The Honey Trap

“What the hell is that?”

The apple looked awful. A piebald runt in red and yellow-green, with a sandpaper roughness around its bear-stub stalk. A bulge threatened one side of its thick-looking matte skin, squeezing creases into its squat sides. It sat on the table like an insult, a gnarled middle finger to the perfected #04B404 Foods Agency standard that reigned the international markets.

Jack Becker – accredited independent collective operator, award-winning Growth Guru, author, cult TV personality – plucked up the fruit in one rubber-gloved hand.

“I have never,” he said, “ever seen such a hideous-looking apple before. Truly.”

Becker shook his head, and smiled.

“What’s your secret, kid?”

The kid shrugged, hands thrust in the pockets of a goodwill grey hoodie, and looked about the Faire. At tables stacked with bespoke preserves, and obscure small town delicacies crammed between avalanches of vegetables; rows haunted by drifts of discerning foodies and brand-stamped hipsters, sizing up each other’s loyalties. Becker’s own table was bare by comparison, but he was here as the borough’s resident Growth Guru, not head of the largest collective this side of the city.

Still. Compared to the fans who usually showed up for his advice, this guy looked more like someone’s kid brother. Becker took another glance at the hooded face. Kid sister, rather.

“Hey, Cole.” Becker leaned back and hollered at his warehouse manager, the guy with a better eye for varietals than anyone else he knew, buried behind crates of Becker’s latest Grower’s Guide. “You gotta see what we got here, man, seriously.”

“Oh wow, I haven’t seen anything like this since the bees died out.”

“I know, right? Do you know it?”

Cole shook his head. “I woulda said it was a Calville Blanc, but the colouring’s all wrong, and the size, it’s all wrong.” He hesitated to touch the misshapen apple. “Nope. Where did she get this?” Becker shrugged. “Where did you get this?” Cole asked the kid this time, who clammed up and wouldn’t budge.

Becker waved off his buddy.

“So you grew this yourself?” he said.

She nodded.

“Okay then.”

Becker sat turning the apple in his hand. Maybe the kid was telling the truth. It certainly didn’t hurt to try and find out a little more.

“Do you mind if I try a bit?”

Taking the knife beside him, Becker carved an oblique slice off the apple, slid it off the blade and into his mouth. The crisp flesh tingled as it brushed his tongue, like the moment before a lightning strike, and Becker bit down.

Juice billowed into every nook of his mouth – around his tongue, between his teeth – nectarous and sharp, and so alien-strong it was near unbearable. Becker almost choked as he forced himself to chew slow, to savour it.

“That is incredibly sweet,” he managed. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’ve never seen something so goddamn ugly in all my life, but compared to the agency standard? This just blows it out of the water. Excuse me.” Becker took a draught from the glass next to him, swilled and spat. “Okay, wow. That more than makes up for its size. Who would expect a runt like that to pack such a punch?”

Becker caught the smear of juice gathering on his chin, set down the knife to reach for the fresh wipes.

“So, you grew this yourself,” he said, as he folded the tissue away. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

The kid said nothing.

“I mean, of course you’re using a custom blend of plant food here. Not the flat beer trick, everyone knows that’s a myth.” He paused for a reaction. Still nothing.

Becker waited. With some of these fans, it took them a while to get an answer out, as if any talent they might have for the art see-sawed their ability to express themselves in words. She just needed a little time to get herself together.

But the kid shook her head. Coy.

“No? So… What? You want me to guess?”

The kid nodded shyly.

“Okay then, let me think…”

Becker threw the kid a few stock questions as he examined the apple once more. The one that couldn’t have come from the self-pollinators normal people grew. That broke about a hundred international laws of sale. That a welfare kid couldn’t possibly be growing – not an heirloom, surely? Becker rocked the impossible apple between his hands. He could take all the guesses he liked. If you’d told Jack Becker that a kid was growing an apple like this – even if she was as old as he’d been when he’d started, he wouldn’t have believed you if you’d stuck it in front of him, carved off a piece, told him to bite… A drop of juice sluiced into his palm, and Becker struggled not to take the glove between his teeth and suck the nectar out of the folds there and then.

