Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
GRAVEN
F our days.
I told myself I wouldn’t go back. That once was enough. Observe, assess, move on. That was what the protocol dictated. It was what the simulations suggested. Distance ensured clarity.
Clarity vanished the moment Regrowth opened.
I arrived at the Greenhouse Annex just after nine. The public were already making their way inside. I shouldn’t have come, but knowing it didn’t make it more desirable than seeing her again. The boundary between what I knew and what I wanted had begun to blur.
The building looked unchanged on the outside—sleek glass, vertical planters, the quiet whir of a climate grid syncing to solar output. Inside, however, the hum had deepened. Everything within responded to stimuli whether it was light, warmth, or movement.
Now it responded to more. Intention elicited a response.
The building itself wasn’t just awake. It was listening.
I signed in without a word. The intern at the front desk blinked at me like she wasn’t sure she’d seen me at all. Good. The Annex certainly didn’t need more questions today.
The front atrium greeted me with the scent of damp loam and photosensitive oils.
The corridor to Future Flora was dimmer than I remembered, less filtered sun and more shadow softened by mist. The change tempted me.
The exhibit hadn’t opened to the public yet, but the plants were already responding—one bloom nearest the entrance swiveled subtly toward me, not in welcome. In awareness.
They remembered me. Most things did. The light adjusted sluggishly at my entrance, they didn’t want me here.
Fair.
I didn’t belong here, but I came anyway.
I walked the corridor deliberately, not hiding but not announcing myself either. The light shifted as I moved—an artifact of the building’s circadian modulation. But still, too reactive. The sensors weren’t just reading temperature or movement. They were reading presence. Mine .
Someone had fine-tuned this system past the point of safe thresholds.
Someone like her.
I found her at the far end of the east wing, sleeves rolled, a smudge of soil on her cheek. She was bent over a tray of moss-tiered growth, adjusting something beneath the top layer—wiring, maybe. Her hands were steady, but her energy definitely wasn’t.
I felt it before she noticed me. The time it took her to realize I was there was a gift. I was able to savor her presence and just study her.
She didn’t startle when she finally looked up. She straightened slowly, eyeing me like she’d half-expected this. “You again,” she said. The words came out more like an acknowledgment without a hint of impatience or annoyance.
“I know,” I admitted without apology. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“Then why did you?”
I paused, glancing around. One of the secondary vines near Regrowth twitched. Not toward me, but away.
“I wanted to check the system’s response metrics. After the storm.” I tacked on the last three words. It seemed a better reason to come in person rather than send someone.
She snorted softly. Apparently not better enough for Irina. “You came all the way down here to ‘check metrics’?”
I didn’t answer, merely shrugged.
The dog lay nearby, watching. He seemed stronger than before. Sharper at the edges. His limbs didn’t quite move like a puppy’s. When he stood, it was silent, measured. Appearances could be deceiving after all, and who better to know that than I?
The puppy took a few steps toward me, not aggressive movement, just present. He put himself between me and Irina. A choice. His gaze met mine and I felt the tether again.
It wasn’t new at all. No, it was as old as I’d begun to suspect.
Irina knelt once more, though this time she did it to stroke behind the puppy’s ears, grounding herself with touch.
“Does he have a name?” I asked, curious.
“No,” she said, a wistful note in her voice. “Not yet.”
“Good.”
“Good?” She raised her eyebrows.
“Names bind. Better to know what you need before you do that.”
Irina tilted her head as the puppy mirrored the exact same movement. She glanced back down at the pitch-black animal, save for his single white paw—that paw was new. Something I tucked away to consider later.
“He doesn’t bark,” Irina said, more to herself than to me. “But he watches everything.”
“Some things don’t need to speak to be understood.”
That earned me a half-smile and a gleam in her sky-blue eyes. It was enough to stop all the breath in my body. “Was that poetic or ominous?”
I allowed myself the faintest of smiles, not that I could have contained it. “Both.”
She rose, but folded her arms. I didn’t think she was cold, but she was definitely unsettled. “You didn’t leave a name last time.”
“Didn’t think I needed to.”
“You still don’t.”
Amused at the bite in her words, I lingered. I should’ve walked away. Said something cryptic and made myself leave, then vanished into the humidity of the greenhouse. That might have let the moment fade.
That was exactly what I should’ve done. Instead, I stepped closer.
“Your soil composition shifted,” I said quietly. “Layer drift. The deeper trays, especially near the stem core.”
Her brow furrowed. “You read our data?
“No,” I said. “I felt it.”
She didn’t move, but something in her gaze changed. Caution giving way to curiosity. “You really expect me to believe you just feel soil layers?”
“Do you believe Regrowth blooms on instinct?” I answered her challenge with one of my own.
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
We stood there, a few feet apart, surrounded by plants that could feel heart rates and thermal loss patterns. The puppy didn’t interrupt. The leaves didn’t tremble. But the room wasn’t still. It waited.
“You’re not here about the plants,” she said finally.
“No.”
“And not about the puppy.”
“Also no.”
She held my gaze. Her heartbeat didn’t spike. No fear entered her eyes. That was so much worse, because their glow made me hunger for her even more.
“What are you here for then?”
I glanced down at the way the moss around her feet had darkened, drawn slightly inward, like it anchored and protected her. The last thing I should tell her was the truth.
But I found, I could not bear to lie to her.
Never lie.
“You,” I said.
Silence stretched unbearably taut as she held my gaze.
Then she blinked, and it released us both. “You’ve got the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard.”
Her response startled a chuckle from me, and the sound was as unfamiliar to my ears now as the feeling was to my chest. Yet a smile tugged my mouth wider before I could contain it. “It’s not a line.”
Skepticism filled her expression. “Still terrible.”
