Chapter 12
FLYNN
The roots are still warm.
I kneel at the crater's edge and press my palm flat against the raw, exposed earth.
Heat radiates up through my fingers, unnatural and sharp, like the soil itself has a fever.
My prize rosebush lies in two halves beside me.
The root ball, split clean down the center, bleeds dark sap into the grass.
Eleven years of careful cultivation. Precise watering schedules.
pH-balanced amendments. Hand-selected organic mulch, applied in exactly two-inch layers, raked smooth every Sunday at dawn.
Gone.
My jaw aches. My molars grind so hard the sound fills my skull.
The runes along my forearms pulse bright, throwing green light across the devastation, and I can't make them stop.
Haven't lost control of the glow since the warbands.
Since the blood trenches outside Korvash where everything was mud and screaming and nothing stayed where you put it.
I pick up half the root ball. It crumbles in my fist.
Warm soil. Accelerated decomposition. Explosive upward force strong enough to launch a mature root system clean out of the ground.
I know what does that.
"Flynn?"
She speaks from behind me. Soft. Careful. The way you talk to something dangerous.
"Flynn, what happened? I heard you from the kitchen and I-"
"Your fertilizer."
The words come out flat. Dead. I don't turn around. Can't. If I look at her right now, standing there with her wild hair and her potting-soil freckles and those ridiculous bright pink clogs, I'll either break something or break down, and neither option is acceptable.
"What?"
"The magical slow-release compound. The one in the bag against your refrigerator." My hand tightens around the ruined root clump. Sap oozes between my fingers. "The one you mixed into the border beds last week without testing it. Without measuring it. Without reading a single label."
"I don't... Flynn, I didn't put anything near your rosebush."
"You didn't have to." I stand. My knees pop. The crater stares up at me like an open mouth. "Magical fertilizer doesn't stay where you dump it. It leaches. Migrates through the water table. Seeps through the root networks underground. Every gardener with a basic certification knows that."
Silence behind me.
"Feel the soil." I point at the crater. "It's hot. The microbial activity is off the charts. Something supercharged the root zone until the pressure had nowhere to go but up. Like a bomb. A rosebush is only ever going to get so big, so when it reached full growth? Boom."
"You think my fertilizer exploded your rosebush."
"I think your untested, unlabeled, magically unstable fertilizer leeched into my root system and created a catastrophic exothermic reaction, yes."
"That's insane."
I spin.
She stands six feet away in soaked socks and a sleep-wrinkled tank top, coffee stain on her knuckles, hair flattened on one side from the tarp. Her eyes are wide. Not guilty. Confused.
Doesn't matter.
"Insane." The word tastes like ash. "You moved in three weeks ago.
Since then, I've had animated flamingos destroy my turf, fist-sized beetles attack from the sky, rogue root systems assault my foundation, and now my rosebush has been blown out of the ground like a mortar round. What's the common variable, Junia?"
Her mouth opens.
"You."
The word lands hard. She flinches. Just barely. Just enough that something behind my sternum cracks, but I stomp it flat because the crater is right there, gaping and raw, and my rosebush is dead on the grass.
"I planted that bush eleven years ago. I grafted the rootstock by hand. Pruned it on a lunar calendar. It bloomed fourteen days early this year because I got the nitrogen ratio perfect. Perfect."
"Flynn."
"It was the one thing in this entire neighborhood that was exactly right."
She takes a step forward. I take one back.
The move surprises us both. Her hand hovers in the space between us, fingers still stained with last night. My boot heel presses into the soft crater and loose soil crumbles inward.
"Don't."
"Let me look at the soil. I can test it. If it's my fertilizer, there'll be a specific magical signature and I'll-"
"You'll what. Fix it?" I gesture at the shredded canes. The crushed blooms browning in the morning air. "Chaos doesn't fix things. Chaos just keeps taking and breaking and spreading until there's nothing left to destroy."
The words come out louder than I intend. Somewhere down the street, a screen door slams. A neighbor's face appears in a window.
Junia's chin lifts. Her jaw sets. The confusion in her eyes hardens into something else. Something hotter.
"You're blaming me."
"I'm identifying a pattern."
"You're blaming me. After last night. After everything we-"
"Last night doesn't change soil chemistry."
She stares at me. The pink morning light catches the potting soil still dusted across her collarbone. Her fingers curl into fists at her sides.