Ruckus. Becker’s eyes snapped up to a nearby stall. The Bow Boys, broadcasting their latest exclusive, an heirloom find – a lonely, last-of-its-kind, only-for-most-chronically-trust-funded tree, dug up withering in some deserted Arizona backwater – across a clutch of toothpick-wielding rubberneckers.

He didn’t have time for this. Becker clicked his tongue against his teeth, dislodging a piece of fruit in the back of his gum.

“Well, you’ve got me,” said Becker, handing back the apple. “Well done.”

The kid smiled and carefully wrapped the apple back in its supermarket bag.

“What’s your name, by the way?” Becker asked.

The kid said, “I have to go.”

And Becker let her. He thanked her, shook her hand – and on the count of ten, followed the kid out of the community space and into the street.

Outside, the summer crowd at The Temple bar spilled out between faux pear trees on the right-side pavement. To the left, a honeysucker pulled out of an alleyway, and a pair of cops wrestled some waster who’d missed the street composter by a few feet.

Becker cursed his luck and headed back to the table.

“Anything?”

Cole shook his head and continued stacking guides. “She’s not a regular. No one’s seen her before. We don’t know anyone working on anything like that, in ours or any other collective. Assuming she’s online, she’s well hidden.”

“Everyone’s online.” Becker stripped off the rubber glove with a wet smack and handed it to Cole. “Can we get the mem-sniffer on this one? Take the glass as well.” He elbowed aside a pile of books and dug it out. “See what you can find.”

“Really that good, huh?”

Cole paused, a recently cultivated tic of disapproval that Becker had learned would go away if he didn’t acknowledge it. They both knew who would break first.

“All right then…”

Becker shrugged off the tone. “You didn’t taste it. It was… indescribable. East side couldn’t come up with this with a million years and a batch of monkeys.”

“Yet you have no clue where it comes from.”

Becker dug a slice of skin out of his teeth and added it to the water. “Not yet.”

The bell was flat, and it took twenty minutes and another tenant going up to get Becker into the building.

“Hello, Mrs Hoffman, is Danielle available, please?”

A half-moon pair of glasses looked him up and down from behind the door chain.

“Just a moment.”

Becker never had cause to be in this neighbourhood. Here the tenement roofs and vacant lots were owned mostly by a revolving chain of pushers, fighting a winning battle against limited police resources and a losing one against the rising salt levels in the groundwater. For now, it was nothing to do with him. The growers kept to their patch, the pushers left them alone. It worked.

The corridor was dark and smelt of too much disinfectant for concrete.

“What are you doing here?”

For someone so evasive, the kid was direct. Becker liked that. He flashed her a photo-op smile. “And hello to you too. Can I come in? I’d like to talk to you. About that apple you showed me.”

Grey hood folded round her neck, Danielle Hoffman stared at him.

Mrs Hoffman yelled, “Are you going to let your friend in, or are you going to keep him waiting out there?”

The kid disappeared from view, and the door slid open.

“Come in,” said Mrs Hoffman. “I’m sorry about my daughter. She forgets her manners sometimes. Would you like some coffee? Danielle, make your friend a cup of a coffee. Watch out for that machine, the power’s on the blink again. Do you take it black or white?”

“Black, please, Mrs Hoffman.”

Becker was gently herded between a beaten-up sofa and a coffee table, as Mrs Hoffman filled in the blanks that a government sanitation truck registration and a hand-printed doorbell sticker couldn’t. The terrible drainage on the lower floors, how it aggravated her health complaints, how he shouldn’t take her child’s behaviour to mean anything more than her long nights Working for the Government –

“I drive a honeysucker, Mom.”

