Elsi Marr walked down the central aisle of Greenhouse Two, her hobnailed boots crunching softly on the freezing black peat.
In her right hand, she carried an ordinary flat-nosed iron coal shovel, its ash handle scarred by decades of sweat, lye water, and boiler grease. The air in the huge hall was still dropping in heat, hovering around twenty degrees. Every breath she took pulled a sharp, icy sting into the scarred lining of her lung tubes. That made her cough with a dry, rattling rasp that echoed off the solid, frost-glazed glass eighty feet above.
Around her, the silence was vast and unnerving. For twelve years, this building had been filled with the hiss of nutrient mist, the rhythmic clink of harvesting blades, and the deep, shaking hum of high-voltage current pulsing through overhead bus-bars. Now, the only sounds were the whistling of the northern mountain gale through cracked roof seams and the slow, rhythmic plink of freezing water drops dripping from iron roof beams onto the dead frames.
She stopped beside the first mound, where Old Karr had stood ten minutes before.
The ash was unlike any hearth residue she had ever shoveled from a winter stove. It was fully cold—colder than the surrounding flat stone slabs—and possessed a strange, heavy thickness that kept it from billowing in the draft like wood smoke. It had the dry, granular consistency of crushed fiery dark rock mixed with fine heat-proof glass sand. When Elsi reached down and stirred the edge…
