Chapter 10: The Bait

Sorrel was out in the yard before the shop opened, finishing up. Finished first, questions after — that was how Sorrel worked. The root had gone into the ground the day before, in the dark, at the end of the row, and this morning it only needed the tag.

The yard behind Second Helping ran the length of the building and then kept going: raised beds, a hose reel, a pear tree that dropped its fruit on the walk no matter what anybody did about it, and at the end, past the last bed, the pumpkin. The pumpkin had a bed to itself and a sign in front of it in a plastic sleeve. A woman in a fleece vest was already kneeling there with her phone held up at an angle for a kid in a stroller, and the kid was watching a bird.

The root sat two beds in from the walk, out in the open, under nothing. Low leaves. Flat. The green of it was the green of grass — the green a person walks past every day of their life and never once looks at.

Sorrel pressed the soil down around the stem, dragged the hose over, gave it four seconds, shut the water off, wiped both hands down the apron, and took the tag out of a pocket.

It was the real kind. Guild stock, the good plastic, the grade stamped in one corner and the price in the other, and a code on the back that would put the plant up on the trade app for anybody with the app and a mind to scan it.

Sorrel held it out. Vesper turned it front, back, front, and handed it back.

“Low,” Sorrel said.

“Yes.”

“Low enough that somebody reports it.”

“Then somebody reports it.” Vesper crouched at the corner of the bed. “Face it toward the walk. The sun’s on that side till two.”

Sorrel pushed the stake in and hung the tag. With a Guild tag on it and a grade in the corner, it looked about as interesting as a weed.

“Tell me again what it’s for.”

“The fire nobody invited,” Vesper said.

Sorrel waited. Nothing came after that. No size to it, no name, no which fire — and Sorrel had worked here long enough to know that when nothing came after, nothing was coming.

“The ones up front know the tag rule,” Vesper said. “That’s all they know.”

“And Rennie?”

“No.”

Across the yard the woman had lifted the kid up onto the pumpkin, which the sign asked her not to do. The kid started crying. Something came off the pear tree and landed on the walk, and nobody looked at that either.

Sorrel went in the back to wash up, and left the tag hanging where it could be seen from the walk, from the counter, and from every table in the place, which was the whole point of it.

He ate one of the candies on the back step at Ms. Tanner’s. It had been in his pocket for a while, along with eight more and a card he hadn’t done anything about yet, and there is a limit to how long a thing like that sits in a pocket before a person does something about it.

Eight left.

It did what it did. Under the boy’s ribs, in the place that wasn’t the boy — the place that had stopped being anything else a long time ago, on a day he didn’t count back to — the small fire took the green in and sat up higher. A thumbnail’s worth.

Not enough. He’d known that before he ate it. Nothing was going to come to him by itself in this town. The core of him was cracked, and worse than that, he was wearing a person. A boy, with a boy’s dulled senses and a boy’s short arms. A body between you and the world is a wall between you and a song. Whatever green hung over this town was green he couldn’t see and never got a chance to take.

If you can’t take it out of the air, eating is the only door left. And eating costs money.

He’d gone through the boy’s memory once, carefully, the way you check a lock, and the rules were all in there: the register, the card, the little screen, the number on the wall next to the thing you wanted. Take something without paying the number, and somebody hits you, and the somebody here wins. A fire the size of a thumbnail doesn’t win fights with people.

He had thirty-two dollars. Ms. Tanner had put it in his hand a few at a time over three weeks, for the lunch rush and the dishes and the carrying, and when he asked what it was for she called it nothing.

The little girl had told him the name of her family’s shop — twice, out loud, the second time to make sure he had it. He’d found it on the trade app afterward: a storefront, a kitchen, and a board of goods with grades against them.

The other reason he’d waited: there were people in this town who worked the green, and he was in no state to be looked at by any of them. Not once. A cracked core inside a borrowed body, and anybody with eyes would see the seam.

If what they had cost more than thirty-two dollars, he’d think about it then. He hadn’t clawed his way back up through the world this far to stop at a price tag.

Something turned over low in him when he thought that. Hot, old, no plan on it yet. It got as far as his hands.

And then, without being asked, a face. Small. Both hands out. A candy in them, held up at him the way you hold something up when you’ve never once had to count what it cost.

He’d counted it since. He knew what it cost.

He let it go. Her family’s shop. Fine. If the plant came to more than thirty-two dollars, he’d ask whether they’d let him pay it off. People did that. He’d heard the phrase forty times at Ms. Tanner’s counter.

Business at Ms. Tanner’s was slow until the afternoon. He took the bike.

It was an hour out. He’d measured it the week before, on a day he hadn’t gone. Second Helping was a storefront in a row of storefronts, and there was a line out the door at eleven in the morning on a Monday, which meant either something was wrong or something was very good.

Out front, in the strip between the sidewalk and the wall, people were gardening. Not the shop’s people — the customers. There was a handwritten card at the end of the strip that said so: Plant it, we’ll cook it, ask inside. Three of them were out there in their work clothes on their lunch break with their hands in the dirt, and their beds looked better than the beds at Ms. Tanner’s, which was saying something.

Inside it was warm and it smelled like the inside of a loaf. There was a board on the wall with the day’s things chalked on it and a price at the end of every line, and half the people in the line were photographing the case.

He read the board twice. Then a third time, in case the third time it came out different.

