1.
Before everything that happened, before the towers, before the site plans, before the deeds, before the failing sports bar and two-bedroom apartment above it that often operated like another, more financially successful, unlicensed sports bar until the police shut it down after that one Polish kid got strangled with a pair of pink stockings behind the abandoned Shoppers Drug Mart a block or two south, there were trees here.
Now there was only a hole. A crane perched on the edge, its lights barely illuminating the dirt below. The stooped shape of a man clambered down the sloped side of the pit, dragging a heavy burden over the frozen mud. A short shadow rippled across the dirt as he descended like a lazy bird of prey. The gardener’s feet knew the way. His breath emerged in tiny clouds. No wind reached down this far, but the cold stitched itself into everything it touched. Far above the pit, towers scratched at the light-polluted sky. Most had undergone the ritual, paid their dues, if not to the gardener than to someone else with their own take on his faltering, archaic craft.
With spring, the hole would come to life again, thrumming with sweaty bodies and hungry machines, but before that happened, it had to be seeded. An aged protection spell practised since the bad old days. This was what the gardener was paid to do down here; a pile of bills in an Easton hockey bag waited for him in a vacant condo across the street. Fives, tens, twenties all mixed together. The money didn’t exist outside that hockey bag. It floated in its own reality.
The gardener unrolled the tarp, let its wet contents tumble down into the low trench at the very edge of the pit. Seventeen or eighteen, the gardener didn’t know. Male this time. It didn’t matter. Its clothes were burned back in the ravine. A rough image of a bird was tattooed on a shoulder, yellow and orange and dead. Fingernails bitten down to scabbed quicks. The gardener knelt down in the frozen dirt, dug his thick hands into the earth. Stone, ice, and soil scooped onto the body, a patient process, ensuring the seed was fully buried. From across the street, The Marigold leered into the pit, eighty-eight storeys topped with a crown of flickering orange lights, the sister tower to what was still only a hole.
Finished with his labour, the gardener grabbed the blue tarp that had carried the heavy seed, wrapping it around his shoulders like a cowl. He turned to begin the long trek to the surface. He didn’t worry about cameras catching his face. No sensors this far down, no one tracking his footsteps, recalibrating the city’s functions. These matters were handled far in advance. Marigold II was supposed to reach over a hundred storeys when it was complete, another tower with a golden halo, a shining monument for some desperate legacy. The gardener put one foot in front of the other, letting the satisfaction of a task well done keep him warm. His breath followed him. There were still more seeds to plant, still more bad old days to come.
2.
Even in the wet snow, Cathy Jin refused to ride the Shit Car.
Some of her kinder colleagues called it the Ghost Car. Coming from an under-financed department in the City’s struggling public health department, most Wet investigators were told to provide their own transportation or take transit. Occasionally, a cop or a paramedic might bring them along, warily watching them for any sign of a cough slipping out from under the helmet. When she wasn’t wearing the full masked helmet mandated by the department, Cathy wore sunglasses, mirrored and chrome. It helped keep the world at bay.
“I’m walking,” Cathy said.
“We can wait for another,” Jasmine said, eyes blinking through the snow. They were both old hands at this now. “Phone says next one is here in three minutes.”
“I want you to look down the street there. You see anything that looks like a streetcar? Your phone lies. We can stand here like idiots or start walking.”
The Shit Car sat in front of them, one of the newer streetcars running without an operator, stupid enough to almost drown itself under the Dundas underpass during the floods two years before, filled to the brim with sewage. There were others too damaged to keep in circulation. The TTC claimed to have cleaned this one out, but the stench remained. Few riders took the risk. The Ghost Car is what the news called it, a haunted house stalking the streets.
“Progress for progress’s sake?” Jasmine asked, wiping melted flakes off her skin.
“I’d rather be a fool under my own power than stand out here waiting for a train that never comes,” Cathy said, dragging her kit behind her, the horned helmet bouncing like it was alive.
“Streetcar,” Jasmine said, following behind. She adjusted her jacket collar against the cold. It hid the public health logo on the inside. Most people didn’t ask what a Wet investigator did, even when the first bodies started popping up in bus shelters or half-eaten in the sand. They didn’t want to know. They weren’t about to start wearing their own little masks again. Cathy knew Jasmine kept her own masked helmet inside her bag, as if people didn’t know what it hid. Jasmine still thought the Wet was something you could control. Cathy wanted to tell her it was more like a weather system — something to be endured rather than confronted.
“Whatever,” Cathy said, trudging along the half-plowed sidewalk. Everything melted, refroze, melted again. The Shit Car came to life and passed them down King, empty, warm, and reeking. “I want to get there before some idiot decides to poke it with a stick.”
