SALTROOT

Issue 1: Low Tide, New Mouth

PAGE ONE

PANEL 1. Full-width. Black water, churned to a boil under monsoon rain. No horizon. Just wet dark and the white scribble of foam. In the lower third, a hand — brine-white, knuckles split — clamps the slimed underside of a market plank. The plank is painted with the ghost of a fish and the word SLACK in a vendor's careless brush.

CAPTION: Kel Maru. Where three brown rivers go to drown in the sea.

SFX: KSSSHHHHHH

PANEL 2. Tight on that hand. A frayed cord loops the wrist and disappears under the water — and snubbed on the cord, half-swallowed by the surge, the dull gleam of a brass measuring-spoon. Worn smooth. Loved.

OFF (small, ragged): Salt.

PANEL 3. A second of the hand. The other hand comes up, slaps the plank, slides, holds. The forearm above it is wound in sodden grey wrapping, cloth gone translucent, hiding the skin beneath.

OFF (smaller): …cumin.

PANEL 4. Black water filling the panel. A face breaks it — just the eyes, lashes pasted flat, mouth a hard line. Fifteen and furious about it.

SAELA: …smoke.

PANEL 5. Inset, the eyes alone, lit strangely — pale light moving in them that the lightning can't account for.

SAELA: Don't you dare let go.

PAGE TWO

PANEL 1. SPLASH (full-bleed). THE TIDE-RACE. Pull back hard and up. The Saltglass: a terraced mudflat island shouldering out of the delta, the Brine Bazaar stacked up its steps in a fever of canvas and lamplight and bodies. The storm tide is CLIMBING — black water swallowing the lowest terrace, vendors hauling baskets, crates, a goat, a grandmother, up the steps two at a time. Run the thin TIDE-GAUGE down the right gutter: a notched ruler, the water-line already past three of its marks and rising. Lanterns swing. Everything leans uphill.

CAPTION: Twice a day the sea climbs the steps and eats the market. Twice a day it gives it back.

CAPTION: Tonight it is in no mood to give anything back.

SFX (huge, washing across the whole flat): WAAAASH

PANEL 2. Inset, lower corner. A boy of sixteen — rolled trousers, one bare foot, a heavy bell-mallet slung across his back — stands waist-deep in the surge poling a flat barge sideways, herding floating crates with the pole like a shepherd.

WADI: UP! UP! Crown Step or kiss it goodbye —

PAGE THREE

PANEL 1. Wadi again, braced against the barge, reading the water the way other people read a face — head cocked, listening to it. Behind him a great brass bell hangs in a timber frame on the highest terrace, dark and silent.

WADI: She's not done climbing. Move your oysters, Cusk!

PANEL 2. A one-eyed woman in her fifties — kelp eye-patch, apron crusted with sewn shells, an oyster-knife in her fist — drags a sledge of baskets up the slick steps, swearing.

CUSK: My oysters've crossed worse tides than you've been alive, boy.

PANEL 3. Low at the flooded edge. The painted plank — fish, SLACK — rides the surge inward, and the white hand still on it. Saela's whole weight drags behind it, a dark shape in the water.

SFX: thud … thud — the plank battering the steps.

PANEL 4. The plank slams the second-highest terrace. Saela's grip tears loose. She tumbles up onto wet stone in a sprawl of soaked coat — an oversized oilcloth thing, its lining stitched thick with dozens of little twists of paper, spice-twists, sodden now. She does not move.

SFX: SKRRSH-THUD

PAGE FOUR

PANEL 1. The Crown Step. The highest terrace, last to flood, smaller than the rest. A single low stall crouches here under a patched awning, a battered iron pot steaming on its hearth despite the rain. Hand-lettered over the counter: THE SLACK POT. Saela's sprawled body has fetched up at the very edge of its lamplight.

CAPTION: The Crown Step. Highest stone on the Saltglass. Last place the water takes.

