Aster Alloway's Arc

Chapter 10 of 26

The newt led Aster into a wide meadow, then stopped at its edge and sat. Poppies filled the space ahead, red and pink and orange, thick as a carpet. At the center, on a single tall stalk, stood the bloom she had chased for six years. It was closed. Its petals wrapped tight around themselves, sealed like a fist. Aster crossed to it with her fly-shoes and knelt. She pressed two fingers to the outer petal and pushed, gentle. Nothing gave. She did not know what opened a flower that opened once a century. She tried what she knew. She cupped warm breath against it. She trickled water from her flask along the stem. She waited for sun to shift across it. The bloom held shut. Her hands, all four of them, hovered and did nothing useful. Time was thin. If she failed here, no one else was coming for a hundred years. "Don't force it." Aster turned. Cosmo Fenn stepped out of the poppies behind her. He was the tidy old baker from her street, the one who left cardamom rolls on stoops and waved at every neighbor. He had asked to come along for this exact moment. He wore a pressed shirt, dust on his cuffs, and he looked at the bloom the way a man looks at an old friend. "I sang a rosebush open once," he said. "An hour, outside a hospital window. It opened." Aster stood back. "Then sing." Cosmo set his feet in the poppies. He drew a slow breath. Then he sang. The first note was low and steady, and it rolled out over the meadow. Around him, the poppies stirred. Petals that had been half-shut spread wide, red and pink flaring open in rings that moved outward from his voice. The whole field answered him. But the tall bloom at the center stayed closed. Cosmo did not stop. He climbed higher, note by note, and stepped closer to the stalk. Aster held her breath. The sealed petals trembled. A seam of gold light showed at their tips. Then, slow as a hand unfolding, the century bloom opened. Its petals fell back one by one. Pollen lifted from its heart, bright and drifting, the same glow that had lived on Aster's apron for six years. "Now," Cosmo said, breath spent. "Catch it before the wind does." Aster snapped open the sealed canister from her pack. She swept it under the drifting pollen and pressed the lid shut. The glow lit the metal from inside. She had it. The thing she had crossed the groves for sat locked in her hands. Then the bloom shuddered. Its open petals began to curl again, faster than they had opened. Around it, the poppies were closing too. The meadow that had answered Cosmo's voice was shutting itself, and the newt at the edge stood up and turned back the way they had come.