The latest case was assigned just an hour before, a notification blinking to life on her phone, Jasmine mouthing go time in the office kitchen. An alert in a parking garage under a condo tower in Liberty Village, a former yuppie enclave now struggling with the rising lake water.
“How bad do you think it will be this time?” Jasmine said. They used to work their own cases before people began to report some of the bodies were still alive. Cathy ran one of the safe injection sites before whispers of the Wet arrived. She didn’t fight the move; it was better than getting fired, ending up on the streets with her former clients. No one knew what the Wet was at that time. They only knew something was spreading up
from the lake, a toxic mould burrowing its way through the foundations of the older buildings, sometimes appearing in large splotches on the ceiling or like fingers rising from the floorboards in the rooming houses, the ones that hadn’t been converted back into single-family homes for music producers and start-up investors.
“I’m sure we’ll need the masks,” Cathy said.
The new department was simply called Investigations. There was almost no funding. The job was solely to observe and report, tracking victims and infested sites. Like most things in the city, it only sounded simple. You came. You saw. You trembled.
“My favourite,” Jasmine said. “You know I love to play astronaut.”
Two cop cars sat in front of the building, blocking access to the parking garage. Real ones, not the private Threshold security some companies had taken to retaining in the other waterfront districts. They’d tried to paint over PIG scrawled on one of the back doors with white house paint.
One of the officers waved Cathy over. The heavy building manager paced back and forth between the cruisers, bald head decorated with melting snow. The officers ignored him.
“I don’t think it’s that bad,” the manager sputtered at Cathy. He knew what the heavy mask in her bag meant. “Could be garbage. Someone probably just overreacted, you know?”
“We’ll determine that,” Jasmine said, placing a hand on his forearm. Cathy preferred to let Jasmine handle the people. She had a talent for zeroing in on people’s insecurities, the weak points in their character. Sometimes that included Cathy’s. “No one is going to blame you for this, alright? It’s not like bedbugs or rats. We need you to stay calm until we figure this out.”
He smiled weakly under Jasmine’s grasp. The officers stood and watched. There was no solidarity here. The Wet investigators were considered disposable. Most public employees didn’t even want to know what they did, just that they disappeared, that anyone around them might be questioned, maybe even tested and quarantined during the aftermath. Cathy pulled her mask over her head, checking the seal as it closed around her neck, locking together like a metal noose. The sensors stood up like goat horns over the massive tinted eye ports and breathing chamber.
“Can’t we wait?” Jasmine said. “We don’t even know if it’s a false positive yet.”
Cathy rolled her eyes, glad Jasmine couldn’t see them. That was how most of their fights started. She did it again, savouring the moment. “Put it on.”
“It’s probably a level one at most,” Jasmine said. “You’re acting like this is my first day. I’m the one who said you’d be good at this. We are partners, right? I don’t need a lecture.”
“And if it’s not a level one, what’s your plan?”
Jasmine pulled her own silver mask out of her bag and strapped it on tight. Two shiny minotaurs now. Some of the newer masks had a matte finish. “You happy now?”
“As close as I’ll get today,” Cathy answered. “Let’s see what they got for us down here.”
It was hard to get funding for a department dedicated to a problem many believe didn’t exist. This was why there was no truck, no centralized office, no real mandate beyond trying to contain this ephemeral thing that the department had taken to calling the Wet. No government above the City wanted to recognize the problem. Cathy knew they made do with the scraps the City provided, often sponsored by funds from the Threshold districts, those corporate-owned sectors of the eastern shore. Most of the money went to the masks. Expensive, fragile, and prone to malfunction, but deeply loved. Jasmine had carved her initials into the forehead of her rig.
Cathy made her way through the lobby filled with abstract orange paintings and sculptures resembling pigs without heads. Jasmine followed behind her to the service door, and they descended concrete stairs together, heavy masks blinking and whirring under the fluorescence. The parking garage walls were slick with condensation. On the bottom floor, Cathy led the way past luxury SUVs and electric cars, letting the readout in her mask guide her toward the source.
“Buddy looked like he was going to have a heart attack,” Jasmine said. “I don’t blame him.”
Cathy knew the Wet was something people whispered about but rarely mentioned in public. There were message boards, hastily deleted accounts, owners and landlords reckoning with this new threat. If the building was officially infected, everyone would need to move out. The accusations would start with the tenants, then the management company, then eventually the developer and whoever they hired to originally bu
ild the tower. Then the lawsuits would start.
“He probably hid it as long as he could,” Cathy said. “These guys are like cockroaches, they only start scuttling if you turn on a light.” One of the sensors in her mask began flickering red and white, a gentle warning of spores in the air around her. “We’re close.”
Jasmine circled a bright red Mercedes on their right, while Cathy moved forward, her mask interpreting the world around her. It wasn’t a bloom this time, emerging from the ground or the concrete walls around them, thick, oozing, and alive. This one was a body, what was once a person. The Wet fed off of it. Cathy didn’t look away. Her mask read the scene, recording the data required before they took the first step to contain it.
