The Laughing Seed Heist

Mina woke to the smell of something triumphant and slightly charred. It was the kind of smell that announces itself with confidence: a warm, cinnamon-spiked toast that had lost a duel with gravity and won the kitchen. She lay still for a beat and listened to the building breathe. The Perch did not snore like ordinary apartment blocks; it sighed and hummed in small responsible tones—pipes that whispered recipes, a refrigerator that hummed opera recitatives, the elevator practicing polite jokes. Built into the side of Crispford’s oldest block, the Perch had been part greenhouse, part thrift store, and part community theatre for things that refused to grow up: ferns that wore spectacles, old bicycles sprouting tomato vines, a robotic vacuum with a fondness for ballroom music. Mina loved it for all the ridiculous reasons other people loved their childhood homes. It remembered the shape of her laugh.

She stumbled into the kitchen in one sock and a T-shirt patterned with tiny pixelated squids. On the counter, Grampa Ilya had laid out the evidence of his latest experiment: scones that had taken on the philosophical pose of a croissant. He spotted her and wagged a floury finger as if it were a national anthem.

— Don’t sniff them too close, love, — he said. — They might answer back.

Sprocket, the building’s resident robot-cat, wound around Mina’s shins and distributed a report in the form of purring and the gentle discharge of a plastic whisker. Sprocket looked like a stuffed animal who had been to technical school: one eye an LED, the other a hopeful button, feet that clicked politely when it accepted being stroked. Mina bent and scraped crumbs into the crook of her palm like a diplomat offering peace. When she pressed a fingertip to her phone, the screen blinked: the Perch's communal noticeboard had posted an alert. At the top, in the building’s old handwriting font, someone had scrawled: ROOFTOP HUM—ANOMALY.

Everyone in the Perch cared deeply about the rooftop. It was the city’s smallest patch of private exultation: a tangle of vegetables, string lights, a satellite dish repurposed into a birdbath, and an old glass lampplant the tenants had named Lamprey. Lamprey was lovably absurd: a lamp and a plant and a jukebox of memories all in one. It leaned over the communal bench and released a soft, hiccuping laugh every morning, a sound the residents swore made the coffee machine dispense better crema. Lamprey had learned the names of three generations of tenants and one particularly stubborn pigeon named Henry. On good days it glowed faintly chartreuse and hummed like a satisfied kettle.

Mina had spent lonely nights at Lamprey when color in the world felt like an unpaid bill: she would press her palm to its pot and it would play her grandmother’s voice—crooked lullabies and the way she pronounced oregano like a secret. So the noticeboard’s alert felt personal, like a friend forgetting to call. She tugged a hair tie from her wrist and tied back her hair with more suddenness than usual. That was the thing about things that were part-home and part-heart: they didn’t forget politely. They collapsed dramatically.