Chapter 18: MIRA VANE
He sat down on the grass at the edge of the grave.
He did not crouch and he did not stand. He sat. He set his kit bag down. The blossoms were a meter from his knee. The marker was a meter from his hand. The name was three months old.
Mira Vane.
House Vane. The family Percival belonged to. The family that held the Ashwood mid-belt license, the only name legally permitted to harvest Corpse Lotus from the mid-belt.
The Corpse Lotus grew in soil with high biological matter content. The cultivation manual had said so. Aiden had read the manual three times. The manual had not specified what kind of biological matter.
A child’s grave was biological matter.
A Vane child’s grave was Vane biological matter.
The Vanes did not just hold the license.
The Vanes were the colonies’ fuel.
He sat with that for a long beat.
He looked at the marker.
Mira Vane. The marker was new wood cut within the year. Someone had carved the name, set it into the earth, and never returned.
The grave was visited by no one. The fourth grave from the south, set apart, with three Corpse Lotus blossoms at its head, was alone.
She was a child.
The thought arrived without permission. He let it sit.
Who was she. What did she like. Did she have a beast. Did her family hold her when she died.
He didn’t know. He would never know. He was a lamplighter from Sewer Row sitting at the grave of a Vane child three months in the ground, and the family that buried her had buried her here so the flowers would grow, and the flowers grew because she was in the ground.
He looked at the blossoms.
He looked at Miasma on his shoulder.
She was looking at the blossoms.
The green pulse under her skin had shifted, on the walk to the grave, into a rhythm he had not seen before. Not the working rhythm. Not the relic’s rhythm.
A third one. Slower than the working rhythm, faster than the relic’s. He read the rhythm the way he had read her rhythms for two weeks: by the body that produced them. The new rhythm was something between recognition and reluctance.
She knew what the flowers were.
She knew what they were for.
She was not refusing them. She was also not asking for them.
He had watched her want things before. Bread. Warmth. The relic’s shelf. Wanting had a posture and this was not it. This was a worker standing in front of a job, pricing it.
I have to do this. I have to take one. We need it. The Assessment is a month off and you need to evolve and the catalyst is here, in this ground, and the ground is a child.
Miasma blinked once, slow.
She did not give him an answer. She did not have one to give.
He took the small extraction blade out of the kit bag.
He held it in his hand.
He looked at the blade. He looked at the blossoms. He looked at the marker.
I’m sorry, Mira.
The thought went out into the clearing and the clearing took it and did nothing with it.
The trees did not register. The grass under his knee was the same grass it had been when he had sat down.
He had spoken to a girl who could not hear him, in a place she could not hear him from. The speech had cost him nothing and changed nothing.
He had said it anyway, because saying it was the only thing he had to bring to the grave that was his to bring.
He looked at the marker for one more beat.
He moved the blade toward the stem of the outer blossom.
He worked the cut at the base.
The blade went through the stem on the third stroke. The blossom came free in his other hand. It weighed almost nothing. The wrong-green smell came up off the cut in a small wave and dissipated into the clearing.
He wrapped the blossom in the wax paper he had brought for it.
He set the wrapped blossom in the specimen pouch in his kit.
He closed the pouch.
He sat at the grave for another minute. He did not know what the minute was for. He sat in it anyway.
Then he stood up.
He picked up the kit bag.
He looked at the marker one more time.
"Thank you," The words came out quieter than he had said no to Renn at the Broken Stem.
He turned and walked back across the clearing.
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He stopped at the edge of the trees.
He looked back once.
The clearing was the same clearing. The twelve graves were the twelve graves. The fourth grave from the south, set apart, had two blossoms at its head instead of three, and the difference would not be visible to anyone who had not counted.
Miasma’s pulse on his shoulder was running the in-between rhythm. The recognition-reluctance one. She had not gone back to the working rhythm. She was carrying the new one home.
He turned to the path.
He started walking.
He had two and a half hours of light left and three kilometers to the road, and the trip back to the city would take him until past sundown.
His chest didn’t catch.
His hands were steady.
He walked back through the lower fringe of the Ashwood, and the forest did not notice him. The small grey bird in the underbrush kept ignoring him, and the shape that was not a deer and not a fox moved between two trees fifty meters off the path and did not turn its head.
He came out at the road past fifth bell.
The road was the same empty road he had walked out on.
He turned west.
He started walking back to the city.
A wagon came around the bend ahead of him at the seventh bell.
Two horses. Driver in a hooded coat. The wagon was the kind of wagon that ran the eastern road between the city and the mid-belt licensed harvest sites, with a cover stretched over the back.
The cover lashed down at the corners. The crest on the side was the Vane crest. The wagon was running west toward the city.
The driver did not look at him.
The wagon passed.
Aiden kept walking.
He had not seen any other traffic on the road for six hours.
He stopped at the next milestone. He looked back at the wagon. The wagon was a hundred meters past him. It had not slowed. The driver had not turned. The wagon was running at a steady pace.
He looked at the angle of the wagon’s path on the road.
The wagon was going to pass the city gate at the same hour the gate rotated at sundown.
The wagon was Vane.
The wagon was running west from the mid-belt at sundown on the day before the new moon, two days before the thin man’s crew was scheduled to harvest at the Ashwood grave, with no other Vane traffic on the road that he had seen.
He stood at the milestone for a beat.
He looked at the wagon receding.
He looked at the kit bag where the blossom was wrapped in wax paper in the specimen pouch.
He looked at his pocket where the map and the ledger and the inspection authority and the bread sat.
That’s not a harvest wagon. That’s a body wagon.
The thought arrived without permission. He didn’t argue with it.
He started walking after the wagon.
Not fast. The wagon would reach the gate before him. He would not catch it on the road. But the wagon was going somewhere, and the somewhere was the city, and the city was where the buyer was arriving in four days, where the cache was empty of its relic, and where the thin man’s crew was going to a grave in two nights.
Who is in that wagon.
He kept walking west.
The Ashwood receded behind him.
The wagon receded ahead of him.
The road was empty otherwise. The sun was going down. The small grey birds of the road were not on the road, the way the small beasts of the city had not been on the road this morning, because the small beasts the Witness used did not work outside the city walls.
Aiden walked west toward the gate, the Vane wagon at the edge of his sight, the blossom in his bag, a beast on his shoulder, and the question of who Mira Vane’s sibling had been lodged at the back of his mind until the wagon had come around the bend.
The wagon was not a harvest wagon.
It was carrying a body home.
