Chapter 7
One second Kaelren is there, hands pressed to the elm, light pouring from the locket, the gate blazing white-gold. The next second , he’s not.
Peeble hits him at full speed, a panicked, shrieking blur of wings and shell. The impact knocks Kaelren sideways, straight into the open gate. The light swallows them both.
A thunderclap. A flash that turns the entire garden white. Then the elm goes dark. The hum dies. The portal collapses.
Where there was a doorway between worlds, there’s only a tree.
For about three seconds, nobody moves.
"Did—" Leo's face is frozen in the expression of a man who just watched his only lifeline get body-checked through a dimensional rift by a beetle. "Did that just happen?"
"That just happened," Mora confirms, her voice flat.
I look at Kevin. He looks at me. His antennae droop, and his fuzzy little face is doing something I've never seen a bee do before, which is look genuinely devastated. Peeble, his unrequited love, just disappeared into the space between worlds.
"Buddy," I say.
Kevin buzzes once, low and mournful.
"I know."
"What do you mean, 'I know'?" Leo is on his feet now, dirt on his knees, fists clenched. He's big for a human, and right now he looks like he wants to punch something, but there's nothing to punch except a tree that just ate our friends. "Where did they go? Can we get them back? Open it again!"
"Leo," Sarah puts a hand on his arm. Her voice is steady, but her knuckles are white. "Take a breath."
"I don't want to take a breath, Sarah. I want someone to tell me what just happened to the only person who was going to bring Elle home."
"The gate collapsed," Raskel says. He's standing on the garden stool, stick in both hands, staring at the elm with an expression I'd describe as somewhere between furious and constipated.
"That fool beetle knocked him into the gate mid-channel.
Instead of pulling Elle through, the locket pulled him in.
He could be anywhere now. Any iteration. Any timeline."
"That's not helpful!" Leo snaps.
"It wasn’t intended to be." Raskel hops down from the stool with surprising agility for something that old and small. "Helpful comes later. If we're lucky."
"So, what do we do?" Mora steps forward. She's got that look on her face, the one I’ve come to adore. Calm and focused, and terrifying in the best possible way.
"We can't just stand here," I add, because someone has to state the obvious. It’s usually me. "Kaelren's gone. Peeble's gone. The gate is dead. Elle is still scattered across time. We're standing in a human garden in—what's this place called again?"
"Arkansas," Leo says through his teeth.
"Arkansas. Which, I have to say, is very hot, very brown. I'm not a fan."
"Can you focus?" Leo turns on me. I hold up both hands.
"I am focused. My focus just looks different from yours.
Yours involves clenching your jaw until your teeth crack.
Mine involves talking, because if I stop talking, I start thinking.
If I start thinking, I'm going to realize my best friend and a beetle I'm very fond of just got swallowed by a tree. I also have no way to help them."
The anger drains out of Leo's face. He runs both hands through his blond hair and turns away, staring at the elm.
Sarah moves to his side. She says nothing, just stands there, close enough that their shoulders touch. I notice Mora watching them, the way Sarah anchors Leo without grabbing him, without demanding he calm down.
Mora catches me looking and raises an eyebrow.
I clear my throat. "Right. So. Plan?"
Raskel opens his mouth, presumably to deliver some biting remark about my intelligence, when the ground shudders.
The whole garden heaves, like the earth itself just inhaled. Every plant in the yard moves at once.
The rose bushes along the fence line surge upward, thorns lengthening, canes whipping through the air.
Dead weeds in the flower beds claw out of the soil, black and slick, twisting together into ropy vines.
A sunflower erupts from the bed nearest the porch, with a ring of yellowed teeth where the seeds should be and a thick stem that flexes and coils.
Two more burst up behind it, then three more.
"Oh, come on!" I shout. "We just dealt with this!"
"The boundary's still fracturing!" Raskel yells, backing toward the house. "The gate's collapse destabilized the anchor point! Every corrupted thing within range of the Rootline is going to come through!"
"How many is 'every'?" Mora asks, pulling the long knife from her belt.
"More than we want!"
A vine wraps around my ankle and yanks. I go down hard on my back, the air punching out of my lungs. The vine drags me toward the flower bed. Kevin dives at it, stinger-first, jabbing at the thick green casing, but the vine barely flinches.
"Get off me, you overgrown—"
I fire a sonic pulse into the ground. The shockwave tears through the root system. The vine goes slack. I kick free, roll to my feet just in time to see one of the toothy sunflowers lunge at Sarah.
