“Hooooooooooo-wee, y’all.” Quince looked around the greenhouse at the students. He grinned and rubbed his hands together. “Buncha good looking folk ‘round here. I know y’all’re excited, so let’s get to it. For your cultivation score, y’all’ll be scored on two things.”

The gravity of the first exam still couldn’t hold down the floating giggles of the students as they counted the triple contraction.

“There’s y’all’s individual projects and there’s our little mystery pot. I went ahead and put the pot at each of y’all’s plots. In an hour, I will judge it based on how much you make it grow and how much essence is in it. No digging around in the soil to figure out what kind of seed it is. While you work, Head Chef Anise and I will come around to evaluate your plots. Let us know if y’all’re submitting anything for innovation.”

Quince flipped a large hourglass—a dramatically appropriate prop—and started on Archie’s row.

Before Archie could even grab his pot, Quince had already given out a perfect score.

“Beautiful,” Quince said as he pulled off his straw hat, revealing his tanned bald spot as he marveled at Blanche’s bountiful and overcrowded crops. He walked up to the three-foot tall bonsai tree in the center of the plot, touching it gingerly and assessing its essence. “I’m telling you. It just don’t get no better than this. Perfect score. Don’t you think, Head Chef Anise?”

“Absolutely.”

Blanche was giddy, her smile shining brighter than the sun. “And over here, I have my innovation project…”

She led them to the lone stalk of corn in the corner of her plot. It looked unexceptional, but Quince knew what it was. He was grinning ear to ear as he walked up to it.

“If you would, go ahead and pick it,” Blanche said.

“That’s all you, doll,” Quince told Anise, prompting a few giggles from the nearby students.

Anise snapped off the ear of corn and peeled back its husk before handing it to Quince. “It seems normal. What am I missing?”

Blanche gestured back to the stalk. A new ear of corn had already grown to replace the old one. Anise’s eyebrows jumped up in delight.

“As you can tell by how full my plot is, I’ve been concerned about space,” Blanche said. “Corn in particular requires a lot of land. So I thought…what if we brought the act of duplication all the way back to the picking of the crop? Imagine being able to sell a potted corn stalk that a non-Chef could pick ten times. There’d be a lot of demand for something like that.”

Quince couldn’t believe it. “Industrious, creative, technical. I know you’re the big opinion on this one, doll, but this is one of the best Orange Jacket projects I’ve seen.”

Anise eyed the stalk. “You can pick this ten times?”

Blanche scrunched up one eye and rocked her head side to side. “Well, I’ve gotten it up to three, but the third one can go wrong sometimes. My hope is that as I get better, I’ll get that number up.”

Anise took the ear of corn and held it up just an inch from her eye. “Well, this is leagues beyond Orange Jacket. Congratulations, Blanche, that’s a great idea. I’m giving you all twenty five points, but I want you to see you keep working on this. Get that number up to five and this’ll carry you through a couple of colors.”

Despite already giving out his score, Quince hung around and talked shop with Blanche while everyone else got to work.

Archie sat down with his pot and put his palm to the soil. He expected a mystery—a good cultivator could grow whatever the land threw at them. But he didn’t expect the lack of essence in the soil. He’d have to bring essence into the soil before even getting started on identifying or growing the seed.

He got comfortable, sitting cross-legged with the pot in his lap, and put his hands around the pot. He used his essence to break down the natural barrier of the dirt, allowing essence to flow into it. As the soil soaked up essence, Archie felt an anomaly inside it—the seed. But just as he found it, Quince interrupted his process.

“Well, Archie, I understand you and Nori are submitting a joint project,” Quince said. He walked up to the lemon sugarcane. “This it? Must be.”

“That’s right,” Archie said as he stood.

“And you’ll be submitting it for your innovation score as well?” Anise asked.

“Yes. It’s sugar cane that we grew with lemon water. And we have candy that we made from it.”

Nori popped up, giving Archie evil eyes for his lackadaisical presentation. She stood up straight, using a hand to iron out the wrinkles of her jacket.

“For our project,” she began in a formal voice, “we started with our end goal—making a better lemon candy. Rather than fusing sweet with sour through cooking, we wanted to do it through cultivation.”

Quince grabbed one of the stalks while Nori continued her rehearsed speech.

“We hypothesized that doing this would allow for a more intense flavor that could be made with a single ingredient. So we grew this sugarcane using enhanced lemon water. It took a lot of trial and error. Initially, the acid killed the sugarcane, but we found a way to make it work by making our essences familiar with each other before applying them to the sugarcane and lemon water, respectively.”

