The Bloom of St. Valentine

They came to a frozen lake to introduce a bio-engineered algae, believing they were healing a wound in the world.

The key was a small, cruel thing of frozen brass, and it refused the lock. I twisted it again, my bare fingers sticking to the metal, the cold a live thing that bit deep into the nerve. The little hut, a dark blue cube squatting on the immense white plate of the lake, remained sealed.

“Just hit it,” Jim said from behind me. The crunch of his boots on the snow was the only sound for miles.

“I’m not going to ‘just hit it.’ This is university property.” My breath plumed in the frigid air, a ghost of my own frustration.

“It’s a shed, Ellie. A shed on a block of ice. No one’s going to write you up for forced entry.” He shifted his weight, and the heavy pack full of our equipment—our salvation—creaked on his back. His impatience was a physical presence, another layer of cold against my skin.

I ignored him. I pressed the base of my palm against the key, pushing and turning with a slow, deliberate force. For a moment, nothing. Then, a groan of tortured metal, a sharp crack like a bone breaking, and the lock gave. The door swung inward into shadow.

Inside, it smelled of old bait and kerosene. A single window, clouded with frost, faced west, where the sun was beginning its slow bleed toward the horizon. The light that filtered through was thin and silver, illuminating dust motes dancing in the still air. We dropped our gear onto the rough wooden floor. Jim immediately went to the window, scraping a clear circle in the frost with a gloved thumb.

“Look at it,” he breathed, his voice stripped of its earlier irritation, replaced by a kind of reverence. “It’s like a blank page. Before the ink.”

I came to stand beside him. He was right. Lake Eir, frozen solid, stretched out in every direction, a landscape of sublime emptiness. The snow on its surface was a pristine, unbroken sheet of white, catching the low light and shimmering with a million diamond points. The far shore was a dark, serrated line of pine trees, their branches heavy with snow. It was a beauty so profound and absolute it felt sterile, like a world waiting for a soul.

“It’s sick, though,” I whispered, my words fogging the new clear patch on the glass. “Under all this. It’s choking.”

For years, the runoff from the farms miles north had been funneled here, a slow poison of nitrates and phosphates. In the summer, the lake was a murky, lifeless green. The ice was a mercy, a beautiful mask over a diseased face. We were here for the face. We were here to perform a miracle.

“Not for long,” Jim said, turning from the window. His eyes, the color of a winter sky, were bright with a fierce, unwavering faith. It was the same look he’d had in the lab at 3 a.m., hunched over a microscope, the same look he’d had when he’d first shown me the sequencing for *Lucidum*. Our creation. Our child.

He unzipped the largest pack and carefully lifted out the transport canister. It was a silver thermos-like container, insulated and reinforced, but with a transparent strip running down its side. Within it, a fluid glowed with a soft, internal light, a liquid emerald. *Phaeocystis lucidum*. An organism that did not exist in nature, a thing of our own design. A single-celled algae with an insatiable, genetically-coded appetite for agricultural nitrates. It would eat the poison. It would starve itself into dormancy when the poison was gone. It would heal this wound we, as a species, had carved into the earth.

“It’s a form of baptism, you know,” he said, his voice low and sonorous, like a priest in a cathedral. “We’re giving the lake a new life. A clean one.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Jim.”

“Why not? This is it. This is the absolution. Not just for this water, but for all the waters we’ve spoiled. We’re turning the tide.”

I couldn’t argue. His grandiosity was infectious because, deep down, I believed it too. This wasn't just a project. It was a calling. A way to scrub clean some small part of the world’s accumulated sin.

We unpacked the gas-powered auger. The sudden roar of its engine was a violence against the profound silence, an angry hornet in a library. We took it outside, the engine sputtering and coughing in the thin, cold air. Jim wrestled it into position, and I steadied it, my boots slipping on the slick ice. The helical blade bit into the surface, first shaving away white ice, then clear, ancient blue. It was like drilling through time. The engine screamed, and with a final lurch, the auger punched through. A geyser of slush and impossibly dark water erupted, and then it was done. A perfect black circle in the white field. A portal to the world below.

We knelt beside it, the engine cut, the silence rushing back in to reclaim its throne. The water in the hole was black as night, a stark contrast to the glowing canister Jim now held. He unscrewed the cap with the care of someone handling a holy relic.

“Ready?” he asked.

I nodded, my throat tight.