Leo is already moving. He grabs the broom leaning against the porch rail. His weapon of choice, apparently. Honestly, he's gotten disturbingly good with it. He swings into the sunflower's stem.
The stem cracks but doesn't break. The flower snaps its teeth at him. He swings again, harder, catching it just below the head. It goes tumbling across the yard, still snapping.
"Mora! Behind you!"
She spins. A knot of black vines is creeping across the ground toward her, and she plants her feet and starts cutting. Clean, fast strokes that sever vine after vine; her face set in that grim determination that makes my chest do somersaults.
I fire another pulse, wider this time, catching a cluster of vines trying to climb the porch steps. They shatter and fall, twitching. Kevin buzzes past my ear, diving at a sunflower that's gotten too close to Raskel's position near the back door.
And then I see something that stops me dead.
Raskel, tiny, ancient, hatted Raskel, comes charging out from behind the garden stool, and he is riding a rabbit.
A regular brown cottontail rabbit, roughly the size of a large house cat, that clearly did not consent to being mounted by a gnome.
Raskel is on its back, his little legs gripping its sides, one hand fisted in the fur at the scruff of its neck and the other holding his walking stick above his head like a lance.
The rabbit looks as surprised about this arrangement as I am.
"CHARGE!" Raskel screams, and the rabbit, either too confused or too terrified to do anything else, bolts forward.
He barrels straight into a sunflower, whacking it across the stem with his stick as the rabbit zigzags through the garden in blind panic.
The sunflower topples. The rabbit careens left.
Raskel nearly falls off, catches himself by grabbing an ear, and the rabbit shrieks in a way I didn't know rabbits could shriek and changes direction, heading straight for a cluster of vines.
"FORWARD, BEAST!" Raskel bellows.
The rabbit plows through the vines. Raskel's stick is a blur, whacking everything in reach—vines, stems, a toad that happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The toad goes airborne and lands in the rose bushes, and I briefly consider that this might be the bravest or most insane thing I've ever seen in a life that has included a lot of both.
"Is he—" Leo starts.
"Yes," I say.
"On a—"
"Yes."
"That's a rabbit."
"I'm aware."
"Should we help him?"
"I don't think he wants help."
Raskel swings back around, the rabbit's eyes wide and glassy with what I can only describe as an existential crisis, and takes out another sunflower on the return pass. The gnome's hat is askew, his beard is flying, and he looks absolutely unhinged. I have never respected anyone more.
"The house!" Sarah shouts from the porch, holding the back door open. "Everyone inside! Now!"
She's right. We can't hold the garden. More plants are surging up every second—the corrupted growth feeding off the fractured Rootline, pulling itself through from wherever the boundary is thinnest.
"Mora, go!" I fire a pulse at a vine reaching for her leg, and she breaks for the porch. Leo covers her with the broom, batting aside a sunflower that snaps at her heels. Kevin buzzes ahead, scouting the doorway.
"Raskel!" I yell. "We're falling back!"
The rabbit, clearly done with its career as a war mount, makes a hard right turn and dumps Raskel into a hydrangea bush. The gnome bounces once, rolls, and pops up on his feet with his stick still in hand.
"Tactical dismount!" he announces, straightening his hat.
"That rabbit threw you off."
"Tactical. Dismount."
I scoop him up, noticing he weighs about as much as a sack of flour with an attitude problem, and sprint for the house. Mora holds the door. Leo is last through, slamming it shut behind us. Something hits the door from the outside, hard, and we hear the muffled snap of teeth on wood.
Then the sounds settle into the scratching of vines against the walls, the occasional thud of something throwing itself at the siding. Inside, we're safe. For now.
I set Raskel down. He immediately whacks my shin with his stick.
"I didn't ask to be carried."
"You're welcome."
We stand in Jo’s kitchen, breathing hard, covered in dirt, plant debris, and what I’m fairly sure is sunflower saliva. Kevin settles on my shoulder, buzzing at that uneven pitch that means he’s tired.
Mora wipes her knife on her pants. Leo leans the broom against the counter, then plants both hands on the surface, head down, catching his breath.
"So," Sarah says, because someone has to. "What now?"
We all look at Raskel.
The gnome pulls himself onto a kitchen chair—a process that involves climbing the leg, using the crossbar as a step, and hauling himself up by the edge of the seat. He refuses help.
Once seated, he plants his stick across his lap and looks at each of us.