We ran straight to the garden, and we saw the tall hedges that weren’t hedges at all, and we slipped between them, onto the pathway that snaked all around the space while low posts topped with dim lanterns illuminated the way here and there.
Freedom.Every breath I took tasted like freedom—just before everything exploded.
The sound reached me first,I think.
Then the light.
Then the blast.
It seemed to just materialize out of thin air—or maybe it rose from the ground right in front of our feet? The grass blades made of some kind of fiber. The trees made of brass, and the leaves made of plastic painted green. The rosebushes and the vines and the flowers—they all exploded from within at the same time, and the sound of it was like thunder. The light was bright enough to blind me. The blast was strong enough to pick me up and throw me back and slam me against something hard.
I passed out before a single thought could cross my mind.
39
Icame to only halfway at first, the taste of metal and grass on my tongue. My face was pressed against the ground—real ground, soil and fiber and something sharp digging into my cheek. My ears were ringing.
Maybescreamingwas the better word to describe it—a high-pitched whine that blocked out everything else, and for a few seconds I couldn’t remember where I was or how I’d gotten there.
Then the pain made itself known like it had been eagerly waiting for my awakening.
It was on my back mostly, where I’d slammed against the ground, right between my shoulder blades. Every breath sent a hot wire of pain through my ribs, but I gritted my teeth and moved anyhour. When I did, I realized my hands were scraped raw—I must have tried to catch myself. My left knee throbbed, too, but I was alive. I was breathing. That was all that mattered.
I pushed myself up onto my elbows. The ringing was fading, slowly, replaced by other sounds—groaning, coughing, then someone calling a name.
Myname.
And it was March.
My eyes blinked fast, the sound of him creating an urgency in me right away. The faster I blinked, the more I moved, the more I saw—and what my eyes were telling me was that the mechanical garden was destroyed.
Maybe not entirely—the outer hedges still stood, though they were bent and blackened, their painted metal surfaces peeled back like skin. But the inner garden, the brass apple trees, the copper rosebushes, the benches—it was all gone. Flattened. Scattered in pieces across a wide circle of scorched ground, the metal twisted and smoking faintly under the dim light of the sky.
The sky was lighter now, much lighter than it had been. Not sunrise yet, but close—that pale gray at the horizon told me that we’d been out here for a long time.
Unconscious. Out in the open in these ruins.
“Ora…”
Levana was on her hands and knees maybe ten feet from me, blood on her forehead, one of the bundled sheets still clutched in her fist.
Behind her, Russ was sitting up against a bent metal trunk, blinking, dazed. Seth was on his feet already—unsteady, swaying, but he hadn’t fallen yet, and Erith was beside him, pulling a piece of brass from her sleeve with a hiss of pain.
My heart fell.
The bundles.
I looked around frantically, counted two-three-five. Five bundles of plaques, scattered across the scorched ground, most of the fabric that had covered them gone, and the metal was stained black on most plaques. Some were almost completely destroyed.
“Is everyone—” I started, but the sound of footsteps coming from across the garden cut me off.
Someone was running.
Multiple sets of feet, heavy, hitting the ground in an even rhythm. And voices—voices I knew, shouting over each other.
“ORA!”
“Hold on, we’re coming!”