Mrs Hoffman looked askance. “Well he doesn’t have to know that…”

– and did she park that thing round the front again, and didn’t she know that people talked, and why couldn’t she be more like her brother who actually had ambition and studied at that C-U-N-Y, didn’t he know. Becker tried to shoot the kid a sympathetic look. It was the same song of disillusionment he’d heard from scores of misunderstood growers he’d given a home to over the years. Becker knew the key changes by heart.

Danielle clanked down a mug of coffee on the table in front of him and stood there with arms folded.

“You’ve been following me,” she said.

“You’re not easy to track down, kid.” Becker smiled and indicated the seat cushion next to him. Standing there, she didn’t look like a Danielle to him, more like a Dani. Dani Hoffman. Now that suited her better, he thought.

Dani didn’t sit down.

“I don’t want you following me.” She shoved her hands in her pockets. “I don’t want you here.”

“Very well.” Becker got up. “But imagine all this from my perspective. You show up, out of the blue, with an apple that looks like the bride of Frankenstein and tastes like heaven itself. I ask around after you, but none of the growers have seen you before. There’s no blog, no connections. Just the most beautiful piece of fruit I’ve ever tasted. You’d have to forgive me for wondering what the mystery is about.”

The kid shrugged and shifted on her feet.

“I just grow apples,” she said. “Mostly apples.”

“Well,” said Becker. “Can I see them?”

It was rightly half a bedroom, a dry wall splitting the differences between Dani Hoffman and her brother – more than just age, going by the pounding bass shaking the dust. A single bed, floor stacked books – a copy of the Guide – topped with headphones, and a handful of bottles huddled from the maze of tubes that lined the walls; a complex of homemade pods lashed together with what looked like old guttering, myco-meal tubs and plastic ties. Here and there she’d stuck clippings, taped printouts of sunlit spruce and vast grasslands from the last of the gov-mandated reserves. Explosions of green shoots lined the pipe between feeders – old soda bottles, filled with what looked like high caffeine energy drink. A gamer’s basement ant farm.

Becker nodded his appreciation. Of course, structure-wise, there was nothing to mark the kid out from the thousands of fresh-faced foodies he saw at the events, who dedicated precious inches of their cramped apartments to their obsession. Accomplished work for a self-build, certainly, but nothing as promising as what he’d tasted the other night.

“You wanted to see the apples,” said Dani.

Becker had missed the six pots underneath the hanging maze, each with its own dwarf apple tree.

“That’s not real compost, of course.”

The kid shook her head. “Leftovers, garbage mulch, solution. The usual.”

She nodded at the wall. At this entire labyrinth of hydroponics she’d built from scratch, just to grow leaf mulch for the apples. Becker whistled.

He bent down and smoothed one of the leaves between his fingers. More of the feeders were set into the soil of each apple tub, drip-feeding the trees. This had to be it. Cole’s ’sniffer had come back with the usual traces from the apple fragments – a higher ammonia content than normal, yes – but it was a blunt instrument after all, only able to detect what it was tuned for. Gently, Becker twisted a bottle to get a better look at the label – a neat K, written in marker, and along the line M, S, N, C, and V. Potassium, Magnesium, Sulphur, Nitrogen, Carbon… V had Becker stumped, but he could check that one later.

“So you’re experimenting with solutions,” Becker said. “That’s pretty cool. Have you read Aaron Goldstein’s blog? He’s affiliated with our collective. He does some really great stuff with blends, you two should meet. We’ll hook you up.”

“Maybe,” said Dani.

Becker bristled and straightened up. He’d just have to try another angle. The kid liked the direct approach, after all.

Becker asked, “That apple you gave me the other night, which one was that from?”

The kid hesitated, then pointed to the M. Becker lifted a branch to find a cluster of shabby grotesques, kin to the apple she had brought that night – then realised so too did every tree, right along the line.

“What suspension are you using, anyway?” said Becker. “This looks more like energy drink than anything else.”

