Goldie’s lips curved upward, the reflex automatic even as her brain spun like a hamster on a wheel.Sparkle, Goldie. Charm it, disarm it, dazzle it until it forgets what it came for. Make it go away.
She winked and let out a bright, tinkling laugh. “Well. I’m pleased to be seen.”
She reached out, almost a reflex, and brushed her fingers against his chest where a human heart might beat.
The Assistant looked down at her hand like it was a curious growth that had sprouted overnight in a tended garden bed. Before she could snatch her hand back, his own shot up and clasped her fingers.
Heat crawled up Goldie’s neck at the sudden grip. He studied her hand intently, tilting it as though there might be runes he had yet to decode etched into her skin. His thumb brushed across her palm like a botanist testing the grain of a leaf.
She swallowed hard, her heart thudding against her ribs like it wanted out. Then she let out a laugh, bright and a little too loud, and eased her hand from his grasp as gently as she could.
“So, uh, loving what you and the Thornfather have been doing to the atrium,” she blurted, words tumbling out like marbles across a polished floor. “It’s very… leafy.”
She flapped a hand in what might have been a gesture of appreciation. “I’m not great with plants,” she added quickly, already regretting this conversational detour. “Sig—you know, Sig Samora? Used to be a Harbinger? All wingy and Doom-y and stuff? Anyway, he’s started sighing every time I bring home apotted anything. Real mournful sighs. Like he’s already writing a eulogy for it.”
Did I just admit to murdering his kindred?Oh gods and goddesses, please. Let the ground open up. Let the Greymarket implode. Let the wallpaper catch fire. Anything.
The Assistant’s brow furrowed slightly, lips pulling down. “Perhaps it is not that you are poor with plants,” he said at last. “Perhaps you burn so brightly, they cannot compete. They give themselves over to you, starved of air and light, until they wither in awe.”
The words landed in her chest like a stone dropped into deep water, rippling through places she usually kept still. Heat rose, unbidden—not just at the praise, but at the way he said it, as though it were an observation rather than a kindness.
She opened her mouth to laugh it off, to drag her sparkle back into place, to make it a joke before it became something else, but he was nodding, as if some verdict had been reached.
“Be steady, Marigold Flynn,” he said.
The sconce above her door flickered, buzzed, and went dark. When her eyes adjusted, he was already walking away, the outline of his coat sharp against the dimming hall.
Goldie stood frozen, cheeks flushed, heart hammering, with the unmistakable sense that something very strange and very important had just occurred.
Chapter
Eight
The Assistant did not look back, though he felt the woman’s gaze press between his shoulder blades. It spread across him like ivy tendrils, a tickling itch that burrowed into bark and bone.
The hallway narrowed behind him. Greymarket liked to shift when it was watching, and lately the building had grown particularly interested in Marigold Flynn.
He could not blame it. She glittered. She interrupted. She carved out space in rooms where she wasn’t meant to be and then filled them completely. She charmed like it was a second language, a layer of defense disguised as warmth and wit.
He hated the practiced performance he saw in her. Not for its brazenness, not only because he recognized armor stretched over a soft interior, but because something sap-deep in him longed to see her without it.
And that unsettled him, because he was not made to feel. He was Splice, a graft shaped to serve the will of something older than cities. His germination had been seeded with precision, sung into form beneath the canopy of Mycor’s breath.
The Thornfather—known to others as a god, to him only as Mycor—wasn’t a father, nor a brother. They were not kin as humans meant it. They were branches from the same trunk: separate but joined, distinct yet communal, each grown to serve a purpose the other could not.
Splice’s thoughts ran in braided strands. He did not bother to separate which belonged to him and which belonged to Mycor. Their link was phloem and fiber, deeper than speech, stronger than emotion.
They had seen so much together. When the world still trembled with gods in every grove, Mycor had walked as an avatar of life, crowned in antlers and wreathed in green. Always, he returned when the land grew restless, when someone forgot that the land remembers.
Splice remembered the most recent time Mycor had stirred. Decades ago, when the city first began tearing at its borders, carving concrete scars and trying to forget its forests. The land had cried out then, raw and unquiet. Mycor had answered, risen, and rooted himself in place. And Splice, his graft, had moved where Mycor could not.
When the bindings were set, Mycor returned to slumber. But Splice did not sleep. He carried out what had been sung into him, tracing the grooves of his purpose like water through stone. For days, years, decades, he moved without recognition, without question, without remembering. The work was done, though he could not have said why or for whom. He was a vessel on autopilot, a witness without memory, a shadow cast by a sleeping tree.
That was what he was made to be. A graft, not a man. Not a creature who lingered in stairwells, disoriented by the glance of a woman who glittered too brightly.
The stairwell gave way to stillness as Splice entered the atrium. Greymarket had done its best to make the spacepresentable for his god: marble planters, skylights, a koi pond ringed with curated ferns. But the koi were long gone, and the pond was now a basin of black water, reflecting nothing. The ferns had grown too lush, too symmetrical, as though Greymarket didn’t quite understand what a forest was meant to look like. Shadows gathered in their roots, stubborn and thick.
Mycor sat at the far edge of the water, trailing his rootlike fingers across its surface as if reading the language of ripples. He was tall, naked, his form a composite of living matter: grass-green, bark-brown, stone-grey. Moss crept in a lattice across his hunched shoulders, vines cascading from his head like a mantle. Where his body touched the marble, the stone darkened, veins spreading outward as if it too were growing.
