The latch of the iron container offered a stiff, protesting click under my fingers. Inside, nestled between layers of damp grey moss, lay the Great White Fern seed from the northern caves. It looked less like a living thing and more like a curled knuckle of bone, cold enough to mist the air around it. I picked it up with a pair of flat copper tongs, feeling the strange, thrumming vibration traveling up the metal handle. Levin looked over my shoulder, his green hair falling forward to brush against my temple.
“It survived the courier's coat better than I expected,” he murmured, his breath warm against the curve of my neck. I set the seed down on the slate counter, reaching for the brass key that unlocked the lower cabinets. We didn't talk about the smuggler or the council meeting waiting for us at midnight. There was only the dry rustle of the moss and the steady, annoying reminder of our bound heartbeats tapping in time.
“The soil needs to be heavily treated before this touches it,” Levin said, his fingers already sorting through jars of powdered sulfur and ash. He moved with a quiet, practiced grace that made my own kitchen franticness look clumsy by comparison. I watched him measure out three pinches of grey mineral dust into a shallow clay dish.
“Normal dirt will choke it within an hour,” I added, pulling a flask of distilled spring water from the shelf. He didn't answer right away, just kept his eyes fixed on the grey powder as he ground it with a stone pestle. The rhythmic scrape of stone against stone filled the small back room, steady enough to drown out the noise of the street outside. I liked watching him work when he wasn't trying to argue with me or bleed on my counters. It was the only time the world felt small enough to manage.
“You're staring again,” he said without looking up, a faint curve touching the corner of his mouth. I didn't look away, just set the water flask down hard enough to rattle the glass.
“Someone has to make sure you aren't slipping crushed nightshade into the mixture,” I muttered. He paused his grinding, turning his face toward mine with that infuriating calm that always made me want to throw things.
“You know as well as I do that nightshade would ruin the conduction,” he replied, his voice dropping into that low, even register. I reached out and took the pestle from his hand, our fingers brushing just enough to send a sharp jolt through my ribs. It wasn't hunger anymore, exactly, but it was something equally difficult to ignore. I turned back to the slate table, determined to focus on the iron box before things got complicated.
“How does a thing like this even grow in absolute darkness?” I asked, holding the bone-white seed up to the single overhead bulb. Levin leaned in close, pointing to the tiny, jagged grooves running along its spine.
“It feeds on ambient resonance, not sunlight,” he explained, his thumb tracing the edge of the table. “In the deep northern caves, it catches the sound of underground rivers and converts it into phosphorescence.” I set it back down on the slate, turning the idea over in my head like a heavy coin. If the fern could convert vibration into light, it might just act as the magical conduit we needed for the endless synthetic blood. We needed a plant that could root in absolute darkness and still draw enough light to feed a starving colony without burning out.
It was a mad theory, but right now, madness was all my kingdom had left.
“The vampire court isn't going to understand this,” I said, reaching for a clean glass pipette. Levin stopped mixing the mineral dust and looked down at the iron box. “They don't need to understand botany, Lilly. They just need to see bottles that don't taste like ash.” I dipped the pipette into a beaker of clear nutrient solution, watching the liquid climb the narrow glass tube.