At this, Dani Hoffman broke into a smile. She closed the bedroom door, and then went over to the detritus by the bed. Kicking aside a handful of plant syringes, she picked up one of the spare feeder bottles, already brimming. Dani unscrewed the top and held it out to Becker.

He took a short sniff. “Holy shit,” he recoiled. It stunk like the composters on the street corners.

“Have you been… pissing on your plants?” Becker said as Dani rocked with silent laughter. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”

Dani shook her head. “I rigged our poster,” she said. She pointed to another mason bottle in the corner, another pile of tubes. “Changed up the strength.”

“No burning.” Becker nodded. “But I don’t get it. I mean, you’re a driver, right? Rather than all this, wouldn’t it be simpler to just sort of skim the manure off your honeysucker, put that in with the mulch?”

“That’s spoken for.” A shadow flickered across Dani’s face for a moment. “Security’s tight. Quotas, clearance checks, sensors.”

“Right. I guess it mustn’t be the easiest job in this kind of neighbourhood,” said Becker. “I heard about this one guy, last month, got jumped while he was collecting. They got out with his entire truck, three building’s worth. Dropped him in the septic tank.”

Too late, Becker cleared his throat, to make way for an apology, but she just shrugged.

“That’s what happens when you get on the wrong side of them.”

“The wrong side?”

“You don’t cross pushers. You cross them, that’s what happens. Don’t antagonise them. Keep on their right side. Just keep your head down and get on with it.”

“That’s what you do?”

“They don’t bother me.” Dani had pulled her hood back up.

Becker nodded. “I guess you have those new security guards they rolled out for you now, right?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah. Can’t afford to lose anything, with the Regen projects out west. Like they say everyone’s gotta ‘do’ their bit,” he smirked.

“Yeah,” muttered Dani.

Becker tried to trace her gaze from behind that hood. In one corner, a bin sat stuffed with paper ready for mulching. On top, behind a flyer for last week’s faire, Becker could make out an array of hastily torn up letters, stamped with the logos of the bigger hypermarkets. The only ones who could afford their own land, regenerated at great expense. The land that sandwiched the meagre reserves, the ones that Dani Hoffman had plastered photos of in every space between the plastic tubes. Field apprenticeships were like gold dust. Rejection slips, not so much.

He changed the subject. “So you’re a plumber too?”

“Public convenience maintenance. Only advantage of the job.”

“Wait,” said Becker. “You became a shitsucker just to rig all that up to your toilet?”

“Why else would I get a job with GovSan?” Dani scoffed, possibly a touch too loud to Becker’s mind, flatteringly so.

Becker stood back and took in the room again. Dedication, that was what he wanted from his growers. All this effort, this work – evidence of a sharp mind, sure. Life had thrown so many obstacles in her way – her upbringing, her environment, constant rejection – and Dani had just kept on pursuing her dream. But this wasn’t just dedication to a craft. More than that; she’d done whatever it had taken, just to get even a fraction closer to her goal. Even Becker had to admit that her single-mindedness was terrifying.

And look at the results. Becker was standing in a stinking goldmine. The first collective that found her was going to make a mint.

The Bow Boys weren’t going to know what had hit them.

“Have you ever worked with full-scale trees?” asked Becker.

She laughed. “Who does?”

“We do.”

Becker watched the kid go back to tending the mulch plants, too nonchalantly.

“It’s purely an experiment for now,” Becker continued, “trying to see if we can scale up some of our heirloom operations with grafts from miniatures. Maybe,” he ventured, “you should drop by some time, take a look.”

Dani paused. She lifted an apple from one of the trees on the floor – the K solution one – and looked at it.

“Maybe I could,” she said.

Becker nodded. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

A voice hurled up from some elsewhere in the apartment. “Danielle, your friend’ll be here to take you to work soon.”

She turned to him. “You better go.”