"Fine."
One word. Quiet. Controlled. She turns on her heel, socked feet squelching through the wet grass, and walks back toward her property line without looking back.
The fence gate bangs shut behind her.
I stand alone in my perfect lawn, in the hole where something beautiful once was.
I should let her go.
Every survival instinct from the warbands screams it. Disengage. Fortify. Return to the perimeter. Let the chaos burn itself out on the other side of the fence where it belongs.
My boots carry me after her anyway.
"We're not finished."
She's halfway across her yard, weaving between the obstacle course of terra cotta pots and hanging baskets and the weird little mushroom sculptures she sticks everywhere like territory markers. She doesn't slow down.
"Oh, we're absolutely finished."
"You can't just walk away from a property damage discussion."
She whirls. A pot of trailing ivy wobbles on its stand behind her.
"A property damage discussion? Is that what we're calling this? Because from where I'm standing, it sounded a lot more like an orc screaming at me that I'm a walking natural disaster."
"I didn't say that."
"You said chaos keeps taking and breaking until there's nothing left.
" She jabs a finger at me. Has to angle it upward at about forty-five degrees, which would be funny if her eyes weren't glassing over with a shine she's clearly furious about.
"What exactly do you think I am, Flynn? What have I been to you this whole time?
Just chaos that hasn't finished wrecking your stuff yet? "
My throat tightens. The answer is no. The answer is she's the first thing in years that made the rigid lines of my life feel like something other than a cage. But the crater is still smoking behind me and the words won't rearrange themselves into anything that isn't jagged.
"I think you don't respect boundaries."
Wrong words.
Her whole body goes rigid. From her mud-crusted toes to her wild, sleep-flattened hair, every muscle locks.
She grabs the nearest thing within reach.
A forty-pound bag of premium enchanted potting soil, stacked against her porch railing.
She shouldn't be able to lift it. She hoists it to her hip like it weighs nothing.
"I don't respect boundaries?"
"Junia, put that down."
"I broke my back mixing your soil. I hiked into a magical death ravine for your loam.
I fought beetles and root monsters and stone gargoyles.
I quoted subsection nine, paragraph fourteen of the HOA charter to save your archway.
" She shifts the bag higher. Her arms tremble.
Not from the weight. From everything underneath it.
"And you're standing in my yard telling me I don't respect boundaries? "
"That's not what I-"
"You kissed me against that trellis eight hours ago."
The words hit harder than a warband siege hammer. My runes flare. Green light splashes across her face, illuminating the tear track cutting through the potting soil on her cheek. One single line. She swipes it with her shoulder, leaving a smear.
"You held me on that tarp and told me my chaos makes you feel alive. Those were your exact words. And now your rosebush dies and suddenly I'm the enemy again? Suddenly I'm just the messy neighbor who doesn't read labels?"
"The evidence-"
"Screw your evidence!" She swings the potting soil bag like a battering ram. Not at me. At the stack of empty pots beside the porch. They explode in a cascade of terra cotta shrapnel. Shards spray across the steps. Soil erupts in a brown mushroom cloud that billows between us, coating everything.
I don't flinch. Potting soil settles across my shoulders, in my hair, across the tee shirt that already carries last night's grass stains.
Junia stands in the wreckage, heaving. Broken pot fragments crunch under her socked feet. Blood wells from a small cut on her ankle where a shard caught her. She doesn't notice.
"I didn't touch your rosebush. I would never.
I know what it means to you. I know you planted it the month after you left the warbands.
I know you talk to it when you think nobody's listening.
I know you adjusted its trellis wires three times last Tuesday because I was watching, Flynn, because I observe you all the time, because I-"
She stops. Clamps her jaw shut. The unfinished sentence hangs in the soil-dusted air between us, heavier than anything she could throw.
"Go home."
Two words. Barely a whisper.
"Junia."
"Go. Home." She bends down and picks up the torn potting soil bag. Dark loam spills down her tank top, over her stomach, pooling in the creases of her sleep shorts. "Go measure something. Go rake something. Go be perfect and alone on your side of the fence."
She climbs her porch steps. The cut on her ankle leaves small red prints on the wood. The screen door screams on its hinges.
It slams.
Locks click. One. Two. The deadbolt she installed herself, crooked, because she didn't use a level and I never offered to fix it.