In the quiet southern corner of the Ferry Public Garden. There, the old stone terrace wall caught the warm midday sun, Tavi sat on an overturned wooden bushel basket. His brass magnifying glass was held steady between his thumb and forefinger. On the low stone retaining wall before him sat a box-shaped watching box, two feet long and one foot wide, built of clean red terracotta with a sliding sheet of clear plate glass across the top.
Inside the box, bedded in damp river moss, crushed shale, and decaying willow bark, lived seventy-four adult lantern beetles—Pyrophorus riparius. In the dim recesses of their tiny clay burrows, the insects’ belly organs glowed with a faint, steady, cold-blue soft glow, pulsing with a slow, four-second breathing that perfectly mirrored the natural breathing cycle of the Third Gate sixty yards away.
Tavi leaned closer, his tongue tucked into the corner of his mouth as he sketched their antennae in his notebook. He was thirteen, his hair was still full of cedar shavings from Eren’s workshop floor. But his hands were remarkably steady.
Suddenly, his magnifying glass caught a sharp, pale line running diagonally across the upper left corner of the glass lid. It wasn’t a hair or a scratch in the animal fat grease. It was a load-bearing fracture. A fine, jagged stress crack that had propagated two inches across the glass from the iron mounting bracket.
