It is a weak sort of fear, cowering and smokeless, at a remove from life. His shoulders rounded, his chin tucked in Grendel’s abject stoop. The respirator remains spread out on the table in front of him, built to filter Smoke from the infectious air and wall in its wearer within the safety of his private self. Thomas is conscious of Livia watching him as he turns the mask within his hands; once, twice; disappointment cleaving her face. Then she bends to him, leans into him, lip to lip, and shouts her anger into his face—“Help us, God damn you!”—each word a sulphurous taunt summoning his manhood, in that strange language of Smoke in which love and derision can be as one.

It is enough and not enough; sends him to his feet and away from the table, half in obedience to her call to arms, half in flight from her challenge. Like Charlie before him, he storms around the room housing the fermentation vats. It is not the walls he inspects but the floors; and seeing nothing, no fresh seams nor any irregularities in the dark tiling, his courage already abating, he grabs a wrench from a toolbox in one corner, and systematically, hurting his wrist and damaged hand, hammers away at a copper pipe emerging from one of the hulking vats like a spout, until it gives way and a sickly floral liquid pours in a thousand gallons across the floor. Then he stands, watching the room fill inch-deep with flowers and liquid, eyes peeled, head cocked, like a man on the hunt.

“Why did you—” Charlie begins but Thomas hushes him, hears then sees the pop of bubbles in one corner, where the liquid is drawn to some flaw within the flooring and is rushing to a pocket of air trapped underneath. As the liquid’s level slowly begins to fall, the flowers floating within it arrange themselves into a rough and soggy square, marking the outline of a well-masked trapdoor underneath their feet.

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They have to wait until the weight of the liquid has shifted from the door, then kick aside the pulpy mass of drenched and half-fermented flowers. The trapdoor itself has a tiny keyhole and is locked. This time it is Charlie who acts: he fetches a giant steel ladle from the same box of tools that supplied the wrench, manages to wedge it into the minute gap between trapdoor and floor, and throws his weight against it. Soon Thomas too is pushing at this lever. Together, they break the lock and bend the ladle, open the trapdoor to a rough-hewn wooden staircase leading down.