"How compromised?" Bryx asks.
"Root is consuming him. He’s letting it."
Silence from the other side. The water ripples, and their faces distort for a moment before settling.
"How long have we been gone?" I ask.
"Nine days on our end," Leo says. "The Elm Gate’s been unstable. Raskel’s been reinforcing the wards, but every time an iteration collapses, there’s a shockwave through the Rootline."
That’s not good. The Elm Gate is our way back. Our way home. If it fails while we’re still jumping iterations, Peeble and I are stranded wherever we land.
"Listen," Bryx says, leaning closer until his face fills most of the pool’s surface. "We’ve been tracking the Rootline disruptions from here. Every time an iteration destabilizes, there’s a pattern. The collapses are getting closer together. Whatever’s happening, whatever she did when she dispersed, it’s accelerating."
"How much time do we have?"
Bryx looks at Leo. Leo looks at his hands.
"We don’t know," Leo says quietly. "But it’s not a lot."
The water ripples again. The connection is thinning.
"We’ll move to the next iteration as soon as we can," I say. "Keep the gate stable. Keep the garden alive."
"Kaelren—" Leo starts.
"I’ll find her."
I pull my hand from the water. Their faces stretch, blur, and dissolve back into reflected stars. The pool goes still.
Peeble is quiet for a long time. For Peeble, that’s about twelve seconds.
"So. Running out of time. Gate’s breaking. No pressure."
"No pressure," I repeat, and neither of us laughs.
With that, the image fades from the pool, and I feel no closer to answers than before.
We’re still on the high ground at dawn when it starts. Shouting, the crack of Root magic, the low groan of something massive taking a hit. I move to the edge of the outcropping and look down into the delta.
Iteration Fourteen Kaelren has found what he’s been looking for.
A massive pod dominates the center of the flooded clearing, and stands is the right word, because it’s walking. A cathedral of vines and thorns, fifty feet tall, moving on root-legs that tear free from the mud with slow, wet pulls.
Its body is layered in living plant matter: bark plates shifting like armor, flowering tendrils lashing from its sides, a canopy of leaves spreading wide enough to swallow the sky. Wherever it steps, the ground responds—flowers erupting, vines racing outward, the delta reshaping itself around it.
Petal-mouths open and close across its surface. Dozens of them, each door-sized and lined with translucent teeth. They gape, release clouds of yellow pollen, then snap shut in a rhythm that sounds almost like breathing.
Almost like speech.
But it’s what’s inside that stops me.
Through gaps in the vine-armor, I can see them. Silhouettes. Dozens of bodies suspended in amber sap, hanging like insects in resin. Fae, mostly. Arms outstretched, mouths open, eyes closed. Alive or dead, I can’t tell. The sap pulses around them, feeding on them or feeding them. It’s hard to say which is worse.
And one silhouette is shaped like her.
The breath leaves my body. My hand finds the locket and presses it to my chest hard enough to hurt. The shape is right, the height, the build, the way the hair drifts in the sap. For one sharp, impossible second, I think she’s here. I think I found her—
The locket is cold.
