Elsi Marr stood over the check hatch. He watched the black drainage churn through the cleared under-road drain with a sound like a distant freight engine. Steam was already returning to the radiators along the south wall of Bay One, the copper pipes pinging and expanding as scalding steam flooded the network. The air in the sump had begun to lose its bitter, limestone chill, replaced once more by the humid, earthy smell of warm compost and sulfur broth.
She ran her calloused fingers over the underside of a lemon bough near the archway. She felt the soft, limp leaves stiffen as the surrounding heat climbed back toward seventy degrees. The frost had touched the very tips—a pale silver fringe on the outer foliage that crumbled to fine dust between her fingertips—but the wood had not split. The rootstock remained warm in its bed of heated gravel. Twelve years of careful grafting and hand-watered survival had not been wiped out in forty minutes of frozen silence.
Behind her, the young tenders were moving through the aisles with horn spatulas, gently brushing frost crystals from the glass cloches before the returning heat could turn them to drops that would rot the leaves. Their movements were swift, disciplined, born of a decade spent managing the fragile threshold between life and death in a darkened world. In the corner of the bay, an older woman was banking the charcoal fire bowls, shoveling damp peat over the coals to put out the smoke now…
