The small back kitchen pantry behind the laundry boilers smelled of sour chicory, damp salt pork. The faint, sweet cucumber aroma that drifted from a large glass pickle jar on the window ledge. Afternoon light filtered through the iron-barred street grate, striking the thick glass and lighting up a twelve-inch frond of semi-clear river ribbon waving inside the cold water. Young Tavi sat on an upturned turnip tub, his chin propped in his grimy palms. He watched the pale amber speckles pulse along the organism’s edges like tiny underwater stars.
Pella Rook stood in the doorway, scraping dried lye crust from the leather cuffs of her work apron with an iron scraper. Her lower back throbbed with the dull ache of four hours spent crouching in the sewer sump. Her wool stockings were damp around the ankles from river spray. She watched the boy’s expression. The intense, protective fascination that children had for strange living things. Tavi had caught the fragment in a wooden scoop when the main colony shifted. He dropped it into the jar with fresh river water and a handful of gravel.
The fragment was alive, but its motion was unnaturally rapid. Instead of the long, measured ripples of the main body in the under-road drain, the cut frond was fluttering against the glass walls in tight, wild spirals, shedding tiny strings of clear mucus that clouded the water. Pella took her measuring tongs and measured the distance between its dorsal nodes: five tiny fractions of an…