Quince looked back. “Make your essences famil-yur?” He looked at Anise. “Is that slang?”

Nori’s eyes widened, her cheeks turning as red as a cherry. “No! We uh—we did a Labruscan handshake.”

Quince raised his eyebrows and looked away. “Now that’s definitely slang.”

Archie pressed his lips together to stifle a laugh. He took a deep breath and licked his lips. “No, it’s…” A laugh bubbled up, cutting him off.

Anise picked up where he left off. “They exchange a bit of essence. It’s like giving a dog the scent.”

“Hm.” Quince said as he gave the stalk a shake. “Good essence. Growth looks a bit stunted. Can I get a taste?”

“Yes,” Nori said, butting in between Archie and the teachers. “We prepared some lemon candy using only this sugar and water.”

Nori fished out candies wrapped in parchment paper. Anise took one. Quince shook his head.

“I mean straight from the sugarcane,” he said. “I need to judge the raw flavor.”

“Archie?” Nori prompted Archie to handle harvesting. When it came to knives, Nori took charge, but when it came to machetes, she left the brute work to Archie.

As Archie chopped down a stalk and started to peel the outer layer off, Anise ate the hard candy and gave her assessment.

“Hmm. Hmm! It’s good. A bit hard for my liking, but I’m not judging you for your cooking. It’s an original idea and a bit of an original flavor. It does seem to have lost some of its flavor in the cooking process. But it tastes different than other candies. Fresher, I think.”

Archie used the machete like a saw to remove a thin disk of the inner sugar cane. Quince broke it in half, tossed a piece to Anise, and chewed on the fibers.

“Yeah,” he said between smacks. “I like it. It’s subtle, but it’s there.”

Anise took a couple of bites before spitting it back out in the dirt. “A lot of flavor. Again, this is an original idea.”

Archie perked up.

“However, it’s not a very big idea.”

Archie perked down.

“The execution is missing a little something. I think there’s room to grow into the idea a bit.” Anise leaned over to Quince and whispered something.

“A couple more than that, I’d say. It’s just Orange Jackets, doll.”

Anise shrugged and nodded. She turned to address Archie and Nori. “For your innovation score, I award each of you eighteen points.”

Nori winced. She had expected twenty. Archie had expected eighteen, but getting what he expected didn’t mean he couldn’t be upset. Some part of him had hoped he might have been pessimistic.

“Yeah, I agree on the execution,” Quince said as he poked around Archie’s plot, running his fingers through the durum wheat and picking a blueberry. “Between that and this, I’ll give you ten points for cultivation.”

“Ten?” Archie’s heart dropped. Ten points guaranteed that cultivation would be his lowest score.

Quince laughed at the misunderstanding. “I’m starting ya at ten. That’s half the score. I’ll come back and take a gander at your pot for the other half.”

Relief swelled in Archie so fast that he nearly fainted.

Quince poked around Nori’s plot, assessing the lemon tree and a few straggling blueberry bushes that Nori had never bothered to remove.

“Hm. Well, Nori…” Quince winced. “I’d say you got about seven points here. The lemon tree is nice, but it seems like it’s just started being tended to properly again. I can tell that at some point in the last few months, it almost bit the dust.”

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Nori tilted her face down in shame.

“Lemme know if you wanna adjust either of those points, doll,” Quince told Anise. “You’re my second on these scores.”

Anise took a quick look through their crops and shrugged. “I’m fine with it.”

“Alrighty, then. Good work, Chefs.” Quince pointed at Archie’s pot. “I’ll be back once the time’s up.”

Nori waited until the teachers moved on before rubbing her temples and groaning.

“It’s okay,” Archie reassured her. “We knew you’d lose a few points on that one. And eighteen is a good score for innovation.”

“I swear, if the cooking challenge is a bearnaise sauce, I’m gonna lose it.”

While Quince and Anise worked their way around the greenhouse, Archie set to work on his pot. He located the seed with his essence and sent waves of energy through the soil to be absorbed.

Once the seed was properly saturated with essence, Archie started to coax it to sprout. He maintained a proper balance—if he converted all of the seed’s essence at once, it could die. Through the feedback of essence, Archie could tell that the seed had cracked and the sprouting process had begun.

He worked in stages, resupplying the soil with essence, then resupplying the seed, then converting to growth, then repeating. The more expert cultivators could compress the stages into more streamlined flow—Blanche did it all in one smooth motion, the soil becoming a perfect conduit for her essence. But for Archie, the soil still had a resistance that needed to be broken down before he could nourish the seed.

