10. Dash #2
I set my feet. Pull the dress shirt taut across my body. Present myself for inspection.
"Awaiting orders."
Magnolia Jenkins ties her hair back with a strip of kitchen twine, flips to a clean page in her grandmother's notebook, and picks up a pencil.
"First. We scale the recipe by twelve."
The first batch comes out of the oven golden. Perfect. Magnolia pulls the sheet pan with bare hands, hissing at the heat but refusing to set it down until she's got it centered on the cooling rack. She bends close. Sniffs. Presses one finger into the sponge's surface and watches it spring back.
"Good crumb," she whispers.
The second batch goes in. I crack eggs. Forty-seven so far.
The shells crumble like eggshell-thin armor in my grip and I've learned to moderate the pressure so precisely that my fingers ache from the sustained control.
Magnolia measures elderflower cordial into a glass pitcher, and the kitchen fills with a smell like summer rain on white flowers.
We find a rhythm. She calls. I execute. She says sift and I sift.
She says zest and I drag lemons across a microplane grater that was clearly designed for hands one-third smaller than mine.
Three lemon rinds lost to my grip before I calibrate.
Magnolia doesn't comment on the waste. She simply places a fourth lemon in my palm and says lighter and I go lighter.
Petunia returns with supplies. Forty-two pounds of flour in canvas sacks.
Butter in cold golden bricks. Sugar. Vanilla beans from the Elven Quarter, each one six inches long and glossy black, smelling of smoke and sweetness.
The bride deposits everything on the prep table, mascara freshly reapplied, and opens her mouth to say something critical.
"Out," Magnolia says without turning around.
Petunia leaves.
Third batch in the oven. Fourth batch prepped.
The copper bowl rings under the whisk as I whip egg whites to stiff peaks per Magnolia's precise instructions.
Don't stop until I tell you. Keep the same speed.
If the peaks flop over, we start again. My forearm burns.
The whisk is a toy in my fist. I keep the rhythm mechanical and even, a metronome of copper against copper, as white foam climb the sides of the dented bowl.
"Stop."
I stop.
She inspects. Tilts the bowl upside down over my head. The egg whites hold. Don't move. A perfect white mountain suspended above my skull.
"Show-off," I say.
"Quality control." She's almost smiling now. Almost.
The fifth batch goes in the lower oven. We have eight layers cooling, four layers baking, and the buttercream base chilling in the walk-in freezer.
The timeline is brutal but holding. Magnolia moves through the kitchen like water finding its own course, never pausing, never second-guessing, her grandmother's notebook open getting progressively more batter-stained.
I'm separating the last batch of eggs when the smoke detector screams.
Not the magical rune system. That's already spent. The mundane backup alarm, a shrieking metal disc bolted to the ceiling, blaring a tone designed to make eardrums bleed. Smoke pours from the ventilation grate above the main ovens. Not wood smoke. Not batter smoke.
Sprite smoke. Acrid. Chemical. The bright orange stink of elemental fire magic burning through metal.
"No." Magnolia's head snaps toward the grate. "No no no no--"
The grate explodes outward. Three fire sprites tumble into the kitchen in a shrieking ball of flame and malice, each one as big as a cat, each one trailing a comet tail of white-hot sparks.
They hit the prep table and scatter. One sprints directly across the eight cooling cake layers, leaving charred footprints seared into golden sponge.
Another launches itself at the industrial stand mixer on the far counter and wraps its burning body around the motor housing.
The third careens off a hanging pot rack and crashes into the stack of flour sacks.
The flour ignites.
Not gradually. All at once. A white fireball blooms from the canvas sacks and rolls across the ceiling, sucking oxygen from the room.
The overhead sprinkler system kicks in, drenching everything in cold water.
The fire sprites scream, an ear-splitting frequency somewhere between a boiling teakettle and a dying violin.
The one clinging to the stand mixer burrows deeper into the motor, melting steel around itself like a metal cocoon.
I'm already moving.
The fire extinguisher hangs on the wall by the door.
Red. Heavy. Built for industrial kitchen fires.
I rip it free, snapping the mounting bracket clean off the tile.
The pin comes out with my teeth. I aim at the flour fire first, sweeping the chemical foam across the burning sacks in a wide arc.
White powder and white foam mix into a choking cloud.
The sprinklers turn everything to slurry.
The sprite bolts for the window. I pursue.
It's fast. Supernaturally fast. But the kitchen is a straight line between two walls and I've chased faster things through narrower spaces.
I blast the extinguisher ahead of it, cutting off its path, herding it toward the open window the maintenance dwarf left unlatched.
The sprite shrieks and swerves. I kick a stool into its path.
It bounces off the seat, changes trajectory, and sails through the window into the gray morning air, trailing sparks.
Second sprite. Still in the flour pile. The foam is suffocating it. It staggers out of the wreckage, diminished, its flames guttering. I punt it. Not hard enough to kill. Hard enough to send it on a clean arc through the same window, a tiny orange shooting star disappearing over the hedgerow.
Third sprite. The one buried in the stand mixer.
Too late.
The motor housing glows cherry red. Slag drips from the base onto the counter.
The planetary gear mechanism collapses inward with a grinding metallic wheeze and the whole machine sags, deformed, cooling into a sculpture that looks like a steel mushroom having a bad day.
The sprite crawls out the other side and scurries up the wall.
I blast it with the extinguisher. It drops, hissing and spitting, and I chase it across the counter, over the sink, along the windowsill, and out into the open air with a final concentrated burst of foam.
Silence.
Water pours from the ceiling. Foam drips from every surface. The flour is ash. The sprinklers have soaked every towel, every ingredient on the open counter, every inch of exposed workspace.
I turn around.
Magnolia stands in the center of the kitchen, drenched.
Water runs down her face and plasters my dress shirt to her body.
She's holding a cake layer in each hand, arms extended over her head, the only two she managed to grab before the sprinklers hit.
Her bare feet stand in three inches of foamy water.
Her grandmother's notebook is facedown in a puddle.
She looks at the remains of the stand mixer. Melted. Fused. A modern art installation titled Your Sister's Wedding Is Cursed.
The second stand mixer, across the kitchen, took a direct hit from the flour fireball. Its bowl is warped into an oval. Its whisk attachment is welded to the housing by heat-fused sugar residue.
Both mixers. Dead.
Magnolia lowers the two surviving cake layers to her. Water drips from her chin. Her jaw works. Her eyes sweep the ruined kitchen, the ash, the foam, the slag, the soaked ingredients, and land on me.
"Three hours," she says. "We have three hours, no mixers, and two surviving layers out of twelve."
I set the fire extinguisher down. Shake foam off my hands.
"What's the plan, baker?"
Her eyes drop to my arms. My forearms. Specifically, the muscles corded from wrist to elbow, still pumped from forty minutes of continuous whisking.
"How long can you beat buttercream by hand?"