Page 28 of Orc'd & Loaded
Boris goes first. He wades in up to his shins, extension cord abandoned, and turns back to face me with his arms out.
"Give me the first crate."
I hand him the beets. Forty pounds of Montverde Valley crimson in a wooden box I can barely lift to waist height. He takes it with one hand. Tucks it against his hip like a clutch purse. Wades across.
I pluck up the fennel. Both arms. The crate's rough pine edge digs into the insides of my elbows, and I step off the curb into water that immediately floods my clogs and soaks through my socks with a cold so sharp it steals the breath from me. The current pushes. Stronger than it looks. My foot skids on something slick, a manhole cover, and my center of gravity lurches left.
A hand clamps around my upper arm. Boris. Already back. Already crossing for the second time. He steadies me without slowing down, his grip a warm vise above my elbow, and takes the fennel crate from me with his free hand.
"Faster, Rostova. Clock is ticking."
I don't argue. I sprint back.
The rhythm establishes itself inside three trips. I load crates at the walk-in door, stacking the heaviest on the bottom shelf of a rolling cart I drag to the ruined back entrance. Boris meets me at the curb. We transfer. He carries, I carry, we cross the flooded street in opposite directions, passing each other where the water hits mid-calf and the rain erases the world past arm's length.
His cellar stairs are stone. Worn smooth by decades of foot traffic, slick with rain runoff, steep enough that I have to turn sideways and brace my shoulder against the wall to keep from sliding. The air changes three steps down. Warmer, then cooler, then a deep, mineral cold that smells like clay and iron and something older. Earthen. The walls sweat condensation in slow beads.
The icebox sits against the far wall. It is enormous. A cast-iron sarcophagus, black as a woodstove, covered in angular symbols that pulse with a faint blue luminescence. When Boris lifts the lid, cold pours out in a visible fog that rolls across the stone floor and pools around my ankles.
"Thirty-four degrees," he says.
I place my palm against the interior wall. Frost crystals bloom under my fingertips and melt into my skin. Exactly right. Exactly perfect.
"Go. I'll organize. You carry."
He doesn't question the division of labor. He takes the stairs three at a time, each footfall a seismic event, and by the time I've arranged the beets along the bottom shelf he's back with two more crates stacked on top of each other, rain streaming off his nose and chin.
Trip after trip. My calves burn from the stairs. My chef coat weighs an extra ten pounds with water. The French twist I pinned this morning collapses somewhere around trip number six, dumping wet hair across my neck in heavy ropes I don't havetime to fix. My clogs squelch. My hands are raw from the crate edges, splinters embedded in both palms.
Boris matches me step for step. Fourteen trips. Maybe fifteen. His breathing stays steady while mine deteriorates into ragged gasps, and on the final crossing, carrying the last flat of koji kombucha jars, my foot hits that same slick manhole cover.
This time I go down.
My knee hits the pavement underwater. The jars rattle. One tips. I catch it against me, dirty street water splashing across the glass, and Boris is already there, already lifting me by both arms, already pulling the flat away from me with one hand while hauling me upright with the other.
"Last one." His face is inches from mine. Rain runs into the corners of his mouth. "You good?"
My knee throbs. My lungs burn. Every jar survived.
"I'm good."
The koji flat goes in clean. Every jar upright, cultures safe, glass fogged with the transition from warm rain to enchanted cold. I arrange them on the second shelf with spacing precise enough to ensure airflow between each vessel, rotating the labels forward out of pure habit, and when I step back to survey the icebox's contents, a small knot between my shoulder blades releases.
Everything accounted for. Everything salvageable.
Except.
"The marrow squash."
Boris stands at the stairs, water pooling around his boots in a widening dark mirror on the stone. He pushes soaked hair off his forehead with the back of one massive wrist.
"What?"
"The marrow squash. I left the crate on the cart. It didn't make the last trip." I'm already moving toward the stairs. "Sixty pounds. Heirloom cultivar from the Bellwether Farm,irreplaceable before the festival, and if I leave them in a dead kitchen overnight the skins will sweat and the flesh will go mealy by morning."
"I'll get it."
"It's sixty pounds, Boris."
