Within a minute, I’m dry. My hair, my shirt, my pants. Everything.
“Thanks,” I say to the flowers.
I was raised to have manners, even when the thing helping me is a plant.
The plants begin to reveal a path ahead.
Ferns draw their fronds back. Low bushes shift their branches aside. A thick vine pulls away from the ground, sliding back on itself until the soil beneath it is clear.
Underneath, smooth stepping stones appear. Pale, flat, and evenly spaced.
They lead inland.
I take a step. Then another.
As I move down the path, the plants on either side lean toward me. Leaves tilt in my direction. Vines shift closer, brushing lightly against my arms as I pass.
It feels like a welcome. Like the greenery is reaching out, the way a dog presses its head under your hand, asking to be touched.
A trailing vine brushes my shoulder, and I feel a small pulse of energy pass between us. My marks answer immediately, a faint hum under my skin. My golden veins flickers once, soft and steady. The vine trembles in response.
This place feels right.
Not safe. I’ve stopped trusting that word.
But right in a way nothing has felt since Jo’s garden. The same quiet sense of belonging. Of being known by the ground beneath my feet.
Like the earth here recognizes me.
The path curves through a grove of copper-trunked trees. Their canopy filters the light above me, breaking it into shifting patterns that move across the stepping stones.
The air smells sweet and green. Beneath that is something deeper and older. Rain on soil. The rich earthy scent of Jo’s compost pile in midsummer.
The air itself feels dense with life.
It vibrates at the same quiet frequency as the hum in my marks.
Then I hear it.
“—telling you, if we wait much longer, I’m going to start a monologue about my feelings, and nobody wants that.”
I stop walking. My heart stops with me.
That voice.
I know that voice.
I’ve heard it complain about sleeping conditions, critique my fashion choices, narrate my emotional state like a nature documentary, and deliver dramatic death scenes that later turned out to be performances.
“Peeble?”
The word comes out cracked. Barely a whisper. I clear my throat and try again.
“PEEBLE!”
A buzz cuts through the grove.
I catch a flash of iridescent wings in the light breaking through the canopy. A small shape rockets out of the trees, moving far too fast for something that size, and then I see them.
