimental and more practical, wrote the woman's name, charm ID, and contact route on a fish invoice. Grief had entered the market as a song. Mika made sure it left with a receipt.
Nara served the last spoonful to the grandmother. "Where did you get the message?" The old woman swallowed with tears running into her wrinkles. "My son sent it through a maintenance channel. Voss said it was corrupted grief noise." Eleni copied the charm ID. Mika moved the seed case under the table before security could invent concern. The pan was empty. One viable seed was gone. In its place, Dockside Market had a date, a song, and a line of survivors ready to taste their way through the months Earth had deleted.