The dirt is tough at first, but on the third attempt Vern’s shovel breaks through, sinking deep into the pale earth. She leans there for a moment, heavy breaths misting in the winter air, and wishes for a breeze not conjured by the rush of cars on the overpass above her, a breeze not smelling of rubber and oil and artifice. But Ackers Park is the only place she knows where the ground still lives, and so she has braved the smell and the darkness and the cutthroats lurking in the alleyways to see this done right. After all, a daughter of the City deserves better than a concrete tomb.
Once her breath has returned, she wipes her brow with a kerchief and is only mildly surprised when it comes away rusty with blood. Her stitches have popped again, but time enough for that later. Rolling up her sleeves, she welcomes the biting cold against her skin as she sets to work, each stroke sending the spade deeper into the clay. It’s hard work, good work, the best work. No time to think. Just down and up, up and down.
“Come here often?”
She turns, slowly, wearily, to see a ragged figure in a brown duster sitting on the nearest park bench. The lamplight pools around them, leaving their face in shadow.
“You talking to me?” She immediately regrets the instinct to reply, but it’s too late. Snapping her gaze away, she returns to her work.
And yet, the stranger merely looks around as though expecting to find a market sausage-peddler hiding in the bushes, laughing silently at the idea that they could be addressing anyone else.
Vern shakes her head and turns back to the hole she’s digging in her heart. Can’t this godsforsaken city give her a moment’s peace? It will, of course, but she has seen little enough of the City’s grace in her fifteen years under its shadow, so perhaps her cynicism can be forgiven.
With renewed vigor, she drives the shovel down and gives a savage twist. She is not in a conversational mood, much less a forgiving one.
“Do you want a hand with that?”
She keeps the stranger in her periphery as she dumps another load of thick clay and rock at the base of the park’s lone, scraggly tree. Already her arms are sore from breaking apart the stubborn soil, and what to show for it but a hole barely big enough for an Ogre–Sized Omelette from Rumeshi’s. Vern is brave, but she’s also afraid, too young to know how bravery must coexist with fear, too young for a shovel this big, too young to be burying a body in a public park so small and forgotten it doesn’t even have a swingset.
“You won’t have much luck, not with that soil.” The stranger pushes themself off the bench, and watching through her bangs Vern is surprised by how slight they are—they can’t be much older than her, unless they have gnomish blood or something.
“It’s been sucked dry—all of its nutrients gone to feed this poor tree.” One hand brushes the trunk gently as they pass it.
She shovels another load, trying to make the gesture threatening. Anger makes her strokes heavier, more forceful, and the thought of using the shovel as a weapon crosses her mind more than once.
“So if you’re looking for dirt, you should…”
They trail off, and they’re close enough now that Vern can see a thin face under the heavy scarf, a face blanched white at what it’s seen. Say what you like about their poor social instincts, they have the tact to realize they’ve misjudged the situation terribly.
“Oh.”
Vern raises the spade slowly. “Do you get the fucking drift?”
The stranger backpedals as she slams the shovel into the ground, putting all her fear and rage and grief behind the stroke.
Crack!
The much-maligned old shovel gives up and Vern staggers, now clutching only a jagged length of wood.
“Oh,” the stranger repeats, gaze still hanging with morbid curiosity on the long burlap bag lying in the bushes.
“FUCK YOU!” She lurches forwards, swinging the broken handle like a club. “That was my only shovel, you bastard! They are protesting, hands raised and stammering apologies on their lips and Vern finds that she does not care, that she wants to hurt someone because she is hurting, that the sound of the club cracking into this gutter rat’s forehead is the only sound that she ever wants to hear again.
But the soft thud as their body falls to the ground changes her mind.
For several seconds, the only sounds are her own breathing and the distant thunder of the overpass. Then: the thump of the club falling from her numb hand as she drops to the ground beside the awkward pile of limbs and beige duster. Then: the words she whispers like a mantra, over and over, for the second time in her too few years.
“Please don’t be dead,” Vern asks.
It’s about three minutes before they come to. Maybe more. She’s not really paying attention to anything other than the latest broken thing cradled in her arms, so it catches her off guard when the pile of brown coat rolls over and groans. She glances up, and locks eyes with the stranger, staring blearily at her with one hand on their temple and a fresh smear of dirt across their face and hair.
“You’re crying.”
Vern glares daggers. “Yeah, no shit.”
“Oh. Sorry, that was… I should go.” They try to rise hastily and immediately regret it.
A ragged sigh slips from her lungs. “You’re concussed.” Vern has seen enough head injuries to know what a concussion looks like, and her anger has been quenched by exhaustion and the cold. Now, she just feels empty.
The stranger drags their hand through unkempt hair, trying to remove the clods of dirt. After a moment, they speak again. “I suppose I probably deserved that.”
Vern ignores them and continues wiping her face with her kerchief. Her face makes it clear that she agrees.
