It was as delicate as a snowflake.
The seedling was so brightly green that it seemed to Timi he could almost see through it.
He knelt down to the floor to look at it closely and examined its tiny, thin stalk and its two baby leaves.
He knew better than to try and touch it. It was fragile and, being so small, just a rough touch could damage it. But he also knew that, like his seedlings in his ‘little garden’, it would need to be watered to 29grow. There was no chance of it being able to get any rain inside the library. For a moment he thought of his seedlings at home, and wondered if Mum would’ve remembered to tell someone to water them. He’d been away from his little pots for so long, they would become dried out by now.
He looked around the empty library and carefully went back to the hallway 30he’d come through. There were several doors leading off the corridor. He tried one and found an old store cupboard. The next was a toilet. But the one after that was a kitchen.
A cup lay abandoned in the sink. Timi filled it to the brim and carried it through into the library.
He couldn’t see any soil through the floorboards. It seemed unbelievable that the seedling had sprung up here in this tiny crack.
But Timi had seen plants growing out of the cracks between bricks. Moss that covered tarmac. It wasn’t impossible that somehow this seedling had grown here. Just very, very unusual.
Timi poured the water carefully into the crack between the floorboards at the 31bottom of the thin stalk, taking care not to let the stream damage the tiny seedling.
‘There you are,’ he whispered to it.
The sun seemed to shine more brightly for a minute. The seedling looked greener than ever.