Chapter 112: Enough to Leave Behind

Chapter 112: Enough to Leave Behind

The camp was on the old propagation lawn inside the outer wall, a dozen small tents in two rows with a cookfire in the middle, and supper was lentils and bread from a pot so large Alden could have bathed in it.

Silas ate two bowls without noticing. Alden ate three. Dagna ate one, slowly, still picking invisible slivers of glass out of her braid, and told Alden no when he offered to help.

Silas’s bedroll lay on top of a root. No amount of shifting made it go away, so eventually he sat up and lit the small lamp by his pack.

The shared field kit had come round the tents earlier: padded boards for handling glass, cord, thin steel field scrapers in canvas sleeves, a handbook for each team. Silas read the section on living samples again by lamplight, with the root digging into his hip.

Take growth with its substrate attached where possible. Keep pieces separated. Damp, not wet. Allow air. Do not strip an entire stand; leave enough to recover.

He considered messaging Elyra about the presence under the hood. Perhaps she could explain its reaction.

Then he tried to imagine the message. There’s a small cool thing under a stone hood, I can’t see it, it went tight when I reached for it, what is it? He could almost hear her asking what else he had noticed. He’d been so pleased to find the moss that the answer was embarrassingly little.

Lower your output. Watch what it does. Stop pushing because you don’t understand.

He turned the lamp down and lay back on his root, and eventually slept.

***

Harth was at the court entrance in the early light, holding a steaming mug.

"The facing under the hood," Silas said. "The thin slabs. Are they part of the structure?"

Harth pressed a thumb against one of the slabs, which shifted slightly in its mortar.

"Loose cladding. Nonstructural. You can handle that as salvage," she said. "The hood itself and the channel stay exactly as they are. Don’t lever anything off the wall. Don’t chip the conduit."

"Understood," Silas said.

"Then go on," Harth said. She went back to her table and her mug.

Silas lay down on the cold paving and looked up under the hood again.

In the morning light, the problem was clearer. The silver band ran unevenly along six of the thin facing slabs, each about the size of a spread hand. The four toward the ends carried a thin, healthy layer. The two in the middle carried the densest growth by far, a thick cushion of silver right over the deepest, dampest part of the vent. That was also where the small presence was. He could feel it there, cool and still, tucked into the very center.

He checked the cracks in the facing. Pull the growth away from its backing and it would die; pull too hard on the thin stone and the whole piece would crumble. He’d brought a scraper, not a mason. The loose outer edges looked manageable.

He let a thread out, thinner than he’d ever used outside, and laid it along the stone near the center of the band. Not touching the presence. Just beside it.

The presence drew back. Not hard, not the fist-clench of the night before, but clearly, away from his attention, into the thickest part of the moss.

He moved the thread away. After a few breaths, it settled again.

He tried the outer slabs on the left. He laid the thread along them, right up against the silver growth there, and waited.

Nothing. The presence stayed where it was, quiet, as though the outer edge didn’t concern it.

On the right-hand side, his thread drew no response either.

He didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know if the little thing lived in the moss or beside it, or fed on it, or simply liked the damp. But it seemed to mind very much when anything pressed at the center, and not at all when he worked the edges.

He could work with that, provided he kept watching.

He got up and brushed off his front.

"Here’s the plan," he said to Alden and Dagna. "We take three of the outer slabs, backing and all. We leave the middle alone."

Alden looked under the hood and then at him, honestly puzzled. "The middle’s where most of it is."

"The middle’s where it’s growing best. If we take the whole stand, there’s nothing left to grow back." That was true, and the handbook said so, and it was also exactly what he wanted. "If we leave the heart of it, there might be more next season. And the end pieces are healthy. They’re enough to start with."

Dagna considered this and nodded. "Fine. What do you need?"

***

Alden lay on his back under the edge of the hood and put the flat of both hands against the first outer slab, not pulling, only holding it steady so it couldn’t crack when it shifted. Dagna knelt beside him with one of the padded boards from the shared kit, holding it just below the slab’s lower edge, ready to catch anything that fell.

Silas worked the seam.

With the field scraper, he flaked away the crumbling mortar around the slab grain by grain. Where the scraper couldn’t reach, behind the slab’s top edge, tucked against the vent, he reached in with Remote Grasp instead and brushed the grit loose, a pinch at a time, so gently it hardly cost anything. Twice he stopped to let his arm rest.

"It’s moving," Alden said quietly.

"Hold it. Don’t help it," Silas said.

The slab loosened. Silas eased it outward with Remote Grasp, a hair’s breadth, then another, guiding it down toward Dagna’s board while Alden kept it from tilting. It came free with a soft scrape and settled onto the padding, silver side up, gritty backing intact.

Dagna let out a breath.

The second slab, at the other end, went wrong.

He’d started it the same way. Halfway down the seam, the slab’s lower corner simply crumbled under the scraper, rotten through, and a piece the size of his palm broke off and fell. Dagna caught it on the board, but it came apart as it landed, moss and grit and stone flakes in a loose heap.

Silas swore, quietly.

The broken edge came apart beneath his thumb. The damp had weakened it all the way through.

Slower, he told himself. And not from below.

He changed the angle. Instead of working down the side seams, he worked along the upper edge only, where the stone was drier and firmer, and used Remote Grasp to take the slab’s weight from above so nothing pressed on the weak lower edge. It took twice as long. When it came free, it came whole, all but the corner they’d already lost. The third, now that he knew how, came out cleanly.

From the broken corner, he gathered what he could: the strands that had come loose clean, without much grit, into a small separate bundle of cloth. They wouldn’t grow on their own. But they were clean, and a refiner could look at them.

At the end, laid out on the padded board, they had three hand-sized pads of living silver on their thin stone backing, one missing a corner, and the little cloth bundle of loose growth beside them.

Under the hood, the thick silver heart of the band was untouched, with an outer slab still beside it, and the small presence sat in the middle of it, quite still.

***

Alden and Dagna took the board back to the kit while Silas packed.

He laid the three pads into Pell’s box with small stones under their corners, so they didn’t touch each other or the damp cloth, and left the lid open a crack for air. He put the little bundle in a separate fold of cloth at the end.

The air by his hip shimmered. Nim put his head out and looked at the box with enormous interest.

"You packed that very carefully," he said.

"I did," Silas said.

"Like food," Nim said hopefully.

"It isn’t food," Silas told him.

Nim looked at the moss, then at Silas, with deep and genuine betrayal. "Then why is it packed like food?"

"Because it’s alive and I want it to stay that way," Silas said.

Nim decided this was a very poor reason and withdrew with a huff.

Silas closed the lid to its crack and stood with the box in both hands.

At the gate he looked back once. The hood was quiet, the strip of marking cloth lifting in the draft. He wanted to see what grew there next season. For now, Alden was waiting to help carry the box, and Silas went to join him.