Becker closed the door behind him, and allowed himself a smile. He pulled out his phone and voice-dialled Cole. Not interested, he smirked to himself. And to think, he’d almost let the guy talk him out of coming over here.

“Are you one of them foodie types? Growers?”

Becker cancelled the call, to find Dani’s brother staring back at him behind swollen eyelids.

“Do me a favour, yeah? Tell my sister to just stop growing that shitty dead food and grow some weed instead, man. That shit’s way too expensive these days. Even LSD’s cheaper now.”

Becker raised an eyebrow. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

“Do that, brah. Man cannot live by fruit alone, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Well, he seemed nice.” Mrs Hoffman watched her daughter as she raided the kitchen cupboards.

“Mm.”

“Have you known each other long?”

“Stop trying to set me up with people.”

“Who’s setting you up?” Mrs Hoffman was innocence incarnate. “You seemed to be doing quite nicely on your own. Although maybe next time you let me wash that sweater first, eh?”

“Mum, look.” Mrs Hoffman winced as the girl pulled her greasy hair into a fresh ponytail. “He’s not my boyfriend. He talks too much, asks too many questions. He shouldn’t have even come here. I had it all worked out and then he… ruined things.”

“If you say so. You know, just because he makes the first move doesn’t mean it’s all ruined. Things don’t go the way you planned, doesn’t mean they can’t still work out. By the way, that package arrived for you.” Mrs Hoffman watched her daughter slide the package across the table, and leaned over as she started to open it.

“Nothing to do with you.”

“Right. I’m only your mother, Danielle.”

“I told you not to call me that.” She kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be back late. Don’t follow me out. Please.”

Mrs Hoffman crossed her arms as she watched her daughter leave. “Well, you remember what I said about that sweater!”

It was just another 80 degree day in the city when Becker found Dani, hood still up, standing outside the Old Factory buildings.

“Aren’t you kind of hot?”

Dani shrugged. “Keeps the sun out of my face.”

Becker had settled on highlights from the Gold Tour for Dani’s visit; the promotional spiel that he gave personally to only the most I of the VIPs who saw the Collective’s base of operations – or the somewhat I, anyhow. There was a quick stop at what he called their ‘guests’, a carefully curated selection of companies he felt really got the Collective’s ethos and, naturally, understood that joining was in their best interests – the African chocolate warehouse, the handmade pasta company, the recycled paper press. He threw in a little history of the place, the machinery he’d insisted was left untouched from its former life as a soft drink factory. Of course, Dani remained unmoved, save the “oh” that slipped out as they swung by the old testing lab.

Becker smiled to himself as they shuttered the near-antique freight elevator. This was just the preamble, of course. What he had lined up next was going to blow the kid right out of those scruffy buck store kicks.

“Here’s where the magic happens,” said Becker, and dragged open the gate.

They stepped into vast space – high cast-iron windows in original warehouse brick, casting motes down onto a complex of metal and ultraviolet lights. Grids of greenery ran at waist height and below in recycled artisanal structures, a collaboration with select designers and architects up-and-coming in the borough. A copse of inflatable ex-NASA airpods stood stalactite and stalagmite, lit by ultraviolet lanterns. A half amphitheatre of strawberry plants hung suspended several feet above a rack of pendulous corn. Along chrome pagodas and screens and looping runners, tubes stuffed with green were tended by the Collective’s hand-picked growers. Becker strolled on through. To the kid’s ant farm, this was a city of the future, gleaming clear, chrome and white.

“We could have run it automatically, but we really wanted a hands-on approach here,” explained Becker. “You know Cole – his baby’s the space garden over there.”

Cole shook Dani’s hand in his gloved one. “How are you? Welcome to HQ.”

She stared at the floor. Becker guided the kid on, and away from his partner’s raised eyebrow.

“You know Aimee Farelli from the Heirloom Vegan blog? That’s her people over there, working with the root veg. And we brought Goldstein on board a few months ago – he’s been doing some really exciting things in the medicine patch. You two want to chat?”

