"Your hands." She grabs my wrists before I can pull away. Turns my palms up. The splinters are deep, some of them two inches long, buried in the callused pads below my fingers. She makes a sound in her throat that's half gasp, half growl.
"Surface damage."
"There's a piece of tree inside your hand, Flynn. That's not surface damage. That's a medical event."
"I've had worse."
"From what? Catching other trees?"
"Siege warfare, actually."
She stops. Stares up at me through the rain. Water runs down the bridge of her nose and drips off the tip, and her eyes are wide and dark and searching my face for the joke. There isn't one.
"Sit still," she says.
She pulls a small canvas pouch from her overalls. Gardening kit. The tweezers she produces are meant for removing aphids from delicate root systems, but they work fine on wood splinters. She bends over my right hand, her grip firm, her fingers warm despite the cold rain. The first splinter comes out clean. She flicks it away and moves to the next.
I see her head. The part in her hair, off-center, revealing a thin line of pale scalp beneath the dark curls. Potting soil still clings there. She carried dirt from her own garden into this ravine, into this storm, and it's still with her.
The lightning flashes again, farther away. The spiral in the clouds loosens. The rain shifts from vertical assault to a steady, soaking downpour.
Twelve splinters. She removes every one. Wipes my palms with a clean rag from the kit. Wraps them in strips torn from her ruined sleeve.
"You caught a tree."
"Redirected."
"You caught a whole tree. With your hands."
"Technically my hands, my legs, and approximately forty percent of my core stabilization muscles, which I'll be feeling for the next week."
Her fingers tighten around mine. She doesn't let go.
The storm doubles down. What was a downpour becomes a wall of water, the kind of rain that doesn't fall so much as occupy the air. Visibility drops to six feet. The trail we hiked in on is now a creek, brown water rushing over the bootprints we left an hour ago, carrying sticks and leaves and a single animated flamingo head that must have survived the earlier purge.
"We need to move." I pull my hands free from hers. The cloth bandages are already soaked through, pink at the edges. "The ravine floods fast. This whole shelf we're standing on will be underwater in ten minutes."
"My orchids. The magical loam. We didn't get enough."
"We got plenty." I yank up the canvas sack of loam I'd packed before the tree tried to kill us. Sling it over my shoulder. Heavy. Good weight. The kind of burden that keeps you grounded on slick terrain. "Go. I'm right behind you."
She doesn't argue. She moves.
Credit where it's due: Junia Erikkson scrambles up a muddy hillside like something feral. She grabs roots, jams her boots into gaps between rocks, hauls herself over a fallen log I have to step around because my center of gravity is too high to risk the same vault. Her torn overalls snag on a branch. She rips free without slowing down. Leaves a scrap of fabric behind like a flag marking conquered territory.
The subdivision fence appears through the rain. Six feet of cedar planking, stained weatherproof gray, the HOA's approved perimeter barrier. The gate is two hundred yards south. We don't have two hundred yards of dry time left.
I drop the loam sack, grab the fence, and haul myself over. Land hard on the other side. My right knee absorbs the impact and files a formal complaint.
"Pass it over!"
The loam sack comes sailing over the fence. I catch it against my body. Then Junia's hands appear at the planking, fingers gripping the edge, and her face follows, mud-streaked and grinning like this is the best evening she's had in months.
She drops. I catch her. Same motion as the mudslide, same instinct, except this time she's falling toward me on purpose and her arms go around my neck and her weight settles against me and we still for two full seconds longer than necessary.
I set her down.
"My garage. Thirty yards."