“We got one. A body,” Cathy said. “Whose building is this again?”
“Looks like a Warton development,” Jasmine said. Her mask reflected the shuddering body on the ground, splaying it across her silver features. A man, maybe in his mid-forties, breathing in the spores down here in the damp. Something each woman had seen before, catalogued and quantified for those higher up the ladder. Usually the Wet went to work on the soft tissues first, working its way through the face, punching through the cheeks and soft palate. This body was a week or two old. An easy job for two people.
“They aren’t going to be happy. What is it, third one this year?”
“Fourth,” Cathy said, a new alarm pinging inside her mask. Then another. Each sound stacking itself on the one before it, echoes that became a plaintive buzz. “Or more.”
“More?” Jasmine said.
Most cases they tried to catch early, the Wet seeping out of an electrical box or appearing in splotches in an elevator lobby. Something you could manage, spraying it down and wiping it away before it began to produce spores. This was what Cathy thought the job entailed initially — a glorified clean-up crew for the first responders.
“Look closer,” Cathy said. The concrete sweat around them. Three lumps in the corner shuddered together, something like a hand emerging from the black ooze, pulsating with disconnected nerves, the smell of old, old water flooding Cathy’s senses.
“I never saw one like this,” Jasmine said. The body no longer held their interest. The mass in the corner shuddered again, at war with itself, alive under all the rot. “They usually don’t stay up here this long. They slide ba
ck down into the ducts or the sewers . . .”
Cathy grunted, turned down the alarms inside her mask until she could hear herself breathe again. The systems were overwhelmed. “We’re looking at more than one. This is just a mass . . .”
“A mass of what?”
Cathy shuffled toward the corner, the one blackened arm now free from the three piles, scrounging at the concrete, leaving behind a thick trail of grey pus.
“You know what. It was at least three of them.”
Cathy circled the undulating mass. She reached into her bag for a fire extinguisher reworked with a powerful, corrosive antifungal spray. They were still trying to get the mixture right. No one had officially approved its application. “Jas, I need you to get your spray out.”
She watched Jasmine’s hands. They were steady. No trembling or shaking.
“Jasmine. The spray.”
When the hand seized Cathy’s leg, her mask lit up anew, sensors bleating in her ears. A voice flickering inside her head, trying to make itself known. The mass of bodies, a family who never returned from their road trip to Muskoka, trapped down here in the dark, all trying to speak as one, alive under the mould, shambling toward her body under the coursing Wet, a fleshy shadow rising up like a sunflower toward the light of her mask, curling toward her warmth.
Run.
The word was simple, imprinted onto her mind, a chorus of voices in her head. It spoke even though there was no mouth. The Wet clung to buildings, rotted away the foundations, peeled paint, and split wires. Cathy knew the Wet could infect a person, find a way into their lungs, weaken their immune systems, maybe hospitalize them or leave them slumped in a basement apartment over their cereal, rotting away. It was a toxic mould, unhealthy, but manageable.
Don’t help.
And yet it was here, moving toward her, fighting against itself, begging her to run. A hand wrapping tighter around her leg, searching for purchase.
Run.
A cloud of white. Jasmine sprayed the air down around her, the powder settling onto the
mass in the corner, drying it out, the voices in Cathy’s head turning to shrieks, to mumbles, to nothing, trailing off into a dial tone she couldn’t shake. She staggered away into the fluorescent lights as Jasmine continued to spray, moving in arcs around the heaving, shrieking biomass in the corner until it stopped moving, stopped speaking, until Cathy could only hear her mask screeching its warnings, overwhelmed by the presence of the Wet, of whatever it was becoming.
“You okay?” Jasmine stood over her, wreathed in floating white powder. A powerful ghost. Cathy was supposed to be the protector. That was how they knew each other. She couldn’t even pull her own trigger, as if the voice was holding her back, seizing some nerve inside her.
“I’m alright,” Cathy said, slowly rising to her feet. The voice could have been imagined, was imagined, a new way to process the cluster of bodies slouched together in the corner.
“It reached for you.”
“Just an impulse. It didn’t know what I was,” Cathy said, regulating her breathing. The mask hid the fear. She pulled out her sample kit. “Like a root searching for moisture, it’s natural. Did you spray down the first body? We need to make sure we got all of it.”
“First body was what we expected, yeah, I got him,” Jasmine said. “As for the corner . . .”
“Corner was just more than one, that’s all.”
Jasmine tilted her helmet, inscrutable. “Alright.”
“What?” Cathy said. She walked toward the first corpse, still human even with the stain spreading through its face. She brushed small chunks of the crystallized Wet into a plastic bag, sealing it tight. “This is just more than we’re used to, that’s all.”