The kid was the picture of indifference.

“Maybe later, then. Ah. Now this I really want you to see.”

A pair of water tanks rose up from the basement on either side of them. Flickering guppies darted between myriad twisted logs. They – people – rarely got it at first. Becker had to stop the kid from moving on, indicate upwards where the branching wood began to thicken. Becker watched realisation spread across Dani’s face as she took in the roots of a forest of fruit trees, then a canopy that stretched high into reclamation tents in warehouse’s vaulted ceiling.

“This is literally the heart and lungs of our operations,” Becker elucidated. “The tank pretty much supplies the entire building, and we collect any water vapour from the trees up there. Plus we filter a lot of our emissions through the tents. It’s the cleanest point in the whole building. Pretty neat, huh?”

Becker looked over at Dani. The kid couldn’t take her eyes off it. Everything was going perfectly. Becker went in for the kill.

“If you were open to the idea,” he continued, “you could work right in the middle of this. See that island there? That’s where we try out our rarer varieties and heirlooms. Strictly the limited edition stuff, sort of our experimental stock. You could try out what you’re working on with some of our dwarves, and then scale up to grafts. You’d be working right here, in the oxygen factory. What do you think?”

Dani wasn’t looking at the trees any more.

“Are you okay?”

She muttered she was fine, and that she just needed a minute, but it was bullshit, because ‘minute’ only had two syllables last time he checked. Becker watched Dani sink, back against the glass tank, ribs hefting like bellows and eyes screwed tight.

Becker said, “Uh, do you want to get some air? Let’s go out on the roof.”

The metal door popped open like a seal, and the oxygen high of the factory’s insides gave way to something more steadying. Up here, far enough from choked smog and smouldering tarmac, the air reached a pleasant neutrality. Becker made sure the kid’s panic had eased off a little, before he walked out onto the roof. Afternoon sunshine glinted off a handful of drone deterrents, keeping watch for any birds or squirrels the cayenne pepper didn’t scare off. Over by the sweetpeas, a couple of yellow-coated ‘Bees’ were brushing blossoms with fresh pollen. Becker told them to take ten, and went back to his prodigy.

“Better, right? You had me worried for a moment there.”

Dani was breathing deeply. Becker figured he might as well spiel while he was here.

“We inherited this garden from the last people who owned this building,” he said, “and they inherited it from the original owners. It’s sort of a tradition.”

But Dani wasn’t really listening. She was walking out amongst the spindles and plant pots, sniffing blossoms. This was nothing by the standard of city growers, just a handful of things you might have seen in allotments and roof gardens a few decades ago. She walked around the place slowly, quietly, like the penitent in a house of worship, muttering about soil under her breath.

She stopped at a large raised bed that Becker kept planted with wild flowers.

“Oh yeah,” said Becker. “I guess you’ve read that this is the last patch of open grass anywhere in the city now, what with the grower’s ordinance.”

Dani hesitated by the edge of the box.

“I’ll take it,” she said.

Becker was caught off-guard. “Excuse me?”

“The job you offered me.” Dani near-as strode over and reached out a hand. “I’ll take it.”

Becker smiled widely.

“Well, cool,” Becker took Dani’s hand and shook it. “Very cool. You know what? We should celebrate – with something appropriate, though. Maybe we should get some of the wine up here. We’ve got this great apple wine we made in collaboration with Asclepius a couple of years back…”

Dani had reached into a pocket and pulled out a pair of apples.

Becker laughed. “Perfect, why not?”

Becker took one and raised it awkwardly up in the air.

“To new creative partnerships.” He took a bite and said, chewing, “You know, I thought maybe you weren’t interested for a while there, but I think this could be a really interesting collaboration. I can’t wait to see what you and Adam come up with, truly. I think we could really give the East side a run for their money in a couple of seasons.”

