SOLENE #2
I reach up and pluck it off. It's warm and damp and trembling. I drop it into the sack.
Boris ties it shut.
The kitchen is empty. Gutted. Clean enough to work in, but stripped of everything we need.
"Inventory," I say. "Now."
We flip the remaining crates. Every shelf. Every drawer.
Boris works one side of the kitchen while I work the other. He rips open cabinets with enough force to crack the hinges. I sweep through the cold storage unit, pulling bins and checking labels with my good hand while my bandaged palm screams against every surface it touches.
"Root vegetables survived," I call out. "Two crates of parsnips. One of turnips. The beets are ash."
"Protein side is gone." Boris slams the walk-in door. "Every cut. The sprites ate through the butcher paper and left nothing but bone."
"We're not using protein from your side anyway. The dish is plant-forward."
"The dish has a smoked bone broth base, woman."
"Had." I shove a crate of salvaged parsnips onto the nearest clean surface. "Now it has a charred miso base. Better depth, no bones required."
His mouth opens. Closes. He picks up a turnip, examines it like a jeweler appraising a stone.
"Fine."
I almost drop the parsnip I'm holding. "Did you just say fine?"
"I said fine. We have ninety-three minutes. I am not wasting four of them arguing about broth."
I pin my wet hair back with a chopstick from the utensil drawer and grab the eight-inch chef's knife from my roll. The handle settles into my grip. Familiar. Grounding.
"Station setup. You take hot side, I take cold. Mise en place in twenty minutes or we're dead."
Boris cracks his neck. Both sides. The sound ricochets off the tile walls.
We move.
He fires every burner on the commercial range simultaneously.
Six blue rings bloom to life, and the kitchen temperature spikes in seconds.
He sets three cast iron pans across the flames, adds grapeseed oil to each, and begins breaking down the parsnips with a cleaver.
His cuts are rough but devastatingly fast. Chunks of ivory root fly from the blade in even pieces, each one within a quarter inch of the others.
I work the cold station. The miso needs to hydrate.
I scrape the last of our white miso paste from the tub, thin it with rice vinegar, and whisk until the consistency hits that precise point between sauce and glaze.
The charring will come later. Right now I need the base smooth and the acid balanced.
My knife moves through the turnips in a blur. Brunoise. Perfect quarter-inch cubes. The bandage on my hand is already pink with fresh blood seeping through from where the knife handle presses into the burn, but the cuts land true and the pile of white cubes grows on my board in neat rows.
"Shallots?" Boris barks.
"Under the sink. They rolled during the attack."
He drops to the floor, sweeps six shallots from behind the pipe housing, and has them peeled and minced before I finish my turnip pile.
His fingers dwarf the tiny bulbs. He uses the flat of his cleaver to crush them, then rocks the blade through the pulp with a speed that sends a rhythmic percussion through the kitchen.
Chop chop chop chop chop.
My knife answers.
Tap tap tap tap tap.
The kitchen fills with the music of two people cooking at the outer limit of their ability. No wasted motion. No repeated steps. I reach for the vinegar and it's already in Boris's outstretched hand. He turns toward the stove and I slide a loaded cutting board directly into his waiting palm.
We don't speak. We don't need to.
The first pan hits smoking point. Boris drops the parsnip chunks in and the oil screams. He tosses them with a flick of his wrist, his arm absorbing the twelve-inch skillet without tremor, and the parsnips flip in a golden arc before settling back onto the searing surface.
I build the garnish. Pickled turnip ribbons, shaved thin enough to read through. Microgreens from the one container the sprites missed, tucked behind the sanitizer bottles on the top shelf. A dusting of black sesame that I toast in a dry pan until the kitchen smells like something ancient and warm.
Boris pulls the charred parsnips and slides them onto my plating station. I arrange them in a tight spiral, alternating the caramelized faces upward so the color gradient moves from pale gold at the center to deep amber at the edge.
"Glaze is next," I say. "The final layer. Everything hinges on the glaze."
Boris nods. He reaches for the upper cabinet where we stored the jar. The heavy glass container with the brass lid. The one holding the Korathian fire salt we spent three days calibrating into the perfect ratio for the fusion dish's signature finish.
His hand closes on the shelf.
Empty.
He pats the surface. Sweeps his palm left, right. Pulls the entire shelf out of the cabinet and holds it up to the light.
A fine dusting of ash coats the wood. Tiny claw marks score the surface in frantic, overlapping circles.
The brass lid sits in the corner of the cabinet, chewed open.
The glass jar beside it is intact but hollow, its interior coated in a thin black residue that smells of woodsmoke and something volcanic.
Boris holds the empty jar up between us. The light passes straight through it.
"They ate it. Every grain."
The dish sit behind me. Beautiful. Complex. Ninety minutes of flawless execution. And completely incomplete without the one ingredient that neither of us can source within a hundred miles of this town.