PANEL 2. Boots. Then the hem of a plain coat. A broad-shouldered woman in her sixties steps out of the stall's glow — silver braids roped down her back, a stillness to her that the storm doesn't touch. One hand hangs at her side. The other is carved wood, knuckled and oiled, fingers slightly curled, catching the lamplight.

PANEL 3. The woman — SEFU — crouches over the sprawled girl. She doesn't reach for a pulse. She tips her face down toward Saela's mouth and breathes in. Slow. Tasting the air off her.

PANEL 4. Close on Sefu's face. Eyes shut. Nostrils wide. Something crosses her features and is gone — a flinch she won't let live.

SEFU (low, to herself): …well.

PANEL 5. Behind her, Cusk arrives with her sledge, oyster-knife pointing.

CUSK: Drowned rat. Tide-trash. Roll it back in before it costs us.

PAGE FIVE

PANEL 1. Saela's eyes crack open. Half-conscious, she's already counting, lips barely moving, the reflex of a creature that soothes itself with inventory.

SAELA (a thread): …salt. cumin. smoke. clove. don't —

PANEL 2. Above her, blurred and doubled, Cusk and Sefu. To Saela's flooding vision, faint ribbons of color drift off each of them — off Cusk a thin smoke-grey worry, off Sefu nothing at all, a clean dark she can't read. Saela's eyes track the ribbons and the terror lands before sense does.

SAELA (thought): No — not now — don't look, don't taste them, don't —

PANEL 3. She slams her own eyes shut. Forces them. Her wrapped right arm curls in against her chest, hiding itself on instinct.

PANEL 4. Cusk leans in, suspicious.

CUSK: Look at her. Reads us like a menu. That's a guild brat, Sefu. Confectory. Trouble in a wet coat.

SEFU: Everyone's trouble in a wet coat at this hour.

PANEL 5. Sefu straightens, decides, in the unhurried way of a woman who has already weighed the whole thing.

SEFU: She stays till the water turns. My counter, my call.

PAGE SIX

PANEL 1. Interior, the Slack Pot. Cramped, warm, packed: bundled herbs overhead, a wall of chipped bowls, a hearth, the big iron pot breathing onion-and-bone steam. Rain drums the awning. Sefu sets a chipped bowl on the counter and ladles broth one-handed, the wooden hand bracing the bowl's rim.

CAPTION: She moved like the second hand had never left. You only saw it was wood when the light hit.

PANEL 2. She slides the bowl across to Saela, who's bundled on a stool wrapped in a horse-blanket, dripping, hollow-cheeked, ravenous and trying not to show it.

SEFU: Eat. Don't talk while you do it. Talking's how good broth gets wasted.

PANEL 3. Saela stares at the bowl. The steam off it carries no color to her sight — just steam. She looks almost disappointed, almost relieved. Then she's drinking it like the tide might take it back.

SFX: glk glk glk

PANEL 4. Sefu watches, arms folded, wood hand on her own forearm. She does not ask the obvious things. Where you came from. Whose you are. What's under that wrapping.

SEFU: There's a cot in the corner-post. Dry, mostly. You wash. Every bowl, every pot, every night. That's the rent.

SAELA (mouth full, wary): …And the questions?

SEFU: I'm too old to carry questions up these steps. Eat your soup.

PANEL 5. Small panel. Saela's eyes over the rim of the bowl — startled by mercy, distrustful of it.

PAGE SEVEN

PANEL 1. Later, the storm gentling. The corner-post cot: a pallet jammed between barrels. Saela lies curled toward the wall, coat hung dripping, the spice-twists in its lining spread to dry like a hundred little tongues. She's not asleep. She's listening.

PANEL 2. Tight on her throat. The brass spoon rests there now, hung back on its cord, polished by years of a thumb. She holds it the way a child holds a hand.

SAELA (whisper): Still here.

PANEL 3. Tight on her right forearm, the wrapping peeled back two turns in the dark. We don't see the skin. We see her not looking at it. She wraps it tight again, fast.

SAELA (whisper): Still hidden.

