Page 1 of 21
Nineteen-year-old rooftop beekeeper Tamsin guards jars of memory-infused honey in a storm-bent coastal city. When a corporation steals her grandmother’s sweetest summer, she descends into flooded tunnels to reclaim it, aided by a mentor, a hacker friend, and a gull-like drone—sparking a citywide reckoning.
They say you can smell the ocean before you see it, like a cut lime pressed under your nose. On the roof of our building the air was always salty and sun-warmed, heavy with the resin-thick scent of propolis. My bees draped the city’s hum with their own, a soft electric chorus that steadied my hands. I checked frames by feel, gloved fingers searching the comb for brood, for capped honey, for the little flickers of life that made sense when everything else didn’t.
“Easy now,” I murmured, lifting a frame to the light. The wax shone like amber held up to the sun, and inside it swam a hundred tiny reflections of the sky.
Grandma Eloise sat in a folding chair by the parapet, blanket over her knees despite the heat. She tracked the bees with her eyes and then looked at me, careful, as if my name were on the tip of her tongue. “You… you’re my honey girl,” she said, relief loosening her mouth into a smile. “The one who makes summers stick.”
“That’s me,” I said, because most days it was true. I made summers stick. Memory honey did that. Some hives could hold stories the way others held clover and heat. It wasn’t something I advertised, but word traveled in a city laced with boardwalks and gossip. Our rooftop boxes weren’t just honey; they were a kind of archive, sweet and stubborn, the way the past can be.
Mrs. Osei had taught me to listen. She’d been keeping bees since before the floodwalls, since before apartment roofs became gardens and docks. “Never feed the hives salt-blossom,” she’d warned the day she gave me my first smoker. “They lose their sense of the city. They wander until they forget where home is. And never open an amber jar when the tide’s dragging out. Memory needs water under it.”
I kept her rules like spells. The tin smoker tapped against my thigh as I moved, a good weight. I pressed the bellows. Cool smoke curled around my wrists and the bees gentled, their wings a soft sift of air against my suit.
Below, the old ferry terminal jutted into the bay like a jawbone. Our neighborhood—Garnet Pier—leaned in toward the water, all rust and paint and dogs barking at gulls. Half of my classmates had gigs on stills or fix-boats after classes; some soldered on balconies at night. I worked on the roof and took community college credits in the mornings for biology and urban ecology, though the city taught me more than any syllabus.
A drone passed overhead, the corporate kind with blue stripes. It paused, clicked, and then moved on. Grandma’s hand tightened around her thermos.
“Just a survey,” I said. The word felt like a pebble in my mouth. “Nothing to worry about.”
She stared at the smoker, at the silver canister dented by years of knocks. “I remember… a night market. Lanterns. Your mother biting into a peach so ripe it… it ran down her wrist.” She touched her throat. “Do you have that one?”
I glanced at the shed in the shade of the stairwell bulkhead. The amber jars lined the shelf inside. Every jar was wax-sealed and labeled in my careful block letters. I had my mother’s laughter somewhere, trapped in gold.