“I’m not interested in the money.”

“Of course you’re not, you’re an artist,” said Becker. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of all that. We just want you to be free to focus on what you do best.”

“And what’s that?”

Becker laughed again. “I mean, we can give you everything you need to realise your potential here. Out of that cramped apartment, space to work, away from that job, the pushers. Everything you could possibly need. New varieties to work with…”

Becker was halfway through outlining the results of their hybrid breeding cycle when he noticed Dani watching him, like a sprinter waiting for a gun to go off. No, like a scientist with a laboratory rat. The look she’d had in her room that day, when he’d watched her tend those apples.

“You know,” he said, “this tastes a little different from that last one you gave me. What did you put in it?”

“Ketamine,” said Dani.

Becker dropped the apple. Ketamine. The consonants felt odd in his mouth, his tongue and teeth like an hour after dental surgery. Becker tried to move his hands, watched them flex, disconnected, in front of him, as if grasping at the memory of the apple in his hand.

Standing was a bad idea. Becker tried to steady himself, grabbing at a raised bed as he lowered himself down. The edge felt like a million sawblade splinters dragging through his skin, yet no pain followed the sensation through. Something was in the way. One hand slipped, and it took him a moment of refocus to see that it was bleeding.

Becker sat heavily. How could he have been so stupid?

Then, reality tore into shreds.

Here was sound, in two – a rumbling tattoo, and a buzz, a hum that pulled static. Over here, the bright red lines in his hands, thrown into relief by the raised beds, rendered in pixelated grids that ran across the skyline and to infinity. Scent disintegrated. Becker tried to drag the pieces back into line as the picture fell sideways. Somewhere near, a bulbous shape carved over the stuttering slats of a bed. The apple, fallen, vacillated between a pinprick in the void and an eclipse of the world entire, pulsing out of sync with the voice somewhere behind him.

“I asked you if you were sure about this, didn’t I?”

It sounded like Cole. Like him, but as he hadn’t been in years.

“I told you she wasn’t interested. I told you not to go. And now look at yourself. Lying there like some drooling smackhead.”

Becker tried to turn, to answer, but felt his back come against the side of the box. A humanoid shape twisted in front of the 8-bit landscape, warping as it closed in.

The voice shifted, perverse.

“You were too busy thinking of the strapline, weren’t you? Another name on the wall. Another Jack Becker success story.”

And again. “How else did you think she’d managed to avoid the pushers?”

“Of course they were in on it.”

“Of course she didn’t care about the Collective.”

“All she could possibly need.”

The thrum resolved to a thudding, like giant footprints on stone. The pushers, had to be. Invasion over that pixelated skyline, come to destroy what had taken him a lifetime to build. Becker could hear them now, that pound-pound-pound against the rooftop thumping. But, from where his mind was now, that was far back down the tunnel. Back where his useless body could do nothing to stop them laying waste to everything he’d worked for. Assuming he did still give a shit about it. The tunnel twisted and something sloughed from Becker, tight and crawling, as light opened up ahead. Thank God, he thought, he’d be too far out of it to see it happen.

Gently, Danielle Hoffman moved Jack Becker into a recovery position on the floor, and checked his mouth again for any remaining pieces of apple. The panic that had gripped his face moments before had melted into dumb pliability. She checked her watch. Only a few minutes, at best, ’til Becker’s pollinators came back. They would have to be enough.

Satisfied, Elle walked back between the rows, arms outstretched and wide, to drift across the fronds as they swayed.

At the box of wildflowers, Elle stopped. She untied her scuffed shoes, leaving them side-by-side at the box edge, as she climbed into the grass. For a moment, she just stood there, savouring the touch of the blades between her toes. Then she lay down on the grass, spread her arms and closed her eyes.

Elle listened to the lazy buzz of the drones above. The whine and bark of cars, once so close and overwhelming, were just a half-heard whisper, like the fading remnants of a dream on waking.