PANEL 4. Wide, quiet. The stall. Sefu's silhouette at the hearth, banking the fire one-handed, back to the girl. Outside, the tide-gauge in the gutter shows the water cresting — at its very top notch — and the storm spending itself to drizzle.

CAPTION: The brand can wait. The brass can wait. Everything could wait, if the water would just —

PANEL 5. A hush spreads across the panel. The rain stops between one drop and the next.

CAPTION: — turn.

PAGE EIGHT

PANEL 1. SPLASH-ADJACENT, wide. THE SLACK. The whole flat goes still. Full-bleed stillness, the line work loosening, white air breathing into the margins. The water hangs at its crest, perfectly flat, neither rising nor falling, a held breath made of sea. On the high frame the great brass bell. Wadi, mallet already drawn back.

CAPTION (thin, spare lettering): For one minute the sea forgets which way it's going.

CAPTION (thin): They call it the Slack.

SFX (single, clean, ringing across the white): DONNNNG

PANEL 2. Saela's eyes snap open in the dark of the corner-post. The light moves in them.

SAELA (thought): That bell.

PAGE NINE

PANEL 1. The tide-gauge in the gutter now plunging mark by mark — the water dropping fast, the sea remembering. Outside the awning, lanterns relight all down the terraces. The drowned market hauls itself back into the bared mud.

CAPTION: Then it remembers. The water falls. And the market — the market wakes up starving.

PANEL 2. Saela ducks out of the stall to dump a basin, blinking at the dawn-grey flat.

PAGE TEN

PANEL 1. SPLASH (full-bleed). SAVOR FLOOD. The reborn bazaar fills the whole page — hundreds of vendors and dawn-buyers cramming the wet terraces, fish slapped on slabs, fritter-oil spitting, kids underfoot, the works. And rising off every single soul: ribbons. Aroma-ribbons of taste-color, hundreds of them, braiding up into the air in a dizzying wash only Saela (and we) can see — saffron-gold longing here, a thread of vinegar-grief there, smoke-grey loneliness, a sour-green envy, sweet ribbons, rancid ribbons, a whole sky of hunger steaming off the crowd. Saela stands tiny at the stall's edge, basin forgotten, drowning in it.

CAPTION (Saela): It's not the food I smell. It never was.

CAPTION (Saela): It's what they're hungry for underneath the food.

CAPTION (Saela): A thousand mouths. A thousand secret aches, all at once, all at me.

PAGE ELEVEN

PANEL 1. Saela claps a hand over her own mouth and nose — useless, you can't unsmell with a hand — and reels back against the post, eyes streaming.

SAELA (thought): Shut it out. Shut it out. You're a dishwasher. Dishwashers don't taste people. Don't. Taste. People.

PANEL 2. A small voice, right at her elbow. A barefoot kid of maybe ten — patched vest, gap-toothed, a glass jar tied to a belt-loop. Crickets hop inside it, sawing away. He's hawking up and down the Walk.

CRICKET: Tide-news! Low water till the third bell, root-mud good for clams, barge runs at the turn — buy yer tide-news, miss, half a cowrie —

PANEL 3. He clocks her face. Sways on his bare heels, unbothered, an old hand at strangers.

CRICKET: You're green. New mouth. New mouths always look like that the first low tide — like the market's too loud in a place your ears can't reach.

SAELA (hoarse): …Something like that.

PANEL 4. He thumps the jar proudly. The crickets saw on.

CRICKET: My fellas. Best clock on the flat. They go quiet right before she turns — 'fore even Wadi swings his bell. Quiet bugs, turning tide. Never wrong.

PAGE TWELVE

PANEL 1. Saela looks at the boy properly — and can't help it. Her sight catches the ribbon coming off him. The rest of the crowd's savor is a riot of color. His is one thin smoke-grey thread, frayed at the end, the loneliest thing on the whole flat.

CAPTION (Saela): Most people are hungry for a hundred things at once. He's hungry for one.

PANEL 2. Close on Cricket's grin — performing it, the practiced cheer of a kid who has learned that bright sells better than sad. The grey ribbon doesn't match the grin.

