Seeder, Chapter 1
1. Phlox
Last night, cross-eyed, wiped out, fingers cramped into talons, Phlox fell asleep in the hothouse on the roof. It’s conducive to sleep: humidity like the closeness of another body, rustle and sway of leaves rhythmic like breath. But in the morning, she’s drenched with sweat. Her skin is scored with runic patterns from the bed of leaves she slept in.
Phlox rises, assesses cricks in joints and tautness in muscles. She cracks her knuckles, touches her toes and plucks her messenger bag from the tangles. Empty mornings are the only gift the Urizen dynasty gives to the citizens of Lod: no jobs means no haste waking. Phlox has places to be, but nothing binds her to those plans. No one could stop her lying back in the ivy to doze, or chewing a fistful of khat and running mad through the city, wild-eyed and frothing. But she’s made promises, and promises create bindings.
It’s going to be a big day.
She picks ripe coffee cherries from a sidamo cultivar, careful not to thin the plant. Some residents grab whole bunches; the pacamara strains on the building’s north side are too scraggly to recover. The coffee plants are royal stock, seeds stolen from gated gardens in Last East. They don’t thrive here, but they survive. Same as anyone in Belovode. The catechismic response of Belovodi mothers to their children’s every request: it is enough.
Phlox chews the coffee cherries two at a time, grinding the dense seeds in her back teeth. The taste is the barely-there of watermelon, but the rush is immediate. Phlox puts her hand against the frosted hothouse glass; it sticks, and pulls away, leaving a palmprint that’s rapidly grown over with ice crystals. She takes a last breath of warm, thick air and yanks the door open, letting February’s cold grab her body. She sprints two steps to the other door, pulls it open, and spits spent cherry seeds over the edge of the roof. The door slams behind her, the stairway no warmer than outside. She presses her back against the iron door. The cold and caffeine provide knife-edge clarity. Sometimes the drugs need help. She hums a snippet of song about a mushroom her mother used to sing. One side makes you larger, and one side makes you small.
The shit they unwittingly feed you, she thinks, chewing the last cherry as she descends. She remembers her father coming in one night as her mother put her to bed. He smelled like pipesmoke and whiskey, and the clumsy rattle of keys in the lock announced his return from another late faculty meeting. He stood in the doorway, listened, then blew air out his nose.
Don’t sing the boy that hippie shit, he slurred. Her mother smiled at her conspiratorially and belted out the last line loud enough for her father to hear it in the living room.
Feed your head. Feed your head!
Phlox broke out in giggles, wide awake, wired.
In the hallway on twelve, Miss Pachenko sits on a folding chair, a three-foot piece of rebar across her lap. Miss Panchenko believes that any day now, the enemy will strike Belovode from above. In particular she believes troops will parachute from airships, landing on the roof of the building and marauding through the hallways, coming for the virtue of the female residents. In Miss Pachenko’s opinion, female virtue, not dead boys, is the central token of war. Miss Panchenko is in her eighties, a self-described dry husk and no longer worried about her own virtue. She sits vigil for the rest.
“How’s the knee?” Phlox asks.
“Worse in the cold,” says Miss Pachenko.
“It’s always cold,” says Phlox. She reaches into her bag and extracts a cabbage the size of a human heart. “Anti-inflammatory. Peel off the leaves, wrap them against the skin,” she says. “Overnight is easiest.”
“Can I eat it after?” asks Miss Panchenko. She takes the cabbage and sets it on the floor.
“I’m heading into Fulcrum, I’ll get you bread,” says Phlox.
Miss Pachenko clicks her tongue. “Veteran’s parade’s today. Practically begging the enemy to strike. Painting a target on the city so Altima Urizen can feel like a big man.”
“I’ll be careful,” says Phlox. She kisses Miss Pachenko’s wrinkled cheek.
“Careful won’t stop a bomb!” Miss Pachenko shouts after her. Their exchanges feel read from a script, carved into the bark of a tree.