Jasmine didn’t argue. She gathered up other dry fragments, stuffing them into plastic bags for the overworked analysts back at the department. “What about your leg?”
Cathy looked down at the handprint, now coated white. “Could have been worse.”
Jasmine snorted. “Understatement queen does it again.”
Cathy smiled under the mask. “That’s right.”
They talked around the desiccated mass in the corner, working their way through procedure. A small vacuum attached to Jasmine’s case dealt with the final bits of dried-out spores and flesh. There would be a separate collection team sent out to gather up the bags. There were only so many masks to go around. There were only so many ways to try to explain their fresh discovery down here. There was no more voice whispering into Cathy’s ears.
“Jas, can you go upstairs and call in . . . whatever this was.”
Another tilt of the horns. Neither woman spoke. The air between them dripped.
“Okay. If that’s what you want, okay.”
Alone, Cathy took her time to review the scene, examining the walls, taking notes on her phone, walking the perimeter to document each incursion of the Wet in the corners concealed by Subarus and Land Rovers. No shapes shimmered. Whatever was under the Wet was gone now, pulverized, turned to powder. Cathy headed back toward the stairs without any voices in her head but her own, telling her this was just another job. The voice sounded like she believed it.
3.
Soda learned to love the rain. Rain meant more customers, more fares, more money in his pocket or at least hovering on the screen in his hand. Digits piling up and up, but never high enough, the accumulation an illusion, one he was complicit in perpetrating every time he climbed into his magenta Camry and told himself he was going somewhere.
He only went where they told him to go. Even in the rain, streets swollen rivers, sinkholes spreading through the city like rot, he was paid to divine a sage path home or wherever the fare was headed. This was how he kept the number from falling too fast. The digits plummeted whenever the insurance company took its fee, or a customer complained, or he had to bail his father out again. Every rider offered a new risk versus reward. Soda kept on pushing the levers, sure of a breach in the algorithm he could exploit, a hidden pattern that would save him.
A hand smacked against the passenger-side glass. Soda unlocked the door. His free hand clenched a taser he had bartered for with a teenager in what was left of Parkdale. You never knew who was going to climb inside. The man was already soaked, thick beard drowned, tailored suit close to ruined.
“You know you’re supposed to use the app,” Soda stuttered. “It’s not a cab.”
“And stand out there in the rain?” the man laughed. He barely fit inside the car.
“Can you at least punch it in for me so I don’t get written up?”
“I thought all you Magellan guys were your own bosses,” the man said. “Be your own captain, all of that good shit.”
That was the Magellan promise at first, the remnants of the rideshare companies scrambling to cover their market share after so many of the big players imploded. There would be no self-driving cars, no future. There were only people like Soda. Magellan promised to make the transition easier. They were all navigating this together, backed by the financial power of Threshold and its investors. Chart your own course. Soda had the red M sticker on the bottom left of his windshield. A freelancer. All he needed was a car, one they were happy to finance and then happy to surveil once all the paperwork was completed, everything signed directly from his phone. His supervisor was a voice and an email address, ticking off infractions whenever a customer complained. A gig that was meant to last a few weeks, but then weeks became months.
“It’s nasty out there, man. I don’t wanna risk getting trapped down on the subway for an hour. I’ve got a hundred bucks. Take me north.”
Months became years.
“North?”
“North for now, alright? Just drive.” The man dropped a single bill into the empty seat.
“You got it.”
Soda left the bill alone. No point in looking too eager. He watched the big man slump down as he wheeled into a U-turn, tossing a wave onto the sidewalk. You did what you had to do unless you were down on the eastern waterfront, the Threshold district humming and buzzing with their own surveillance, making note of every fluctuation. To make a better city, a smarter, safer city, that was the line that rang through Soda’s brain. A city that owned every action you took, collated, stored, redistributed, realigned, and filed it away for undisclosed purp
oses. It spread slowly, twisting through the concrete. Technically, Magellan’s office was in one of the energy-efficient towers down there, but Soda had never seen anyone behind the desk.
North was simple. There were stranger requests. North was easy. Rogue umbrellas scrambled across the intersection ahead of him. The weather app told him to expect snow, but Soda didn’t pay attention to the forecast anymore. Fluctuations came and went, taking entire gardens with them. Frost followed by five days of summer in February. The seasons tilted.
“I’m sick of this place,” the man said. “Deep in my belly, you know?”
Soda avoided conversation. He turned up the radio. After the first month behind the wheel, Soda learned he wasn’t only a driver — he was port, tour guide, counsellor, sometimes a priest.
“You know why?”
“Why?” Soda said, swerving around a limping casino tour bus in Chinatown, lights pulsing red as it pumped the brakes. A man on a bike banged Soda’s bumper as he nudged into the bike lane before taking off again. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