CRICKET: Got a mum somewhere, prob'ly. Don't need one. I got the whole market, see? Everybody knows Cricket. Cricket knows everybody.

PANEL 3. Saela's own hand drifts up to the brass spoon at her throat without her telling it to.

CAPTION (Saela): I know that thread. I wore it for years.

CAPTION (Saela): Being known by everybody. Being kept by no one.

PANEL 4. She wars with herself. Eyes squeezed. The reflex litany.

SAELA (thought): Salt. Cumin. Smoke. You do not cook for people. You never cook for people. That's the one rule you kept when you ran from the —

PANEL 5. But she's already turned toward the pot.

PAGE THIRTEEN

PANEL 1. At the hearth, fast and furtive, glancing back to where Sefu haggles with a fishmonger out front. Saela ladles broth into a chipped bowl. Plain bone broth. Nothing magic in it. Yet.

SAELA (whisper to herself): Just soup. It's just soup. Feed his belly, not his — don't —

PANEL 2. Her free hand goes to her coat lining of its own accord and pinches out a single spice-twist — the last dry one, the others still wet on the pallet. A twist of waxed paper, contents unseen.

CAPTION (Saela): My last dry twist. The one I'd saved for me. For some night I'd need it.

PANEL 3. Outside, in the jar at Cricket's hip — the crickets stop. Mid-saw. Silence. The boy doesn't notice. He's watching a clam-digger.

SFX (struck out, a sound ending): —rrr—

PANEL 4. On the high frame, Wadi's head comes up. He reads the flat water. He lifts the mallet.

WADI (small, off): Here she comes. Hold yer breath, market —

PANEL 5. Saela, bowl in hand, stops dead. The light moves in her eyes. She knows, the way the crickets know.

SAELA (thought): The turn. Now. Right now.

PAGE FOURTEEN

PANEL 1. She crosses to Cricket and pushes the bowl into his startled hands. He looks up, gap-toothed, surprised by kindness.

CRICKET: — eh? I didn't pay for —

SAELA: On the house. New-mouth tradition. Eat it now. Right now, before the bell finishes.

PANEL 2. Tight on her thumb over the bowl. She twists the waxed paper open and lets a thread of dark, smoke-scented spice fall toward the steam. As it leaves her fingers she isn't thinking of his stomach at all. She's thinking the true thing.

CAPTION (Saela): Not for your belly, little clock.

CAPTION (Saela): For the part of you nobody ever set a place for.

CAPTION (Saela): For being kept. Not just fed.

PANEL 3. The spice touches the broth.

PAGE FIFTEEN

PANEL 1. SPLASH (full-bleed). THE SLACK takes the page. Everything stops — the market, the steam, the rain-fresh air — and goes white-bright and silent at the edges, the lettering thinning to a whisper. The bell's note hangs in the air, DONNNNG, fading. Above Cricket's bowl, for this one breath, the smoke-grey ribbon of his loneliness bends down into the steam and is drawn into the broth like silk through a needle's eye. The world breathes white.

CAPTION (thin): In the Slack, the sea holds still — and so does the trouble in a person, just long enough to be tasted clean.

SFX (faint, dying): …onnng…

PAGE SIXTEEN

PANEL 1. The minute breaks. Color floods back. Sound floods back. Cricket lowers the bowl from his mouth, a broth-moustache on his lip, and his face — the performing grin is gone. Something underneath it has come loose.

PANEL 2. Big panel. Cricket's eyes overflow. Not grief. Release. Years of it, in a kid who learned not to. The grey thread off him is gone — replaced by something warm and clean and small, like the first thread of dawn through cloud.

CRICKET (thick): …it's good. It's really — why's it — I'm not even sad, why'm I —

PANEL 3. Then he laughs — wet, astonished, his whole skinny body in it — wiping his face on his patched sleeve.

CRICKET: I feel — light. Like somebody — like I been carried up the steps. Miss. MISS. What'd you put in it?

