Page 66 of Orc'd & Loaded
Boris jumps down from the counter. The floor shakes. He lands in a puddle of sooty water and immediately swats a dazed, waterlogged sprite toward the door with the flat of his pan. It skips across the wet tile like a hockey puck.
I work the hose in systematic passes. Left to right across the counters. Top to bottom on the walls. The water runs black at first, then gray, then clear. Grease traps overflow. The floor drain gurgles. Steam rises from the sprites I've hit directly, and they crawl toward the shadows with the slow, miserable determination of creatures that have had a very bad morning.
Boris sweeps through behind me. Where I blast, he collects. His massive boots push the stunned sprites into a pile near the door, and he scoops them into the canvas sack in handfuls, water dripping between his fingers.
We work the kitchen in sections. Methodical. Me with the hose, him with the pans. The rhythm builds without discussion. I clear a surface. He checks for stragglers. I move to the next. He secures the last.
Seven minutes. The kitchen goes from disaster zone to dripping, soaked, but clean.
I release the trigger. The hose dies with a shudder. Water pools in wide, reflective sheets. My chef coat is drenched from the spray. My hand throbs where the trigger bit into the burn.
Boris is in the kitchen. A skillet in each hand. Sooty water drips from his leather apron. A single sprite clings to his topknot, blinking up at me with enormous, terrified eyes.
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.
