“I’m sorry about your daughter.” Her pupils stretched wide in the darkness, searching for scraps of light. Soon they would learn to fix open into the black stare of the Kindred, able to pull in the light from a storm drain three tunnels down.

I squeezed her small hand. “You’re my daughter now, and the only one in all the understreets.”

She was silent, then. I thought it was out of shyness. But knowing her now, I believe she was thinking. Planning.

***

“Why doesn’t anyone else have children?” Beth crumbled compost over the delicate buttercup sprouts that lined the old brick wall.

“Most of us are very old. Only the very old and the very young stop for small flowers anymore. And the young these days are older than the young that used to be. There are too many cares on their shoulders to bother with a small bit of brightness underfoot.” I looked at how her arms bent to her task, willowy and lean. “And you are very old, or very young, for a newborn.”

I could hear her thinking in the way that she breathed. Slow and shallow, like a rush of fresh air might interrupt her train of thought, though the air isn’t fresh. Not down here, and not up there.

“Do you miss your mother, Beth?” I shouldn’t have asked it. I should have done as Kindred do and pretended she’d never had one. That the canal through which she was born was a drain—her caul the tender leaves of sidewalk weeds.

“I never knew her. I don’t miss the nuns. They never let us play in the dirt.” She ran her fingers through the black soil at the base of an unfurling sprout.

It’s not uncommon for a Kindred. It’s easier to slip through the cracks when no one is looking.

“Are you bored, Beth? Are you lonely?”

“No.” She plucked at a mushroom sprouting from ancient grout and popped it in her mouth. “But maybe a little. Or maybe just worried.”

I paused in my digging. “Worry isn’t for the Kindred.” I fixed my black eyes on her. “Worry leaves no room for small flowers.” It’s what Belle had told me once, when I was newborn to the understreets, before the sun had faded from my skin and my collar sprouted lichen.

“But I’m worried about the Kindred, Aemon.”

“No need for that, child. We left our worries aboveground.”

“But if there are no other children, who will there be when the elders are gone?”

“No one, love.”

“But who will tend the flowers?”

“No one. Might be that’s an end for small flowers in the city above. Or might be that they never needed tending. Might be that the tunnels will fill with streams of wild buttercups.”