The second shift began under a heavy, rotten-egg fog that rolled off the Gray Rush and seeped through the cellar floorboards of Mira Os’s tenement.
Down in the four-foot relief water chute beneath the Roman arch, the heat had climbed another two degrees overnight. It reached ninety-eight at the core of the beetle nest. The adult workers, stimulated by the elderberry oil Imran had painted along the outer edge, had spent sixteen hours detaching the outer egg clusters and moving them toward the water chute mouth. The emerald light was blinding. It reflected off the damp dark rock ribs in long, shivering sheets of cold green light.
Imran Bell lay on his stomach on a folded strip of horsehair carpet, his magnifying visor adjusted over his glasses, his fingers moving with razor-sharp delicacy as he teased an egg cluster from an unmortared ceiling seam.
Ten feet behind him, crouching on his knees in the muddy floor trough, young Tavi was receiving the filled linen pouches and lowering them into the moss-lined crocks. The boy’s teeth were chattering, not from the cold—the water chute was like a bread oven—but from the sheer, terrifying closeness of thousands of emerald insects.
“Keep your shoulders level, Tavi,” Pella whispered from the water chute entrance, where she knelt with the spare crocks and a horn flask of clean water. “Watch how Imran holds the pouch. He doesn’t pinch the hemp. He cradles the bottom so the eggs don’t roll against each other.”
