Ashley worked the fields til harvest was done. Moving up and down the stalks plucking the fruits of iron and tungsten for her cousin’s forge work in the town. The fruits were abundant and readily available all along each stalk, the plants eagerly offering them up that if left alone they would crowd out the avenues between them.

It was easy work with a basket and a sweeping brush of her fingers to pull the fruits free. Far more delicate work was drawing from the taps. Every plant gathered up a great store of water in their flesh for their many needs, kept warm by distant sunlight and kept liquid with tightly sealed veins and bladders. To draw on these stores of water and the sugars within one had to tap the stalks, fit an inflatable bottle to the outlet, and let the plant gently fill the new volume to capacity. There was a cycle and a rhythm to changing over the bottles on the taps. And it was that rhythm which set the times for harvest and the cycle of working the field here.

The taps were made in the forges of town, delicate exchangers with precise valves and pressure locks. The gossets and latches needed to seal tight or water would seep, freeze and then evaporate out around the edges. They needed to be clean or the stalks could suffer and infection or blight. They needed to be sharp and very strong or they would shatter under the strain of the plant’s flesh. They needed to be tempered against corrosion for the mix of nitrous and enzymes could be caustic within the flesh of the stalks.

The connectors for the bottles were also made in town’s forges. Carefully lathed and treated to fit to the taps without welding locked into them. A welded tap was a ruined one and required delicate extraction and tending to the wound on the stalk before that site could be set for harvest again. Long periods of regrowth where the harvest of waters and sugars could run low for field workers like Ashley.

She sang to her sisters in medium long light and listened to their progress, each of them had their place in the fields. Everyone was making good progress and it looked like she would be first to finish her harvest.

The net around the raw metal fruits and bottles of syrupy sap water was edging towards full enough it would be too much of a strain to take to town safely. She sang out that she was finishing up in her field, noting the stalks she missed for her neighbors if they wanted to take up any extra load or make up a deficit from a blighted or less fruitful stalk.

Then it was the work of ropes and knots to close up the net tight. Then once everything was bound solid and secure together she started it along to coast down a field avenue. Chirping softly ahead so that others could stay out of her way or another bundle and its handler could divert or warn her to brake and stall her bundle’s momentum.

At the end of the fields where she harvested she braked her bundle so she could swap out her lungs and air reservoir. It was quick flex of her air intakes and loosening of her own living connectors. Dropping the waste saturated symbiote into the chamber and picking up a newly revitalized one fresh with glucose, oxygen and water.

Ashley was economical from long practice in slipping herself into the symbiote’s embrace, no panic like when she was younger and scared of not getting her breath back. A sickening moment of exposure as bits of residual liquid sizzled on her exposed membranes. A quick sticky cling and then once more she had air and sugar and water to live by. The swapping station for field workers was fed into the farm’s local grid, fed by their own taps. The sugary syrup of the sap lines run through splitters and filters and digesters to revitalize the air symbiotes.

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No need for imports of the very same bottles she was harvesting here. Not like the power canopy.

After ensuring she would have enough symbiote breath for the journey Ashley shoved off with her bundle to town. The avenues of the fields met with one of the thoroughfares here, a nice clean straight shot with overwatch from periodic watchtowers, scouts and snipers. Keen eyed friends and family with ancient imported weapons and strange city magic ready to protect any of the caravans of bundled up metal fruits and sap-syrup bottles that came along this way.

Ashley liked to rest during this part of the trip, with just a few quiet chirps down the town-ward road. Coasting with minimal nudges and tugs to keep her on course. When she was young she had practically had to crawl along constantly adjusting her burden’s trajectory and the trip had been exhausting, requiring she have a spare symbiote to swap out along the way. But now she could usually manage the trip without hardly having to breath at all.

The symbiote was mostly so she could have breath in town without having to trade at whatever Smithiner was charging. Sometimes it was almost reasonable if she was ahead of the rush of laborers but it was hard to beat the price of free that was offered complementary to any sap workers.

The syrup and metal field was a decent place to harvest. And a good place to get tool metals of course as the plants were always trying to get rid of more metal. Not like the danger and risk of the great power canopy which surrounded most of the town and the local use crops. The great black leaves darkening out the sun so much that one could freeze to death if they brushed too much that was shaded by them, or be roasted alive by moving too close to the red hot fins that kept the plants themselves from bursting under the heat of the sun. She had lost a lot of cousins and friends and a few uncles and aunts during their due work time in the solar fields.

But the power canopy paid for wonders and the Tith, the debt owed by all. The price promised by their ancestors and founders of the town. Debt to the great mythical city. A place none of them had ever seen. Sometimes the beam riders and traders spoke of news relayed along slow and trickling between the towns and consolidation stations all the way from the fabled and distant fantasy of Crimson Leaf, the red glowing tree where everyone was so rich that they did not need to work a field to breath.

The place that the light of every power canopy and solar field converged from all around the sun.

The market from which traders found magic and the great weapons in the watchtowers.

A trickle of miracles and the honor of ancestors required that they work the power canopy no matter the risk to life and limb.

So the most skilled of field workers took lots and worked the power canopy as was their due. Risked the dangers of hungry predators and pests seeking to sap the lifeblood of the town. Ashley had done two tours of the caustic danger and gotten out with only a few burns and some skin frost frozen.

She had been lucky.

Ashley prefered working the syrup and metal fields, it was pastoral and safe, close to town and it gave her all the breath she could want if she was careful with the bundles. And hardly anything more dangerous than a few children wanted to eat the kind of plants that made sap and metal.

But she would put in lots like everyone else so that the children and her younger sisters and brothers did not have too.

The power canopy was no place for the unaware or inexperienced.