“Some of them. Maybe.” She meets my gaze, and I see something in her expression that I haven’t seen before. Not fear—she’s faced fear and moved past it. This is something else. Dread, maybe. Or the anticipation of a horror she’s been preparing herself to face.
“Do you want to see what the Bloom does when it’s allowed to run its full course?”
No. Every instinct I have screams the word.
“Yes.” I take her hand. Press my lips to her knuckles—a gesture I’ve seen courtiers use in the warlord’s halls, elegant and out of place coming from an executioner’s scarred mouth. “You shouldn’t have to face it alone.”
FORTY-TWO
ZRYNOK
The basement stairs descend into darkness.
Arwen carries a torch, its flame casting dancing shadows on walls that have never seen sunlight. The air grows thicker as we descend—heavier with spores, sweeter with the Bloom’s particular rot. My infection surges in answer, a deep pulse under the skin that recognizes what it’s moving toward the way a compass needle finds north.
“The Abbot called this the Cultivation Chamber.” Her voice echoes off stone that seems to swallow sound. “He brought his most interesting subjects here. The ones who responded to the Bloom in unusual ways. The ones whose transformations were... extreme.”
“Why?”
“Research. He wanted to understand the Bloom’s full potential. How far transformation could go. Whether complete integration was possible—human and flower becoming one organism.”
We reach the bottom of the stairs. A corridor stretches ahead, lined with doors larger than the ones in the cells above. These have windows instead of slots—thick glass panels that allow observation without contact.
Arwen stops at the first window. Her face goes pale.
“Oh, Sera.”
I look through the glass.
The thing in the cell might have been human once.
Its body is split open—chest cavity expanded, ribs folded back like the petals of a flower, organs displaced to make room for the Bloom that grows from its core. Crimson flowers bloom from the exposed flesh, their petals glistening with moisture that might be blood or might be something else entirely. Stems have replaced veins, carrying nutrients to tissue that has become more plant than animal.
The face is still mostly intact. Female, I think, though the transformation has obscured most identifying features. Eyes that hold awareness—fractured, tortured awareness—fix on the window. On us.
Her mouth moves. Shaping words that the glass muffles into silence.
I can read lips. An executioner’s skill, useful for catching final confessions through the noise of crowds.
Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.
“She was called Sera.” Arwen’s voice is barely a whisper. “We were friends, before. Before she started showing signs of accelerated transformation. Before the Abbot took her for study.”
“How long?”
“Three years. She’s been like this for three years.”
Three years of being a living experiment. Three years of consciousness trapped in a body that is no longer hers, that flowers and blooms and grows while her mind watches from behind eyes that still know how to weep.
I unlock the door.
Arwen doesn’t try to stop me. Doesn’t ask what I’m planning. She already knows.
Sera—what’s left of Sera—watches me enter. Her mouth keeps moving, keeps shaping the same two words, keeps begging for the only thing I can give her.
I draw my knife. The small one. Sharp enough to make this quick.
“I see you.” I crouch beside her transformed body, close enough to smell the sweetness rising from her blooming flesh. “I know you’re in there. I know you’ve been waiting.”
