She smiled through the dark, and I saw her eyes were as black as mine. But then her smile wilted and her pupils shrank to pinpricks—her eyes wide discs of blue.

“I’ll be alone, then. When all of you are gone. That can’t happen,” she said, and jabbed her trowel into the offal piled under a drain.

***

Toes tapped like the incessant drip of water, echoed through the meeting chamber as we waited. Beth balanced along an old train rail, dragging her toes through the grit, oblivious to the empty seat that held the elders rapt.

Roz never came.

The agenda was cast aside in favor of organizing a search. Chev knew where her tarp was, but none knew her fishing spot—her crack in the sidewalk where she held her flower, hopes high.

“Her knees have ague,” Dane said. “It won’t be far from her tarp.”

No maps are allowed in the understreets, but any Kindred worth his muck can follow the glowing fissures in the street overhead. It’s the branching vascular system of our world.

Dane found Roz in a bright beam of light pouring from the hole where a slab of sidewalk had fallen in and crushed her. Her fragile frame curled in at jointed angles, like a dry spider. She held a fistful of buttercups—one still pinched in her outstretched fingers. The flowers drank in the light and glowed with it.

We squeezed our eyes against the glare, wrapped strips of black cloth across them, and felt our way toward her. She had to be moved before the sunwalkers found her—before their light-kissed faces peered curiously through the hole, now a window to our world.

There was a rustling and crunch of gravel.

“Aemon, what should we do with her flowers?” A small voice echoed from somewhere in front of me. I peered at her from beneath my cloth. She stared at Roz’s fallen form, her face pinched in a familiar kind of pain. Her childhood had faded from her in that moment—her shoulders squared and fists clenched.

“Beth, get away from there! The street here isn’t stable. Put your blindfold on and stand back.”

“I don’t need a blindfold, Aemon, the light doesn’t hurt after a minute or two.” She kneeled and took Roz’s hand in her own.

Chev’s deep voice came from the left. “Obey your father, child. If you would be Kindred, your eyes must be attuned to the dark. Light poisons them. Shun it.”

“The light isn’t poison. Our flowers need it, so we need it. We need more of it,” Beth said.

Heavy footfalls fell beside me. I ripped off my blindfold.