Cello walked the edge of the field, pressing the long grass down in a footprint-wide path as he moved. He studied the hollows in the ground, and the way the wind moved around the earth there. Everything Cello knew about planting he’d learned from Sil—Sil, who could make anything grow. He could coax life out of places teeming with mold and rot.
The garden was a constellation of plots—some tiny, half the size of the kids’ trailer, some large; the largest was almost three acres. Most fell somewhere in between, and it was Cello’s job to mind the middling ones. The largest plot and the smallest were Sil’s, the small plots were filled entirely with his experiments.
Sil taught all of the kids different things, but it was Cello who received the most instruction, because it was Cello who was most like Sil. Cello could also make things grow. He knew certain things, just by picking up a handful of earth—whether the plants were healthy, and thriving, or if they were not. Sil taught him how to smell the soil for elements that were missing, and showed Cello how to add those things back.
“In farming, people will tell you to leave the topsoil alone,” Sil had explained. “But there’re ways around it. You can’t till the topsoil the way you’d need to for most crops, but for what we’re doing now, you can. You just have to plant around the contours. You need to strategize.” Sil tapped at his forehead with a dirt-caked finger.
Cello couldn’t remember his life before working in the garden with Sil, just that he was smaller than Emil, and had learned which plants were valuable the same way. All of their harvests were delivered straight to the Josephs. In exchange for the truck beds full of cuttings they drove to the Joseph compound, Letta took home envelopes fat with cash. He and Joanie had been the only kids then, but as the Vine kept growing, and as Letta kept planting, their ragtag family—and Letta’s envelopes—grew, too.
Cello didn’t fully understand the arrangement until Joanie finally explained it one night, after she came back from living on the compound. It was late in the kids’ trailer, the littlest ones were in that stone-heavy sleep that only people who were recently babies could reproduce. They hadn’t had enough food that winter; nobody was ever full.
“She’s just cheap,” Joanie told them—Cello, Marcela and Sabina were the only ones awake.
“What do you mean? It’s not like they have jobs.” Marcela flipped onto her side—her voice sounded clear in the tinny dark of the trailer.
“God, you’re such idiots,” Joanie said, her voice muffled against her pillow. “What do you think the Josephs put in those envelopes they give Letta? Stickers?”
“How would I know?” Marcela said. Cello could feel her flash of irritation ripple in the air.
“The little kids are sleeping, you guys,” Sabina whispered.
“Who cares about that?” Marcela said. “They sleep plenty. I want to know how much money the Josephs could be paying for a bunch of flowers and weeds, is all.”
“Yeah, what are they? Florists?” Cello had said, half joking, but still unsure. He had no idea how much money florists made. Could be millions.
“I can’t believe I share a room with you idiots,” Joanie said.
“News flash,” Marcela shot back. “This is nothing close to a room. Just tell us what you know, if you’re so smart.”
“What do people pay that kind of money for?” Joanie asked. She let the question float there in the dark.
Cello turned to face the peeling laminate paneling on the wall. He breathed in the smell of lacquer and stale sweat from his unwashed sheets. Perhaps he had known all along that there was something dangerous about the Vine, how often they were warned not to break its skin or release its sap. But until Joanie’s prompting he’d never linked the Vine to Marcela and Sabina’s disintegrating mother. He’d never made the connection from the work they did in the garden to the empty-eyed tenants who waited by the Joseph compound gate. A tremor of panic glanced through him as he began to understand he knew very little about what the Vine could do—could there really be such dark, addictive power in it, such shadowy value?
Sil treated those plants better than he treated the kids. Cello had always partly believed it was because he was drawing magic from the ground, and that it was more about Sil’s practice than about profit. Letta, on the other hand, had always seemed very mercantile-minded with their work. More scams than crimes, at least that’s what Cello had believed.
Meanwhile, Marcela chattered in the dark. “Are you serious? Sabina, she’s messing with us, right?”
“Please be quiet,” Sabina whispered.
“Joanie? Are you serious?” Marcela repeated.
Joanie didn’t speak again, and soon they all fell asleep, even Marcela.
After that, Cello watched Sil and Letta more carefully. He watched them especially on those regular visits to the Josephs’. They always left the little kids with Sabina and Marcela, and brought along Joanie and Cello, who sat in the back of the truck with the tarp-covered mounds of fragrant plants. They pressed their arms and legs down on places where the wind flipped up the tarp. For Cello, those afternoon drives were filled with the scent of languishing greenery and hot canvas, and the thrilling proximity of his limbs to Joanie’s. The cuttings they brought to the Joseph compound were unloaded into a barn, in a kind of anteroom—a large, refrigerated metal compartment. No one let Cello see beyond that, but he knew that now Joanie understood exactly what happened there.
* * *
Cello shook his head to loosen thoughts of Joanie from it. Just do your job, he told himself. The plot he’d outlined flickered green and gold under the sun. Sil would be happy with this, he thought, surprised by how much satisfaction he felt. He knew it was pathetic to crave that approval, but he also knew he’d done well.
Cello felt the flush of his skin and the slick of sweat between his shoulder blades and across his chest. He wondered what time it was, and when Sabina would come back with the mower. Marcela still lay in the grass, curled like a sleeping fox kit.
“Hey, Marcela,” he said, maybe too gently.
“What.” Her face was buried in the crook of her arms, and her voice sounded distorted, like it belonged to someone different.
“Are you going to do it, or is Sabina?”
“I’m going to,” she hissed. “As if I would make Sabina. She doesn’t know anything about it. I’m not a monster,” she said, with a look that sliced right through him.
“I’m sorry,” Cello said, without looking at his foster sister. “I wish I could help you.”
“No, you don’t,” she said. “Believe me.” Marcela stood up and walked the perimeter Cello had outlined. He followed her, a few paces behind.