Phlox Ericales ran away from her blood family when she was fourteen. In the ten years since, she’s been adopted into better, stronger families. This building represents only one. On nine, Benton hears her footsteps and comes out with biscuits, still hot. Phlox isn’t allowed to leave his sight without taking a bite; she singes her tongue to appease him. They are better than government bread; small but not bulked with alum and sawdust to fill the gut. The salt mingles with the lingering taste of the coffee cherries and she smiles. She spirals her way down the building. On eight, the Volkovs pause their argument to say good morning. Mrs. Volkov is two weeks past due with their first child, and their fights have a sweetness to them — Mr. Volkov is upset because he wants so badly to meet his daughter. Phlox gives them a tincture bottle of blue cohosh and warns her to strap in once she takes it. Sometimes Phlox warns people about the taste of things; more often they understand: the acrid tang, the herbal fug, are the costs, the price of healing.
The fourth floor, Phlox’s, is doomed. Everyone thinks so and even in the winter, when Belovode’s homeless population spikes, no one comes to squat in the fourth floor flats. The hallway walls are lined with kudzu and creeper; flats packed with vines thick as tree trunks. If you open the door, green mass spills out. The pipes are clogged and the electrical lines strangled, but electricity and running water are never guaranteed in West Flat. No one asks how Phlox manages: they assume she’s a witch. Sometimes Phlox let herself believe them. Her fingers drift through the kudzu, which crackles with static electricity that builds as leaves brush one another. A bark-crustem vein of xylem runs along the floor next to the wall, thrumming with flowing water.
All this collects in 4F: Phlox’s home, her private manifesto, her proof of concept. No one is allowed in Phlox’s place: no lovers, no conspirators. An important part of her belief in collective action is having a cloister to which she can retreat. The plaster and iron walls are hung with paintings by artists from across Belovode. Before today, Phlox has never sold one of her paintings for money — none of her friends or acquaintances have — but there’s an active barter market among themselves, a quiet economy in which no one admits certain works are valued more than others. One reason Phlox doesn’t let anyone into her home is she can’t allow fellow artists to see which pieces she treasures, which ones she’s removed from the economy, hoarding them for herself. If anyone knew she had Fyodor’s oil painting of the wheat fields in Last East, or Valerian’s chiaroscuro of the Northeast Woods, and offered a trade for it, she’d be heartbroken, compelled to accept. Better they forget, and the paintings remain here, hers.
Phlox fills a bag with lukewarm water and hangs it in the shower. She cleans off last night’s efforts, along with soil and clinging leaf. She stares at her closet, mulling outfits that meet the conditions of today’s meetings. Indecisive, she pulls on an oversize teeshirt, stolen from a lover or a conquest, the words on it faded into nothing. She returns to her messenger bag, and brings out her oracle cards.
It’s counterintuitive doing a reading while her head is razor sharp and crisp. She usually reserves readings for evenings when she’s come home drunk, or rolled up a joint to allow herself to go fuzzy. Needs must.
The cards aren’t for augury, but they can clarify Phlox’s thinking on a problem. She orients herself east, where the day waits, and places her hand on the deck. She thinks about her day, not in terms of people but the events they represent.
The girl first: the princess.
Phlox draws her first card.
Beth root: reflect and emit, adopt another’s power. It could mean using the girl’s position for advantage — the plan to begin with — or to allow the girl some aspect of Phlox’s own power, reflected.
She turns the second card, for the man from Kitezh.
Queen Anne’s lace, for sanctuary. Simplest reading signifies the man and where he comes from; Kitezh harbors academics and heretics. But it could mean an offer from Phlox.
She turns the last card, for Yarrow.
Aconite: a boundary. It confirms Phlox’s feelings about the day. Not a helpful read. She slips the drawn cards onto the bottom of the deck, wraps it in hempen twine, and puts it in her bag. From her closet, she picks a military uniform: a gunmetal grey wool coat and pants she spliced with vines of verdant linen. She looks like a Urizen soldier being consumed in green flame. She nods at her reflection in the cracked blackglass mirror, pleased.
Yes.
It’s going to be a big day.
