Page 23 of Orc'd & Loaded
"Vance is photographing my sandwich board." I push the bucket aside and let the steel door close behind me. The latch echoes. "He's standing between our two restaurants with that notebook, and he hasn't eaten a single bite from either of us, and he's already writing."
Her jaw tightens. The strand of hair trembles against her cheek.
"I know what he does," she says.
"Then you know he doesn't need to eat the food. He reviews the experience. The neighborhood. The competition. He'll write about the smoke from my pit drifting into your dining room. He'll write about the vegan place across from the barbecue joint. He'll turn us into a punchline, Rostova. A culture-clash joke.One paragraph and we're both finished before the festival even starts."
She pushes off the counter. Paces to the walk-in. Paces back. Her hands flex at her sides, fingers curling and releasing, a pianist warming up before a concerto she doesn't want to play.
"What are you proposing?"
"A truce."
The word lands on the white tile floor like a dropped knife. Solene stares at me. Her eyes are dark, nearly black in the fluorescent light, and they hold absolutely zero warmth.
"Define truce."
"We stop publicly fighting. We stop the dueling booths, the taste tests, the—" I gesture broadly. "The spectacle. Vance feeds on conflict. He's a carrion bird in a charcoal suit. If we starve him, he moves on."
"And the festival?"
"We still compete. Behind closed doors, in our own kitchens. But out there—" I point toward the street, toward the man with the notebook. "Out there, we're neighbors. Friendly ones. Supportive ones."
Solene crosses her arms. The stained chef coat pulls tight across her shoulders. She is a small woman in a very large profession, and the way she occupies space has nothing to do with her height and everything to do with the steel cable running up her spine.
"You want me to pretend I like you."
"I want you to pretend you don't want to kill me. There's a range."
Something flickers at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile. The memory of where a smile might live if it ever decided to visit.
She pulls a heavy ceramic crock from the shelf behind her. Pries off the cloth lid. Inside, a dense purple-black mass of fermented blackcurrant pulp glistens under the kitchen lights.The scent hits me in waves: tart, funky, deep, with a backbone of acid sharp enough to cut glass.
She holds the crock out.
"Take it. For your funeral ale. Fix the mid-palate gap."
I wrap both hands around the ceramic. The crock is warm from its own fermentation, alive and humming faintly against my palms. Her fingers brush mine on the transfer, callused and quick, and then they're gone.
"This isn't friendship," she says. "This is mutually assured survival."
"Understood."
"And if Vance comes through my front door tomorrow, I will serve him the single greatest plate of food he has ever encountered in his miserable career. Truce or no truce."
"I'd expect nothing less."
She points at the loading dock door. "Now get out of my kitchen, Cleaver. You smell like woodsmoke, and it's contaminating my place."
I don't leave.
The crock of fermented blackcurrant sits between us like a peace offering she already regrets. Solene turns her back, yanks open a produce drawer beneath the station, and hauls out a canvas bag of carrots so thick they look like they were grown in enchanted soil. Each one is the diameter of my wrist, deep orange going almost red at the core, dirt still clinging to the root hairs.
She lines up six of them on the cutting board. Pulls her knife from the magnetic strip on the wall. The blade is a nine-inch Miyabi, carbon steel, so thin the fluorescent light passes through the edge like it isn't there.
"Rostova. We need to talk about how this truce actually works."
The knife comes down. THOCK. A carrot splits lengthwise, the two halves rocking gently on the board. She rotates them ninety degrees. THOCK THOCK. Perfect batons. Uniform. Mechanical.