He tilted the canister. The green fluid slid out in a thick, luminous stream, hitting the black water with a barely audible hiss. For a second, it hung there, a swirling nebula of emerald light, a galaxy in miniature. Then, it began to disperse, to diffuse into the darkness, carrying its light with it. We watched until the last drop fell, until the black water was just black water again, its secret now held deep within its cold heart.

We retreated to the hut, leaving the lake to its communion. We were both vibrating with a nervous energy, a giddy, terrifying hope. An hour passed. Then two. We drank coffee from a thermos and talked in hushed tones, not wanting to disturb the work being done beneath our feet. Finally, it was time.

I lowered the digital probe into the hole on its long, thin cable, my hands shaking slightly. I fed it down ten, then twenty feet. The readings appeared on my tablet, numbers scrolling and graphs forming in real-time. My breath caught.

“Jim,” I said, my voice a croak.

He was at my side in an instant, looking over my shoulder. The nitrate concentration graph was a vertical drop. Not a curve, a cliff. It was impossible. It was… beautiful.

“My God,” he whispered. “The models… they weren’t even close. It’s a hundred times more efficient than we projected.” He let out a bark of a laugh, a raw, explosive sound of pure triumph. He grabbed my shoulders. “We did it, Ellie! We actually did it!”

He was right. The numbers didn't lie. The poison was vanishing. Our creation was working with an impossible, miraculous efficiency. He pulled a small flask from his jacket pocket. Whiskey. It burned on the way down, a welcome fire in the cold. We celebrated, our laughter echoing in the small wooden box, two young gods admiring their new, clean world.

I saw the first sign, but didn't recognize it for what it was. Peering down into the hole, I noticed that the water wasn't completely black anymore. A faint, faint viridian glow seemed to be rising from the depths. “It’s working so fast you can already see the population density,” I murmured, more to myself than to Jim. I dismissed it as a sign of our resounding success.

Another hour passed. The sun had touched the horizon now, painting the underside of the clouds in strokes of violent orange and bruised purple. The beauty of it felt like a benediction. I went back to the hole, drawn by a curiosity I couldn't name. The glow was brighter now, a distinct and eerie pulse of green from below. I lay on my stomach, pressing my face close to the opening, the cold seeping through my jacket.

That’s when I saw it. An eye. A single, cloudy, dead eye pressed against the bottom of the ice sheet a few feet away. It belonged to a yellow perch, its body a pale, ghostly shape in the gloom. Its mouth was open, a silent scream. Then I saw another. And another. A dozen of them, then more, all floating up, bumping gently against the frozen ceiling of their world. A graveyard viewed through a keyhole.

“Jim,” I said, my voice flat, all the warmth of the whiskey gone. “Get the light.”

He brought the high-intensity flashlight and aimed its beam down into the hole. The light didn't penetrate. It couldn't. It hit a surface just a few feet down and scattered. The water was no longer water. It was a thick, viscous, pulsating soup of emerald green. It was a solid, living mass of *Lucidum*. It hadn't just eaten the nitrates. It had eaten everything. The oxygen, the life. It was growing, consuming, filling the void.

We stared, horrified, into the glowing abyss we had unleashed. The silence of the lake was no longer peaceful. It was accusatory. Malevolent.

Then came the sound. It started as a low hum, a vibration I felt more in the bones of my skull than heard with my ears. It grew into a deep, resonant groan, the sound of a cello string stretched to its breaking point. It was coming from the ice. From all around us.

“What is that?” Jim asked, his voice a thin thread of sound.

Before I could answer, a jagged line shot across the ice in front of the hut, a bolt of black lightning against the white. It appeared with a deafening CRACK that shook the small building to its foundations. Another followed, then another, a spiderweb of fractures racing out from the center of the lake, from the point where we had poured our miracle into the water.

“It’s not the temperature,” I stammered, scrambling to my feet. “It’s… it’s pressure. From below.”

The bloom. It wasn't just growing. It was explosive, a biological detonation. The sheer mass of it, the gasses it was releasing, was pushing upwards, heaving against the tons of ice that sealed the lake.

Our cure had become a bomb, and we were standing at ground zero. The floor of the hut tilted violently, sending us stumbling against the wall. A new sound joined the groaning and cracking—a high, shearing scream of ice being torn apart. The ice screamed, and the world beneath our feet began to break apart.