“I am sorry. About the shovel, and…”
“How am I supposed to do this now?” Her voice is raw. She knows this is stupid, that talking to strangers is dangerous, that showing emotion in public is weakness, but safety feels like a lie now, strength, an illusion. “This was my only shovel, and I fucking broke it. It had one job, and it failed, and now…” She sniffs, trying to keep herself from lapsing back into crying. “Now I’m crying over a shovel in front of a ratgator-licking bastard in this stupid park with its stupid fucking concrete soil—what the hell is wrong with this place? Dirt’s not supposed to be like this!” By the time the words run out, she is half shouting.
The stranger waits for her words to stop echoing off the concrete forest around them before they speak again, softly, almost a murmur. “Soil isn’t meant to be in places like this—cut off from the world where it belongs.” They run a hand through the spoil of her abortive attempt at gravedigging, breaking up the tough clay into tiny grains of ochre sand. “It’s amazing that anything can grow here—the City wasn’t made for growing things. And yet, even with no nourishment, no fertilizer, and barely any sun… life endures.”
There’s something oddly soothing about the cadence of their speech that stops Vern from interrupting. Maybe it’s just the sound of another voice that she has latched onto. She glances towards the bushes, remembering a voice that lives on only in her memory, then hastily looks away. “You some kind of philosopher?”
The stranger laughs nervously, uncertain what to make of this burgeoning conversation. “Uh, no.” They take a steadying breath, still holding their head. “I’m a gardener, actually.”
Vern snorts. “Down here?”
“You’d be surprised.” They wait a moment, hovering on the edge of speaking, before finally managing a lame “you?”
She looks up, surprise and confusion mingling on her face. “Me? Oh. I deliver papers and, uh, stuff.”
Her words trail off into silence. Above them, a truck rattles across the overpass, and somewhere far away an airship’s horn sounds. Sirens grow louder, then fainter, then fade altogether. Vern shiveres, unrolling her sleeves to cover forearms clammy with cold. She looks down at the broken spade in her lap, and wonders where she found the strength to break it.
“Don’t have a spare shovel lying around, by chance?”
The stranger looks up hesitantly. “Uh, no… But if you want help, I… I might know somewhere to go. Somewhere better than here for you to, uh…” Their eyes flick towards the bushes.
“No.”
“I don’t mean an undertaker or anything,” they rushed to explain, stumbling over the syllables. “I mean somewhere like this—a park, of sorts. It’s a bit of a trek, but my head’s stopped spinning like an engine pumped on flux, so I should be good for it… if you want to.”
Vern sighs heavily, filling the air around her with a cloud of mist. “You take the legs,” she says, rising wearily to her feet and rolling her shoulders.
“What? Oh.”
It’s the hardest thing Vern has ever done, to pick up that bag again, to feel the cold, hollow weight inside resting on her shoulder in the same way Ajsha’s head used to. But she refuses to break down in front of a stranger again, even a gardener, and after much grunting and shifting, they manage to balance its weight between them.
“Well, which way?”
“This,” Vern observes, “is a dead end.”
It’s hard to see how the stranger reacts around the bulk of the bag, but they don’t seem perturbed, and they don’t slow the steady, shuffling pace they’ve been maintaining.
“If this is some kind of trick…” She shifts the weight of the bag to free one hand and taps the shovel head poking from her satchel.
“No trick,” they assure her. “Should only be a little further.”
A sudden movement catches both their gazes, as a bulky figure detaches itself from the shadows of an alley—a man in a stained corduroy suit jacket, a cap under one arm. For a moment, three pairs of eyes flick between each other.
“Good evening.” Vern’s voice is low and menacing, projecting a strength that has never felt more absent.
But it’s enough. The man raises an eyebrow, looks between Vern and the bag she’s carrying, and heads on his way a little more briskly than before. Only when his footsteps have faded does she let her shoulders sag, catching the bag with a grunt as it starts to roll.
“Should we…”
“Move a little faster? Great idea.” Vern sets the pace this time, alert for any movement. She can see the stranger staring at the ground—they need to get a move on. “Also a good idea? Knowing where the hells we’re going.”
“Well, it’s a sort of park, I suppose.”
“You said it yourself, nothing grows down here. Ackers is the closest thing to green you’ll find outside of a Salad Serpent dinner bowl.”
Though Vern can’t see it, the stranger is smiling under their scarf. They know that for everything the City takes, it always gives something back. “I said that life endures. It doesn’t need much—the smallest handhold, a toe in the door, a crack in the sidewalk—but once it takes root it will find a way to grow, eventually.”
They’ve come to a stop in the shadow of an old subway station, and Vern looks up at the rusting, crooked sign that announces: Dragonspur Road Station.
“You can’t be serious.”
The stranger glances back over their shoulder, and this time she does see them smile. “The Gatters Line doesn’t run this way anymore—This station hasn’t been used in years…”
Vern has heard the rumors, everyone has. No place in the City stays abandoned for long; it just changes ownership.
“…or at least, not by anyone other than me,” they finish, seeing her alarm. “Do you have a light?”
Vern hesitates. She does have one, but she can’t reach it without dropping the bag. “We’ll need to… put her down.”