The invitation to play was right there. My being stretched out toward hers in yearning. I turned toward the corridor before I could give in to the desire. If I stayed any longer, something might happen that couldn’t be undone.
“You’re leaving?” The disappointment wreathing the words looped around me, and I had to glance back.
“You have work and so do I.” Not a lie. Never a lie. But not the whole truth either. “I’ve interrupted you enough as it is.” The last, the absolute truth.
“Oh.” So much meaning populated that one word, and I resisted the urge to translate it. To offer her comfort and to take some myself, because the last thing I wanted to do was leave her.
“You should run a test on Regrowth ,” I said over my shoulder as I neared the exit. “Use a neural imprint pattern—without touch. Watch what she does when you walk by.”
An olive branch for her. A gift for me.
“Why?” Puzzlement filled the word, and I knew her gaze had gone to the plant so I looked back once more to drink in the sight of her.
“She’s remembering you.” With those last words, I forced myself to leave and not wait for any response.
She wasn’t going to say anything to that.
Not yet, anyway. The puppy didn’t growl as I left, but his stare stayed on me all the way down the hall and beyond when the doors closed behind me.
There was an ancient question in his stare and one I didn’t have an answer for. Not yet.
Back on the street, the city pulsed around me—sirens, footsteps, voices, car horns, fragments of music—but I wasn’t listening. I should have stayed away, but how in the name of Gaia could I possibly do that?
I was closer to her far sooner than I’d ever managed before.
I’d had two whole conversations with her and not a few sorrow-infused moments before she was ripped away from me again.
How many times had I lost her? I hadn’t lost count, every single moment imprinted on me forever.
Those tear-drenched moments both sustained and enraged me.
No, I couldn’t stay away. Not when the tether had finally tightened again. Not when the blood had already begun to stir. If I were close, then I might be able to hold on to her this time.
The moment I made the corner, the air shifted. Not like before. This wasn’t memory humming in the wires or the pulse of something ancient rising through the cracks. This was colder. Stiller. As if the city itself skipped a beat.
The clouds threatening earlier had rolled in, but they hadn’t thickened. The light had changed anyway, it slanted sharper and colors blued at the edges. It was like the sun had glanced away for a moment too long.
I made myself keep walking with a measured pace, spine straight, and I kept my gaze firmly forward. I didn’t glance back at the Annex, even if I could still feel her inside. Irina . The puppy. The slow, inevitable rhythm of something beginning.
At the next crosswalk, the voice found me.
“Didn’t think you performed your own errands.” It came from the stoop of an old bookstore, one that hadn’t been open in years. The sign was still hand-painted, letters faded and flaking like they were ashamed to still exist.
The man seated there wore a crisp gray suit, but no tie and no coat. He appeared young, but the kind of young that didn’t really start that way. His eyes were the color of tarnished copper, and he wore a single ring on one gloved hand, a seal I recognized and hated.
I didn’t stop walking.
“Pollux,” I said without turning.
He laughed. “That’s not the name I’m using this time.”
“Don’t care.”
“Rude. I came all the way to the surface, and you don’t even offer me a coffee?”
“I didn’t invite you.”
“I go where the threads pull.”
I paused then, just for a second. That was the problem with gods like him. They didn’t lie. Not exactly. They just told the truth in the most weaponized form they could devise.
I turned.
Pollux still lounged, perfectly relaxed, like a cat on a sun-warmed ledge.
There was far more pressure beneath the surface, crouched within him just behind his spine.
One of the Dioscuri, he had shared his immortality with his human twin.
They were rarely without the other, though together they had warranted a place in the stars.
“You’re early,” I said.
“That’s twice today you’ve said that. Maybe the clock isn't broken. Maybe you’re just late .” The insouciance infusing his quip dared me to act.
“She’s not ready.” And he should damn well know that. His gift with travelers made him as likely to be one of those who stole her away at the moment of her death. One who could act in those few precious seconds when her soul was just out of my reach, before she could truly re-enter the Underworld.
“She never is.” His eyes sharpened. Yet, he didn’t seek to deny his presence or offer me weak excuses. “That’s not the point.”
I didn’t respond. The street around us blurred slightly. A lens shift, too subtle for mortals to notice, but I saw it. The barrier between was thinning. Not unheard of, but not expected either. More shifts this time. More changes. The pattern seemed to finally be breaking after all these centuries.
“Let me guess,” Pollux said, his voice almost kind.
“You think this time will be different. You think this incarnation will choose you and the bloom will open and stay that way.” He straightened then, far too smooth and confident.
“Let me save you the trouble, Skotos. She’s already being watched and not just by you. ”
My chest went still. My will . “Stay away from her.”
He grinned, all teeth now. “I’m not here for her. I'm here for the moment after . When she breaks. When she remembers too much too fast, and the world you’ve so carefully manicured around her begins to burn. I’ll be there to offer a different path.”
I stepped toward him, not a threat but a warning. “I’ll end you before you touch her.” This time, suspicion would be enough.
Pollux’s smile didn’t move, but the air around him did. Slightly. It was as if it bowed—to me, not him.
“You could try,” he said lightly. “But I’m not your shadow anymore, Graven. Not since Prague. Not since the gate burned in reverse.”
I didn’t flinch, but the memories still tore through me like teeth.
“I know about the dog,” he added softly. “It’s almost cute that you don’t.”
That stopped me cold.
He turned to go then, brushing imaginary dust off his shirt. “Be careful with hope, Skotos. It starts small and then it eats everything .”
He vanished with the next flicker of the traffic lights. No sound. No trace. The world around me resettled, and sound rushed back in.
I’d just been warned—whether Pollux meant to do it or the universe offered me a boon—I would take it.
What the hell had I missed? And how much time did I truly have left?