PANEL 4. Saela, frozen, hand still half-out, watching what she's done with horror and with something worse: longing. The taste of having fed a real hunger. She wanted that. She has wanted that her whole life.

SAELA (barely): …salt. cumin. smoke.

PAGE SEVENTEEN

PANEL 1. Across the stall. Sefu, mid-haggle, has gone utterly still. The fishmonger keeps talking; she doesn't hear him. Her wooden hand has frozen around a fish. She's breathing in — and what she smells off Cricket's bowl has stopped her blood.

PANEL 2. Tight on Sefu's face, the color gone out of it. She reads savor by smell, never by sight — and she knows this smell. She knows what just happened on her own counter. She knows it better than anyone alive.

SEFU (whisper): No. No, no, not here. Not on this stone.

PANEL 3. She drops the fish. It slaps the counter, ignored.

PANEL 4. She crosses the stall in three strides, not fast exactly — inevitable, like water finding the low place.

PAGE EIGHTEEN

PANEL 1. Sefu's wooden hand closes on Saela's collar — gentle, irresistible — and steers her behind the iron pot, out of Cricket's sight, into the cramped back nothing of the stall.

CRICKET (off, oblivious, delighted): — tell everybody! Best broth on the flat! Slack Pot! SLACK POT, EVERYBODY —

PANEL 2. Behind the pot. Close two-shot. Sefu does not shout. Her voice drops to something flat and even and so cold it raises the hair on your arms. Saela has braced for fury. This is worse.

SEFU: Look at me. Not at the crowd. At me.

PANEL 3. On Saela, pinned by that calm, the spice-twist's empty paper still pinched in her fingers.

SAELA: He was — he was so alone, I only — it was just one twist, I didn't even —

SEFU: You cooked a true plate. In the Slack. To his hunger, not his order. On my counter.

PANEL 4. Sefu lifts the carved wooden hand between them — not a threat. An exhibit. The fingers don't move.

SEFU: You know what this used to be?

PAGE NINETEEN

PANEL 1. Tight on the wooden hand, lamplight in its grain.

SEFU: A hand. Same as yours. I cooked a true plate once, for someone I loved, and I got it wrong, and it went to ash in the pot and took this with it. That's the gentlest thing it took.

PANEL 2. Saela, very small now.

SAELA: …I didn't get it wrong. It took. He's —

SEFU: I know it took. That's the trouble, girl. I can smell that it took from across my own stall. So can anyone with a nose for it.

PANEL 3. Sefu leans in. The one rule. She gives it the weight of a law older than the market.

SEFU: One rule under this awning. Hear it once. No magic at this stall. Ever. Not for a lonely boy, not for a dying man, not for me, not for you. You wash my bowls and you keep that gift folded up in your coat with the rest of your spices. The day it comes out again is the day you go back in the water.

PANEL 4. A breath. Then, lower, and this is the part that lands — not the threat, the thing under it:

SEFU: I'm not protecting my stall from you. I'm protecting you from what comes running the second somebody smells a cook this strong.

PANEL 5. Close on Saela's face — caught between shame and a terrible, dawning understanding that this old woman knows exactly what she is, and isn't going to say so.

PAGE TWENTY

PANEL 1. Time-cut. Dusk. The low tide deepening, the flat at its widest, mud bared far out toward the channel. The bazaar winding down, lanterns thinning. Cricket, far off down the Walk, hawking tide-news with a new bounce in his step, jar at his hip, the crickets sawing again.

CRICKET (distant, tiny): — Slack Pot broth, best on the flat, ask anybody —

PANEL 2. The Slack Pot, closing up. Saela scrubs bowls in a basin, mechanical, hollowed out, the litany running silent on her lips. Sefu banks the fire. Neither speaks. The silence is its own conversation.

PANEL 3. Saela's eyes flick out to the bared mud, far out where the water's pulled back further than she's seen it pull. Something tugs at her — she doesn't know what. She looks away.