The stranger nods, the gesture vague in the darkness, and they gently lower the bag to the ground. Rooting around in her satchel for her pocket torch, she doesn’t see the stranger’s gaze lingering on the dull brown burlap, on the faintest impression of a face in the cloth. When she produces it and flicks on the light, they look away hurriedly.
“I’ll go down first—watch your step, it’s slippery.”
Slowly, they begin to descend. At first, her wan light falls on chipped stairs and bare concrete walls—the bones of forgotten infrastructure. But something in the air feels different after the first flight of stairs. The oppressive echo of every shuffling footstep is gone, replaced by a distant trickling of water. And now: the stairs are soft under her feet, as a carpet of moss has crept over them. And now: the walls are upholstered in verdigris, with roots spreading from between exposed rebar. And now: light, pale and soft from the moon far above, shines down through a narrow, open crack in the ceiling as they step out onto the platform.
“I’m a gardener,” the stranger says, and this time Vern finds no breath to disagree. All around her, in every place her light falls: green. The iron beams and pillars of the station’s roof have become a massive trellis, draped with vines and roots reaching towards the light. On the floor, broken tiles lie in moss-covered mounds that rise from a thick carpet of grass and clover. Ivy spirals up the walls, ferns reach fronds from beneath the railroad ties, and in the low trough where trains once came and went, a blanket of dark earth now lies.
Vern has heard people call the City the most beautiful place in the world. Now, for the first time, she wonders if that might just be true.
“I’ve been working on this place for a while now,” they explain, bending slowly to ease down the bag. “It took forever to pry up all the tiles and bring in fresh earth, but all I needed to do was make a crack and life did the rest. The seeds of change can grow in the most unexpected of places, if you give them the chance to. I was going to plant bulbs in the new soil down there come springtime, but…”
“Thank you. Truly, I don’t know how to. But thank you.”
The stranger shrinks into their scarf at her words and steps back, giving her space. Slowly, reverently, Vern unbuckles the straps that hold the bag closed. Her hands are shaking as she reaches inside, lifts out the still form that lies within. Ajsha’s body feels too light and yet too heavy as she lifts it, carries it, lays it down in the soil. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “This was the best I could do.” Her hand lingers a moment on Ajsha’s cheek, but she knows that if she doesn’t let go now, she never will.
Vern has no shovel, nor does she need one. Slowly, handful by handful, she returns her city-sister to the earth. Only when the soil forms a smooth, unbroken mound does she rise, hands stained with dirt and cheeks stained with tears.
For a long moment, there is no sound save for a distant trickle of water.
“Who was she?”
Vern smiles sadly. “She was my city-sister. She was everything: brave, tough, stubborn—sometimes too stubborn for her own good.” She laughs, and the sound echoes in the verdant station. “She would have been furious I broke her shovel—I wouldn’t have heard the end of it for weeks. One time I borrowed her bike and ran into an angry ratgator on my route, and…” She trails off, rendered silent by the weight of all the words she has not said, all the memories that are now hers alone. “Sorry,” she finishes lamely, not meeting their eyes.
“I’m Ellys,” the stranger says abruptly, staring intently at the moss beneath their feet. “I figured if you’re telling me all this, you should know my name. And I’m really, uh, really sorry about your city-sister.”
A faint smile finds its way onto Vern’s face. “Thanks,” she mutters, then: “Vern.”
“What?”
“That’s my name—Vern.”
“Oh. Nice to meet you, I guess. Thanks for not killing me with a broken shovel.”
Vern winces. “Are you…”
“I’ll be okay,” Ellys replies, rubbing the bruise ruefully. “As I said, I probably deserved it. You’d had a rough day and I really wasn’t helping.”
“But you did. Eventually.”
“I guess so.”
The silence, when it comes this time, is softened by overgrown surfaces around them. It seems almost companionable—the kind of silence you would never expect to find on a subway platform—and yet…
“Where did you, uh…” Ellys trails off, then rallies: “Where did you learn to do it this way?”
“Nowhere,” Vern answers, looking up towards the shafts of moonlight dappling the freshly turned earth. “It’s just how we do things.” She breathes in, and the air carries the scent of soil and roots and petrichor. “A daughter of the City deserves better than a concrete tomb.”
Ellys grins sadly, and follows her gaze. “Indeed. That, she does.”
And then: “How long have you been here?”
“In the City? All my life.”
“No, here.”
“Oh… more than a year, now. I live across the overpass, there’s another entrance on that side. I found this place by accident; had to relocate a family of cave fishers.
“Where did they go?”
“Next station down the line, I imagine.”
And then: “You’re bleeding.”
“Oh. Right. A few popped stitches, nothing serious.”
“Are you… let me take a look at it.”
“You’re concussed—sit down.”
“Fine. Later…”
“Yeah, okay. Later.”
And then: “You should plant those bulbs anyways—when spring comes, I mean.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah… she would have loved this place.”
“Well I’m glad she found her way here; glad both of you did.”
“Yeah. Me too.”