“Halfway done,” Nori said to Archie, nodding at the hourglass. A single green sprig had risen from her soil.

Archie’s sprout was still stuck an inch beneath the surface. He sat up straight and stretched his shoulders. Nori nodded at him. “You can do this,” she said.

Archie’s mind wandered toward the future. Toward the prospect of success or failure. Toward the splendor of the yellow jacket or the disappointment of the stripes. He caught his thoughts slipping away and pulled them back in to focus on the task at hand.

He became a bit more reckless as the sands of time piled up, sacrificing quality for speed. Finally, a little stem, adorned with a single precious leaf, broke through the surface.

“Time!” Quince yelled.

“Hands up!” Anise yelled, her head whipping around to try to catch someone cheating.

Archie lifted his hands up to his shoulders and looked around. A sinking feeling stole his breath as he recognized the mediocrity of his results.

Quince started with Blanche, whose seed had grown into a beautiful bouquet of clovers. “Full points.”

The Head Chef’s face didn’t hide his disappointment as he moved on to Archie. “Hm,” he said as he grabbed the pot. He lifted the single leaf with a finger.

“Well, there’s real quality in here. It’s grown very well. Just not very quick-like. Seems like you understand how to convert essence to growth, you just gotta figure out how to do it a bit faster.”

He looked down at his notebook, finding Archie’s score. “I’d say this takes you up to a sixteen.”

Archie sighed with disappointment. Together with his innovation score, that put him at a thirty four—he had hoped for a clean forty to put him securely in range of the yellow jacket.

Quince took Nori’s pot, which had bloomed to a point somewhere between Archie’s and Blanche’s. “Good growth,” he said. “I do think you might have brute forced it a bit at some point. The structure of the essence is a bit warped. You gotta be more delicate. Still, good growth. With your seven from earlier, this puts you at…seventeen.”

The score filled Archie with bitterness. It took him a moment to swallow his pride. “Good job,” he told Nori.

“Yeah. I knew I wasn’t going to get full points. I really rushed it at the beginning.”

“Eh, at least you didn’t take fifty minutes to get the sprout above the soil.”

Nori offered a sympathetic laugh. “You’ll be fine. Ready to get out of here?”

“Yeah. Lemme just grab these.”

As Archie gathered blueberries for the next exam, they overhead Quince grading Julienne.

“Weeeeeell…I take it they got their own growers down at the Cafe, don’t they?”

Archie went into the main kitchen early to get started on his pasta. He started a process he had done countless times before, placing eggs and mashed blueberries into a mound of flour and kneading it into a ball of blue dough.

But as he kneaded, his mind wandered back to the cultivation exam. Sixteen points. Sixteen. He had expected at least eighteen. Sixteen put him in the range of failure. Two stripes. Half the class might be happy with two stripes. They’d take it as a sign that they could work over the summer to make up the difference. But not Archie. He wouldn’t be happy as long as he wore orange.

His thoughts stumbled upon the well-worn path of his childhood dream. The homecoming. Returning to Sain as a real Chef. His neighbors fawning over the yellow jacket. People coming to Petrichor to see the newest up-and-coming Chef in the world.

He feared their disappointment. If he returned in an orange jacket, they’d say, “oh, just like his father.”

But then Archie realized that he might not return at all. The finals were inconsequential compared to the situation he and Nori and found themselves in with Mr. Ackers. He’d be lucky to be able to keep living a normal life after the next week.

He set the dough in the fridge and went to take a nap that left him groggy, not replenished.

A few hours later, Archie joined the rest of the first-years in the main kitchen for their freestyle cooking assessment. Colby marched through the rows of students to make sure everyone played by the book. Pomona sauntered through the rows of students to offer last-minute tips and answer questions.

Archie put his subpar cultivation score out of his mind. He knew he could make up the difference here.

But then he grabbed his dough from the fridge and realized he might have been wrong.

While cooling, the dough had become slick with an excessive amount of moisture. Archie tried to recall how many eggs he had used, but could only recall how distracted he had been. He checked the essence of the dough, realizing he hadn’t been as deliberate as usual when kneading the dough. He added more flour to reduce the moisture, but he knew doing so meant reducing the overall aeration of the dough.

While Archie raged against his own mistakes, Nori found herself in the zone. Everything came easy. She fileted a salmon and baked it with asparagus and small gold potatoes. As the fish cooked, she prepared a creamy yellow sauce with cream, chicken broth, thyme, garlic, butter, and—of course—lemon.

