“Have you tried—” Beth’s voice trailed off as Chev hissed at her further interruption. She lowered her eyes.

I squeezed her small, cold hand.

Belle stood. “I would like to hear what the child has to say.”

Beth slid off the end of her chair, shoes tapping against the damp brick. “Have you tried making a crack?” she asked. “Splitting a small hole in a spot where you know our flowers might be seen?”

Chev made a sound like a drain. “If finding small flowers were so easy, those that found them would not be Kindred,” he said. “The Kindred are drawn to them because they are looking for something—and only in that moment understand that they have found it. It is a rare person who stops for small flowers.”

“But what if it isn’t? What if Kindred aren’t rare at all? What if they’re just in the wrong place?”

Chev’s voice rose and echoed through the tunnels. “A Kindred still looking for their flower is not yet ready for the understreets. This meeting is over.” He stalked from the chamber, vanishing into the tunnel that led to his tarp.

The other elders remained in their seats, looking at Beth.

“We don’t have many tools,” Dane said.

Beth held her trowel out, small fingers curled around the worn handle; its blade flashing in light so faint that even our gaping pupils strained.

***

Beth slipped the edge of her trowel into the seam where the rough under-grit of road met the smooth sidewalk near a drain, where the road had been opened before and worked soft. She twisted and pushed, digging away at loosened slag until a small seam of light opened and grew across her knuckles. She pushed the metal in farther. The plane of pavement shifted.

Beth’s dark hair was showered with grey dust that sparkled in the light from the new fissure. She turned to me and smiled. I traded a flower for her trowel, and she raised it into the daylight. We breathed the fine dust that hung in the air.

Laughter and joyful shouting spilled through the beam of light. Within moments, the flower was pinched. The world blurred, as it always did at the birth of a Kindred. A deep scrape, as if all the streets of the city above were sliding over the tunnels, sounded in my ears. Like the world pulling apart and then falling back together.

Beth tumbled to the tunnel floor, a fair young boy in her arms. His hair was so bright it stung my eyes. He smiled at Beth, and wrapped his chubby arms around her neck.

***