CAPTION (Saela): Out past the last stall the mud goes on forever at low water. Like the sea's keeping a secret down there it only shows you when it trusts you.

PANEL 4. She kneels to wedge a loose stone back under the cot in the corner-post — and her fingers find a gap in the old timber, a knot-hole stuffed with something that isn't wood.

PAGE TWENTY-ONE

PANEL 1. Tight on her fingers working the thing out of the corner-post. Small, round, hard.

SFX: tk … tk … pop

PANEL 2. In her palm: a coin. Not metal. Pressed sugar, glassy-hard, gleaming faint gold in the last light. Stamped into its face — a maker's mark, a little crowned spoon-and-fan, the seal of something official and sweet.

CAPTION (Saela): I knew that stamp before I could read.

PANEL 3. Close on her face, the bottom dropping out of it.

SAELA (whisper): A tasting-token. Confectory.

PANEL 4. Her wrapped right arm draws in against her ribs, the old instinct, the brand under the cloth suddenly burning in her mind even though it's cold.

SAELA (thought): They don't drop these by accident. You leave one where you want it found. It means somebody stood right here. Asking.

PANEL 5. Behind her, Sefu's shadow falls over the cot. The wooden hand reaches.

SEFU: Give it here.

PAGE TWENTY-TWO

PANEL 1. Sefu turns the sugar coin over in her carved wooden fingers, slow, the gold catching the dying lamp. She brings it to her nose. Smells it. Her jaw sets.

PANEL 2. Tight, the token in wood. The crowned spoon-and-fan stamp filling the panel.

SEFU (low): Someone's been on my flat. Walking my Walk. Asking my neighbors a question.

PANEL 3. She lifts her eyes to Saela. Not warm. Not cold now either. Just direct, the way the tide is direct.

SEFU: Cusk said it the second she saw you. Guild brat. I told her everyone's trouble in a wet coat. So.

PANEL 4. A long beat between them. Outside, far out on the dark water, the first pinprick of a far-off lantern.

SEFU: Girl. Who's looking for you?

PAGE TWENTY-THREE

PANEL 1. On Saela. She doesn't answer. Her hand has closed around the brass spoon at her throat, white-knuckled. Her other arm — the wrapped one — pulls tighter still. Everything she's run from is in her face and she will not let it out of her mouth.

SAELA: …Nobody worth a barge.

PANEL 2. But her eyes go past Sefu, out, to the black water — and stop.

PANEL 3. Out across the channel, where the tide ran out to bare the deep mud: a long, low white barge. Built like a wedding cake and a warship at once. As they watch, it runs up its lanterns one by one — pop, pop, pop, pop — a slow procession of cold gold lights down its length, lovely and patient and wrong.

SFX (soft, far): tink … tink … tink …

PAGE TWENTY-FOUR

PANEL 1. Wide. The Slack Pot's little lamplight on the Crown Step — and far below and out, the white barge finishing its lanterns, a constellation of sweetness on the dark sea. Between them, the bared mud and the thin Walk and the whole sleeping market.

CAPTION (Saela): Sugar and gold and patience. They never run. They never need to.

CAPTION (Saela): They just light their lamps and wait for you to drown swimming back.

PANEL 2. The barge's prow swings. Slow. Deliberate. Turning to point — straight at the Saltglass.

CAPTION: They cure the grieving. Legally. Gorgeously. They pull the ache right out and sell it back to you as nothing at all.

PANEL 3. Tight on Sefu's face, lit gold from below by the distant lamps, the sugar token still in her wooden fingers, her eyes hard on that prow.

SEFU (quiet): Tide doesn't hurry. Neither do they.

PANEL 4. Last panel. Tight on Saela: the spoon at her throat, the wrapped arm at her ribs, the moving light in her eyes — and behind those eyes, for the first time, not just the urge to run. Something deciding to stay.

SAELA (whisper): …salt. cumin. smoke.

SAELA (whisper): Don't you dare let go.

CAPTION (small, bottom corner): — END OF ISSUE ONE —