Nori saw an advantage in finishing quickly, calling Colby and Pomona over as soon as she plated the food. Archie watched as he pulled the noodles from the boiling pot to a sauté pan, hoping to get rid of some excess moisture.

Colby took the first bite, using his fingers to smear a potato with sauce as he ate the fish. “Mmm,” he said. “It’s simple. Sometimes I appreciate simple.”

Pomona took a bite. “Mmm! Nori! This sauce!” She used the fork to scoop up a bit more sauce and sucked on the prongs. “Okay, you have to show me how you make it sometime.”

Once again, Archie’s disappointment with himself battled with his happiness for Nori. Judging by the Head Chefs’ reaction, she probably had twenty points in the bag.

And then Colby took another bite of fish—not out of a critical curiosity, but out of desire. “Mmm,” he said again.

More than twenty!

Colby and Pomona stepped away, whispering to each other so that Nori couldn’t hear. Once they landed on a score, Colby was the one to break the news, providing the rare opportunity for a student to be praised by him.

“Twenty four,” he said.

Nori nearly jumped out of her skin.

“Congratulations,” Pomona said as she squeezed Nori’s shoulders. They moved on to Julienne, who had created a dish of tagliatelle and bolognese sauce.

“I’ll be submitting it for my innovation score, as well,” Julienne said. Pomona went to grab Anise.

Meanwhile, Nori looked over at Archie while she cleaned up her station. “Did you hear that? Twenty four! I just need twenty one points from conjuration and I’m yellow!”

“Congratulations,” Archie said with a smile that disappeared a little too quickly.

Nori’s celebratory tone went on pause as she worried about Archie. “Hey, what’s up?”

“It’s not…” Archie sighed. His body tightened, his breathing growing shallow. “It’s not going well.”

“Hey. You got this.”

Archie wished he believed her.

Back at Julienne’s station, Anise gasped with glee as Julienne’s tagliatelle noodles moved on their own to wrap around a magically enhanced fork. “Smart, fun, practical. I can see how this could elevate the dining experience and be useful for others to learn. I’d score it at twenty points.”

“This would be great for kids,” Pomona added. “When my niece eats pasta, the floor eats as much as she does.”

“True! True! Twenty two points, then.”

Anise was also thankful to get to try Julienne’s pasta, which earned an immediate twenty five points from Colby and Pomona.

Archie melted parmesan and romano cheese together, adding blueberries at the end and pouring it over his pasta. His previous mistakes had made him frustrated, and being frustrated had made him rush.

Colby took the first bite. “Mmm. It’s a good idea. The execution, though…”

Archie looked at Pomona. Pomona the kind. Pomona the complimenter. Pomona the Colby-softener. She took a bite and pursed her lips in disappointment. “It’s good. Seriously. But…I expected more from you.”

They stepped away. Colby whispered a suggested score to Pomona, who nodded in agreement.

“Eighteen,” Colby said.

Even with an assumed twenty five points in conjuration, that meant Archie needed a twenty one on the next day’s cooking challenge to earn his promotion.

“Finished!” Oliver declared. He held out a small vial of blue liquid. “And it’ll be my innovation project.”

Anise considered the liquid with great caution. “This isn’t gonna kill me, is it? Head Chef Colby, perhaps you’d like to try it?”

Colby’s face went white and Pomona laughed, both undoubtedly recalling the incident from the first semester.

“You run the innovation portion,” Colby said. “Your opinion is the one that matters.”

“I’ve tested it on myself several times,” Oliver said. “It’s alcoholic, but you don’t have to worry about it.”

The whole class worried about it. Archie sweat. Nori gripped a spatula. Blanche said a prayer of protection.

And then Anise drank.

Nothing happened. She licked her lips.

“It’s pretty good. Honey mead? I like that it—”

A stream of fizz erupted from her mouth, shooting ten feet before hitting the floor. The stream lasted for several seconds, putting a bath’s worth of bubbles on the floor. When it finally ended, Anise blinked repeatedly and wiped her mouth. She looked at Oliver with a wild rage.

“What the—”

“Sorry!” Oliver squeaked. “It was only supposed to last a couple of seconds. At least I figured out how to make it come out of the right end finally!”

While most of the students ate their creations for dinner, Archie could hardly manage a bite. And that night, he couldn’t sleep. If it wasn’t the finals, it was the thought of Mr. Ackers that kept him awake. The thought of Teff. Bloody and bruised, collapsed against the counter.

Even Oliver couldn’t get a joke out of him.