Chapter 7 #2
"Now," he says, "we do what we can, which is not much, but it's what we have."
"Inspiring," I mutter.
"I'm not here to inspire you, bug boy. I'm here to keep this garden from tearing a permanent hole in the fabric of reality.
" He smooths his beard. "Kaelren is gone.
The beetle is gone. The locket is gone with them.
That means the only anchor we had to the bond, the only tool we had to pull Elle back through, is somewhere in the iterations, probably being misused as we speak. "
"So we're helpless," Leo says, and his voice is the quietest I've ever heard it.
Raskel's tone shifts, still gruff, still impatient, but underneath it there's something that might be kindness if you squint.
"We're the other half of the equation. The gate exists in this garden because the Rootline runs through that elm.
If we let the corruption take the anchor point, then it doesn't matter if Kaelren finds Elle, because there'll be nothing left to come home to. "
He lets that settle.
"So we hold," he continues. "We fight the corruption. We maintain the wards. We keep the elm alive, the Rootline stable. When Kaelren and Elle find their way back, and they will, that idiot prince is too stubborn to fail. That girl has more spine than anyone I’ve met in four hundred years. They’ll have a home to return to. Because of us."
"It's up to them to save the realm," Mora says softly. "It's up to us to make sure they have something to come back to."
Raskel points his stick at her. "Her. I like her. She gets it."
Leo straightens. "Okay. We hold."
Once the immediate crisis is addressed, Raskel starts muttering about ward configurations and Rootline stabilization techniques. Leo turns to me and Kevin.
"You two should see the rest of the house," he says. "If you're going to be living here, you should know the layout."
I don't point out that "living here" implies a permanence I hadn't fully processed. I just follow him, because what else am I going to do? Go back outside and argue with a sunflower?
The house is solid, built with strange materials.
The floors creak. The walls are covered in a pattern that Leo calls "wallpaper," which is exactly what it sounds like: paper on a wall.
The ceiling is low enough that I could touch it without stretching, and every room has its own smell.
The kitchen is old, spices and coffee. The living room is furniture polish and dust. The hallway is something older with the kind of scent that accumulates over decades.
"Jo lived here for sixty years," Leo says as we walk through the living room.
He touches the back of a worn armchair as he passes it, casual, automatic, the gesture of someone who has touched that chair a thousand times.
"She moved here after she left—well, where you're from.
Wynmire. She never told us that part. We just thought she was from overseas.
She had an accent she could never quite explain, and she knew things about plants that nobody else did. "
He leads us down a hallway. The walls here are covered in photographs.
Rows and rows of them. Small ones in simple frames. Larger ones with ornate borders. Black-and-white images fading to sepia. Colored ones bright, sharp. They line both walls from floor to ceiling, a timeline of a life lived fully, with intention.
"Jo documented everything," Leo says, slowing down. His voice has gone soft. "Every birthday. Every holiday. Every first day of school. Every graduation. Every random Tuesday she decided was worth remembering."
I stop in front of a photograph near the beginning of the hallway. Black and white, slightly yellowed at the edges. A young woman with red hair, bright eyes, stands next to a man in a military uniform. He’s taller, square jaw, kind eyes.
"That's Jo," Leo says. "And that's Grandpa Henry.
She met him about a year after she came through.
He was in the Army. Served two tours overseas.
Came home with a bad knee, a good heart.
He adopted Elle's mother when she was three.
Raised her like his own. Never once made her feel like she wasn't his. "
I study the photograph. Jo looks young here. Her smile is wide, uncomplicated. She leans into Henry like he’s the most solid thing in the world.
"They were married almost sixty years," Leo continues. He’s looking at the photo, not at me. "He passed about five years before she did. She used to say the garden was where she went to talk to him after he was gone. Said the flowers could carry messages if you knew how to listen."
We keep walking. The timeline progresses. Jo and Henry with a toddler, a baby—Elle’s mom, her aunt, I assume. A tiny thing wrapped in a blanket. Two girls growing up. Birthday parties with paper hats. Holidays with tinsel, too much food. A teenager with Jo’s hair. The other with Henry’s jawline.
Then Elle appears.
