Page 6 of The Last Great Omegaverse

Nobody’s picked their own anything here in a long, long time.

I walk the rows anyway, boots sinking into ground turned soft with mud, and it’s worse the closer I look. Rot. Some kind of disease on half the leaves. A tractor under a tarp that’s more rust than metal by now. Somewhere near the back fence there’s an old scarecrow that’s lost most of its stuffing, slumped sideways like it gave up on the job years ago and nobody had the heart to take it down.

And then, right in the middle of all that ruin, there’s a patch near the south fence that’s fine. Green. A little unruly, but healthy, vines thick and leaves broad, three or four good-sized pumpkins already going orange under them like nobody told this one corner of the farm it was supposed to be dying with the rest.

I crouch and look closer, half expecting to find the trick of it—irrigation, better drainage, something logical—and find nothing. Just dirt, same as everywhere else. I decide it’s luck, a fluke of sun angle or wind shelter, file it away, and don’t think about it again for longer than I probably should.

I’ve spent my whole adult life in cities dense enough to swallow an Omega whole, streets crowded enough that nobody blinks twice at who’s walking home alone after dark. Out here, there’s no crowd to disappear into. No apartment building full of strangers who’ve never learned my name, no safety in numbers. Just me, on land big enough to be run by a team, in a town that seems to find it strange, maybe even careless, that I’d try to manage it alone. Some part of me, the part I’ve spent years teaching to stay subdued in elevators and grocery lines, knows exactly how exposed that makes me out here.

I ignore it. I’m good at ignoring things.

I find the old farm sign leaning against the barn wall, half-fallen. I pick it up without really deciding to, and think about a woman I met only a handful of times. The woman who left me a house and a mess and a wind chime that never stops clattering. I don’t know what to do with the lump that forms in my throat, so I set the sign back where I found it and keep walking.

By the time I make it back to the house, my boots are ruined and my hands are dirty. I have, by my count, roughly four hundred problems and no plan for any of them.

Which is when a car turns up the drive.

It’s a tidy little sedan, the kind that screams professional in a town that otherwise screams homemade. The man who steps out of it is somewhere in his sixties, with silver hair, and a briefcase that looks older than I am.

“Ms. Calloway,” he says, extending a hand. “Warren Whitfield. I handled your grandmother’s affairs. We spoke on the phone.”

We did, three weeks ago, a call I remember mostly for how surreal it felt. A stranger’s voice telling me a woman I hardly knew had left me land, a house, a farm, and a folder of paperwork thick enough to double as a doorstop.

“Come in,” I say, though the inside of the house is barely more presentable than the outside. He doesn’t seem to mind. He sets his briefcase on the kitchen table, next to the mug Asher left behind, and pulls out a folder.

“I want to walk you through the terms properly,” he says, “now that you’ve had a chance to see the place.”

“Please do.” Honestly, all the details are still a little fuzzy. I barely heard anything after he said my grandmother had died.

“Your grandmother’s will is clear on the primary bequest. The land, the house, the farm equipment, all pass to you outright.” He slides a page across the table. “But there’s a condition attached, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t lay it out plainly. The farm must remain in operation, under your residence and management, through this year’s Harvest Festival. If it fails to produce a viable crop by that date, or if you vacate the property before then, ownership reverts.”

“Reverts to whom?”

He taps the second page. “To the holders of an old easement agreement. The Ashworth land collective, next door. Your grandmother and the founder of that pack, Callum Ashworth’s father, entered into a shared-resource agreement decades back. Water rights, equipment sharing, some right-of-way clauses, and a joint-supply provision I confess I’ve never once seen either farm actually invoke, in all my years handling both estates. Your grandmother added the reversion condition herself, more recently, as part of updating her will.”

“Joint-supply provision?”

“Regional buyers, mostly. Co-op contracts that pay considerably better than selling at market alone, provided a farm can hit the tonnage required. Ambitious minimums, from what I understand—more than either farm’s cleared solo in some years.” He waves a hand, already moving past it, filing it back under paperwork nobody’s touched in decades. “Not something I’d expect either farm to bother with at this stage. I only mention it because it’s bundled into the same agreement as the reversion clause.”

I sit with that for a second. “She wrote it so that if I fail, the whole property goes to the neighbors?”

“In essence, yes.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I couldn’t tell you her reasoning with any confidence,” he says, carefully, the way people are careful when they know more than they’re willing to say outright. “Your grandmother was a woman with strong opinions about this land. I suspect she believed the arrangement was sound, one way or the other.” He hesitates, folding his hands over the folder like he’s deciding how much more to give me. “Hollow Creek’s old-fashioned about a great many things, land included. There’s still plenty in this county who’d say a farm like this wants a pack behind it, not only a deed. Your grandmother ran it alone longer than most would’ve tried, and it wore on her toward the end. I don’t say that to frighten you. Only so you understand what people here believe, whether or not you share it.”

I don’t know what to do with that, so I file it next to the pumpkin patch that shouldn’t be thriving and the pain under my ribs I’ve been ignoring since the driveway, and say nothing.

The unbidden memory of a man on my couch at one in the morning, telling me my dead grandmother’s stove had moods, infiltrates my mind. I think about him crossing the field toward that same white farmhouse this morning, easy as anything, like he’d walked that path a thousand times.

“The Ashworth pack,” I say slowly. “How many of them are there?”

“Four, I believe. Why do you ask?”

“No reason.” I press my palms flat against the table to keep them from shaking, more from anger than fear, though I couldn’t say which one’s winning. “How long do I have?”

“Sixty days,” he says. “Harvest Festival falls on the fourteenth. The town relies on the yield from local farms, yours included, to supply the event. If Calloway Farm can’t deliver, the festival committee has made it clear they’ll be looking at your place in the community closely.”