The girl weeds the tomatoes. She thinks about how, in her closet, there’s a duffel bag. She has a decision to contemplate. Suddenly, a blood bee pricks her and takes her blood. Her grandmother has died. Nearby, her father sees a swarm of blood bees flying past. He smiles to her, congratulating her. She thinks about how her grandmother, now, must be nothing but holes after the swarm has consumed her. Quickly, the girl runs. Her mother wants her to stop, telling her she cannot leave, but she darts out of the city.

Five years later, the girl is on a tour along the wall which separates fertile city from arid barrenness. Here, the earth is nourished by blood, taken by the keepers, like the girl’s grandmother. While her grandmother is still alive, the girl is a keeper in waiting. Together, everyone on the tour watches blood course through the earth. Defiantly, the girl climbs up a nearby ladder. She thinks about how, against her will, her mother is already arranging for her to be a keeper. Atop the ladder, on the platform, she meets a scientist. They introduce themselves to each other: the girl, a keeper in waiting, and the scientist, one interested in hematology, blood science. The girl wants to just be a normal girl. The scientist wants to study the blood of the keepers. Together, the girl and the scientist walk off to talk, over drinks.

Now, the girl lands on a roof and keeps running. She gets down to the street and runs through markets, all while her grandmother’s voice, and legacy, rings in her ears. She is interrupted by a herbalist who asks about her grandmother and finds out that she’s dead. He tells her that she shouldn’t run, as she must join the blood bees and accept their sting. The girl thinks about how, at age five, she saw the blood bees watering the earth, with the blood they took from her grandmother. She keeps running, hoping to get too far for the swarm to follow. One blood bee stabs her, giving her much pain, before dying, spraying her blood on the ground.

Three years before, the girl tells the scientist about how the blood bees work. The first prick allows the blood bees and their hive to acclimate to the keeper’s blood and produce blood which has healing abilities. The scientist talks about how the people in her field hardly know about the keeper’s blood, to which the girl says that it’s kept a secret to avoid infringement of traditions. The scientist suddenly says that they could leave the city, proposing a method in which the keeper’s proteins can be modified and directly nourish the earth, without needing blood bees. The girl says that serious convictions could happen if such science were to occur, but the scientist isn’t afraid. She says that the same kind of experiment must have happened with two scientists who were expelled years before, as their work threatened the keepers. Hesitantly, the girl offers the scientist samples of her blood to experiment with.

Now, the girl is walking, only a few blocks away from the scientist’s house. She keeps going and yells out loud that she doesn’t want the blood bees. Everyone around her is murmuring, and she hears voices in her head. She cries, and the blood bees descend upon her.

A year earlier, the scientist says she finally figured everything out with the girl’s blood. At the scientist’s house, she shows the girl a petri dish with materials from the outside world and how the girl’s blood explosively reacts with it. As such, the scientist’s experiment is successful and that they can eventually leave the city with her work. The girl asks what’ll happen when they get there. The scientist says that other communes will accept them and that she’ll share the knowledge on an ad hoc basis as the keeper system falls apart.

The girl shucks corn with her grandmother, presses a washcloth to her forehead. She wakes up, on her back. The people around her are talking. The blood bees are descending. They rip into her skin. The queen bee comes, embedding itself into her heart.