She’s small in the first photos. A toddler with wild red hair, an expression that suggests she’s either about to laugh or about to commit a minor crime. She’s sitting in the garden, surrounded by flowers leaning toward her in a way that might be coincidence. Might not be.
"That was her second birthday," Leo says. He points to another photo. "And that's us. I was six. She was four. She’d just shoved me into the koi pond because I told her girls couldn’t be astronauts. She could absolutely be an astronaut. She just chose not to."
The photo shows two children standing in the garden. Leo, dripping wet, scowling. A tiny Elle with her arms crossed, a look I recognize on her face. That stubborn, immovable, I-will-die-on-this-hill expression she carries into every argument, every battle.
I can’t help but smile.
More photos. Elle and Leo building something in the garden. Elle reading in the window seat, hair falling over the book. Elle and Jo kneeling in the dirt together, planting something, both of them laughing.
A whole life, captured in fragments, pinned to a wall.
Something shifts in my chest. Looking at this hallway, this record of ordinary days made extraordinary by the simple act of being together, all I can think is: I want this.
I want a family to make memories with.
I glance at Kevin on my shoulder. He tilts his fuzzy head at me. Down the hallway, I can hear Mora's voice, low and calm, talking with Raskel about ward placement.
One day. If we survive this.
"You okay?" Leo asks.
"Yeah." I clear my throat. "Yeah, it's just you humans do this? Keep pictures of everything?"
"The important stuff, yeah." He pauses. "Jo kept more than most. But she had a lot to remember."
We move on.
Leo leads us to a room at the back of the house. It’s small, windowless, contains two of the most evil-looking contraptions I have ever seen.
They’re large, boxy, made of white metal. They sit side by side like sentinels guarding a doorway to some mechanical underworld. One has a round glass eye in its front panel. The other features a series of dials, knobs that look designed to confuse, intimidate in equal measure.
"What are those?" I ask, and I'm not proud of the fact that I take a step back.
"Laundry machines," Leo says. "Washer and dryer. You put dirty clothes in one, it cleans them. You move them to the other, it dries them."
I stare at him, then at the machines, then back at him.
"They clean clothes. On their own."
"Well, you have to push a button."
"You push a button and the machine does the rest."
"Basically."
"Leo." I grab his arm. "Whoever said humans don't have magic clearly lied. This is sorcery. These are enchanted objects. There is no way fabric goes into one of these things dirty and comes out clean without some form of arcane intervention."
"It's called engineering."
"It's called witchcraft, and I respect it enormously."
Kevin buzzes at the dryer's vent, where warm air is leaking through, and settles on top of it with the satisfied posture of a bee who has found his calling.
"Don't get attached, Kevin. We're not staying in the laundry room."
Kevin doesn't move. He's made his decision.
As Leo leads me back out, I spot something on a shelf beside the door. A red can with white lettering. I pick it up and turn it over in my hands.
"What's this?"
Leo glances back. "Dr Pepper." He pauses. "Elle's favorite. Grandma Jo always kept a stockpile. There's an entire case in the pantry."
I know about Dr Pepper. I've heard Elle talk about it.
I've heard Peeble talk about it. It's achieved an almost mythical status among our group.
This human elixir that Elle consumed in quantities that suggested either addiction or a death wish.
I've been on this planet multiple times and somehow never tried one.
I pop the tab the way Leo shows me. The can hisses, releasing a smell that is sweet, sharp, entirely unlike anything that exists in Wynmire. I take a sip.
The world changes.
It happens entirely inside my body. I have zero control over it. The flavor hits first. Sweet, deeper than fruit, more complex, with a bite at the end that fizzes across my tongue, climbs into my sinuses.
Then the carbonation. Tiny bubbles exploding against the roof of my mouth, tickling my antennae from the inside. A sensation I didn’t know was possible. One I definitely never needed.
"Oh," I say.
I take another sip. A bigger one.
"Oh no."
"You okay?" Leo asks.
I am transcendent. Every cell in my body has woken up and is screaming with something between joy and terror, and I can't tell the difference because the distinction doesn't matter anymore.
My compound eyes are processing colors. My antennae are picking up frequencies from neighboring dimensions.
My heartbeat, which normally runs at a steady, respectable pace, has decided to audition for a percussion solo.