My left hand hits the top rail. The shears swing wide in my right. My cargo shorts catch a nail head and tear at the pocket—a problem for future Flynn—and then I'm in her yard, bootscrushing something purple and fragrant, and the beetles are everywhere.
They're wrong. Every instinct bred into me by twelve generations of Orcish hunters screams it. Natural beetles scatter. Natural beetles flee from vibration and shadow and anything larger than themselves. These hold formation. They work in coordinated waves, six to eight per orchid, mandibles scissoring through stems with mechanical precision while a perimeter ring faces outward, carapaces raised like shields.
Military patterns. Someone trained these things.
"My Cattleya! Flynn, they're killing my Cattleya?—"
Junia grabs a terracotta pot and swings it into the nearest cluster. The pot shatters. Three beetles tumble sideways, recover midair with a buzz like a circular saw, and latch onto a hanging basket of white Dendrobiums.
I'm already moving.
The shears open. Close. A huge beetle splits clean down the dorsal line, and the two halves hit the grass trailing something that carries the idea of hot copper and burnt sage. Magic. The ichor isn't blood. It's liquid enchantment, and it sizzles where it contacts organic matter, leaving black spots on Junia's lawn like cigarette burns.
Second beetle. Third. I pivot into the swarm around the Cattleya, and the perimeter ring breaks formation to meet me. Four of them launch at my face. Mandibles wide. Iridescent wings throwing prismatic light that's almost beautiful if you ignore the razor anatomy.
I swat two out of the air with the flat of the shears. One hits the fence. The other hits a gnome statue and decapitates it.
The remaining two land on my forearm.
They bite.
Their mandibles punch through my skin like carpet tacks, and green blood—my blood, dark and thick as pine sap—wells uparound their heads as they saw deeper. Pain lances from wrist to shoulder. I grunt. Don't scream. Screaming is a warband luxury I trained out of myself before my tusks came in.
I crush them. One in each fist. The carapaces crack like walnuts, and the copper-sage smell intensifies until my eyes water.
"The Vanda! Flynn, the blue Vanda on the post?—"
I spin. A cluster of nine beetles has engulfed something on a wooden post near the porch—a flower I don't know the name of, blue as deep water, petals already shredded to confetti. Junia sprints for it. A beetle detaches from the swarm and dive-bombs her face, mandibles aimed at her eye.
No.
The shears leave my hand.
Thirty-two inches of carbon steel spinning end over end, and the throw is ugly, graceless, nothing like the precision a warband captain should produce, but the blade catches the beetle three inches from Junia's cheekbone and pins it to the porch railing with a wet crunch.
She freezes. Stares at the quivering shears embedded in her railing, the bisected beetle twitching around the blade.
"Duck."
She ducks.
I barrel past her, rip the shears free, and lay into the remaining cluster on the Vanda with both hands. Overhand chops. Fast, brutal, ugly. Beetle parts spray across the porch in a rain of chitin and copper-scented ichor. The wood planks smoke where the liquid lands. Her welcome mat—a pink thing that reads BLOOM WHERE YOU'RE PLANTED—catches a splatter and immediately sprouts a six-inch mushroom.
The last beetle tries to flee.
It lifts off the ruined Vanda, wings buzzing, and banks hard toward the street. Toward Valerius's end of the neighborhood.I track its trajectory. File that information in a very specific mental drawer labeled EVIDENCE.
Then it's quiet.
Junia stands in the wreckage of her garden. Shredded petals. Smoking ichor stains. Terracotta shrapnel. The Cattleya is destroyed—nothing left but a gnawed stump weeping clear sap. The Dendrobiums are half-eaten. The blue Vanda is confetti.
Her hands hang at her sides. Soil under her nails. A smear of copper-bright ichor across her cheek.
She isn't crying. Her jaw is set in a way that reminds me of soldiers who've just lost a position but haven't lost the war.
"That last one flew toward Cedarbrook Estates."
Her eyes snap to mine.
