I press soil around the orchid roots. My cheeks burn. Everything burns and none of it is from the sun.
The combined yard stretches between our houses like a declaration. No fence. No line. No border.
From somewhere up the street, the quiet hum of a luxury sedan's engine idles. Watching.
We're tamping down the last terrace border when the ground moves.
Not an earthquake. Not a tremor. The soil between the third and fourth retaining walls ripples like something underneath is breathing. A long, slow inhale that lifts the fresh-packed clay an inch, two inches, then exhales it back down with a sucking sound.
Flynn's hand shoots out and catches my wrist.
"Back up."
"That's my moonbloom bed."
"Back. Up."
The ground inhales again. This time it doesn't exhale. The clay bulges upward in a dome, cracks spiderwebbing across the surface, and a root the thickness of my forearm punches through like a fist through drywall.
Pale. White. Glistening with sap that is copper and rotting fruit. The root whips sideways, spraying dirt, and slams into the nearest basalt slab hard enough to chip stone.
"That's not moonbloom," Flynn says.
"No."
A second root erupts. Then a third. They twist and braid together mid-air, forming a writhing column that rises four feet, five feet, six feet above the terrace. Smaller tendrils branch off the main trunk, each one tipped with a barbed hook that gleams wet in the afternoon sun.
I know this root system. The wild jasmine I planted along his retaining wall. Except jasmine roots are thin and polite and don't punch through basalt. This is something else. Something fed by the magical loam we hauled out of the ravine. The rare soil that bonds different growing mediums together.
It bonded a little too well.
"Shovels," Flynn barks.
I hold the flat-head from the drainage trench. Flynn seizes his D-handle spade, the heavy one with the reinforced steel blade that he sharpens every Sunday like a religious observance. The root column sways, tendrils fanning outward, and two barbed tips snap toward my face.
I swing.
The shovel connects with a meaty thwack and the tendril recoils, leaking milky sap. Another lashes at my hip. Flynn's spade cleaves it mid-strike, the steel singing through the air behind my head close enough to stir my hair.
"Duck."
I duck. His spade whistles over me and buries itself in a tendril. Sap sprays across his tee shirt in a long white streak.
We fall into a rhythm without discussion. I swing low. He swings high. The tendrils come from every angle, whipping and coiling and stabbing those barbed hooks at anything that moves. One catches my overalls and rips the strap clean off my shoulder. Another wraps Flynn's ankle and yanks. He staggers, drops to one knee, and drives his spade straight down through the root pinning him.
"Behind you!"
I spin. A thick tendril arcs toward my head. No time to swing. I jam the shovel handle forward like a spear and catch the root dead center, forcing it sideways. It wraps around the steel shaft and squeezes. The handle groans.
Flynn's back presses against mine. Solid. Immovable. A wall of muscle and heat and the faint vibration of his runes blazing under the bandages. I brace against him and he braces against me and we hold the terrace while the root system thrashes around us.
"I need to get the main taproot," I shout over the sound of cracking stone and whipping tendrils. "If I sever it from the loam layer, the whole system dies."
"How deep?"
"Two feet. Maybe three."
"I'll hold them."