It didn’t. The cheapest thing on it that counted as a meal was sixteen dollars. A bowl of soup with bread was thirteen. And one small thing — one, the size of a deck of cards, the kind of thing you eat standing up — was eleven.

He had thirty-two dollars. At Ms. Tanner’s, thirty-two dollars was five plates of chicken and rice, and every one of them put you to sleep for an hour afterward.

He read the board again.

He could eat here twice.

The girl behind the register was watching him when he got to the front of the line. She had ears — two of them, round, furred, sitting above a cloth headband that was doing no work at all — and when she turned her head toward the kitchen they moved a half-beat behind her.

The man ahead of him had asked her where she’d gotten them. She’d said thank you, and given him his change, and he’d taken it and gone out the door still waiting on the answer.

“Hi,” she said. “You ready, or you want a minute?”

He looked at the board.

“It’s Monday,” she said, “so we made a hundred extra of each — the Knockout and the Comeback — and the Comeback never makes it to three. If you want one, this is the hour.”

He knew the second word. Comeback meant come back. The first one he had no idea about, and it wasn’t worth finding out.

“Two of the Comeback.”

“Two. Okay.” She tapped it in. “Twenty-two, twenty-three fifty with tax.”

He put the money on the counter and counted it out and did not watch the last of it cross the wood.

“Ten minutes on the Comebacks,” she said. “You can wait here, or you can go out back. Everybody goes out back — there’s a pumpkin.” She slid him a number on a stick. “Just don’t pick anything. Everything back there is either somebody’s or it’s got a tag on it.”

Through the gap in the kitchen door, a panda in an apron took the lid off a pot and the whole shop changed weather.

“Order up,” the panda said.

“Coming.” She went, and came back with somebody’s soup, and the smell of it went down the counter like a rumor.

He went out the back.

The pumpkin was the pumpkin. It came up to his hip and had been polished by hands, and two teenagers were taking turns standing next to it, looking at the picture, standing next to it again.

And past it, in the last bed along the fence, was the plant.

He knew it before he knew he knew it. Years of eating whatever grows does that to a person: it isn’t a sense, it’s a reckoning. The leaves told him nothing — low, flat, the green of something that comes up in a sidewalk crack and gets mowed. The plant under them told him everything.

Green. Not a trickle, not the little bit that had been in the candy. Weight of it, running down into the ground, sitting there by a fence with a tag hung on it like somebody’s tomato.

His hand was up. He didn’t remember lifting it.

Behind him a phone clicked, and one of the teenagers said again, and he got his arm down and put both hands in his pockets.

Then the face came back, unasked. Both hands out. One candy, held up at him like it cost nothing.

He stepped back out of the bed.

The tag had the grade in one corner and the number in the other. Two hundred and sixty. Nobody who knew what was in that ground would have hung that number on it. That was the only thing it could mean.

He had eight dollars and fifty cents, a number on a stick, and nothing else in the world. He went back in before the girl came looking.

He took the stool at the end of the counter.

The Comebacks came on a paper plate. Two of them, small, square, layered like a stack of paper.

He’d expected them to be good. Ms. Tanner’s was good; she could take a chicken and a pot and four hours and turn it into something you thought about the next morning. He’d assumed that was the ceiling.

The first bite went past the ceiling. Salt, butter, layers thin enough to read through, something cool underneath and something hot and sweet in the middle, and he sat with his mouth full like an idiot.

And then, halfway through, the other thing. He’d been a fire a long time. A fire can take a field apart down to nothing and never once taste any of it; that’s the trade. This mouth could taste. The boy’s mouth. It had been sitting there the whole time, being able to taste things.

Then the green came in behind it.

The fire took it the way a man who’s been drinking out of puddles takes a glass of water. It went up — not a thumbnail this time, not a trickle — it stood up and turned over once, and he sat very still with both hands flat on the counter and let it.

And when it had gone quiet, he could feel the rest of it.

Faint. Thin as a thread, the world coming in through a wall. But there: the room, the yard behind it, the building, the dirt under the building, all of it running green.

He ate the second one slower. It did the same thing and put him a little further up the road.

Where he came from, this would be a puddle. Here it was the difference between crawling and walking, and the whole of that difference was folded into a square of pastry the size of a deck of cards.

Eleven dollars. He’d have paid fifty.

He sat a while longer with his hands on the counter, doing nothing, feeling the thread. Then he got up and put the paper plate in the bin and went out past the register.

The girl said come back Monday. He didn’t answer, which she was used to, and so was he.

Halfway home the green began to thin. By the time he came up the hill to Ms. Tanner’s it was gone, and it was what it had been that morning, and the morning before that, and every morning since he’d opened his eyes in this body.

The little girl’s family ran the shop. Her mother could put green into a pastry. Somebody in that family put it into a candy and wrapped it in a twist of paper and handed it to him without a thought behind it.

The ground around that building wasn’t lucky. Somebody was feeding it.

Which meant what he needed was attached to a person, and to get back up he’d have to stay close to her family — closer than was safe, close enough that one of them would eventually look at him and see the seam.

And the other thing in him, the thing that had kept him alive this long without ever once needing a reason, said stay away.

It had never been wrong yet.

Behind the fence at Second Helping the plant was still in the ground, still tagged, still carrying a number that didn’t match what was under it. He’d be back for it.

He put the bike in the shed. The rush started at five, and it was five.