The nearest flytrap strikes again. Junia brings the shears down in a diagonal slash that severs the stalk six inches below the jaw. The head drops to the concrete floor, still snapping. Mucus spatters her dark clothing in thick ropes.
She doesn't flinch.
Second stalk. This one comes from the left, whipping sideways with surprising speed. She ducks, plants her back foot, and drives the shears upward into the joint where jaw meets stem. The blade punches through with a wet crunch. Fluid sprays. The stalk goes limp.
I should help her.
I take another photo instead, because she told me to and because watching her carve through mutant vegetation with a pair of eight-dollar pruning shears from the hardware store is doing something to my cardiovascular system that has nothing to do with adrenaline.
Third flytrap. Fourth. She works through them like she's deadheading petunias, efficient and brutal, each cut placed where the tissue is softest. Plant anatomy knowledge weaponized. The severed heads pile up around her boots, still twitching, jaws clicking against the concrete.
A thick stalk shoots from beneath the rack, wrapping around her ankle. She stumbles. Goes down on one knee.
Two steps. I cross the distance and stomp the stalk flat with my boot. The pressure splits it open lengthwise. She yanks her foot free, rolls forward, and buries the shears into the last flytrap standing between her and the rosebush.
Silence. Just the drip of plant fluids and the hum of grow lights.
"Your rosebush." She straightens up, blowing a curl from her face. Flytrap mucus streaks her cheek. Her eyes burn with something feral and satisfied. "Go get it."
My rosebush. My Crimson Glory hybrid tea rose. Twelve years of selective pruning. A root system I mapped by hand in a leather journal. Valerius jammed it into a nutrient tank full of whatever magical slurry he's pumping through this place, and already the canes are wrong. Too thick. Too dark. Thorns curved like fishhooks where they should be straight and elegant.
I reach into the tank. Warm liquid closes around my forearms. My fingers find the root ball and cradle it, gentle as I'd hold anything I've ever loved. The roots have tripled in mass. Tangled. Aggressive. But alive.
I lift it free. Nutrient solution streams off the roots in phosphorescent ribbons, pooling on the concrete between my boots.
"Can you fix it?" Junia stands at my shoulder, close enough that her breath warms my bicep. She knows what this plant means.
The root ball sits heavy in my palms. Corrupted growth. Forced mutation. Magic residue threaded through every cell.
"I can stabilize it. Flush the magical compounds over a few weeks. Prune back the forced growth." I turn the root ball, examining the crown where the main canes branch. Stillstructurally sound. Still the architecture I built over a decade of patient work. "It'll survive."
"Good."
She squeezes my arm once, hard, then moves to the back wall. Starts photographing the remaining stolen plants from different angles. Insurance shots. Backup evidence.
I wrap the rosebush in my dark overshirt, cradling it against me. The nutrient solution soaks through the fabric and against my skin. Warm. Tingling slightly where the magic residue contacts bare flesh.
Junia finishes her documentation loop and jogs back to me. Her phone screen shows forty-six additional photos.
"We have enough to bury him."
A mechanical click echoes through the greenhouse. Then another. Then a cascade of them, sharp and metallic, rippling across the far wall.
Every grow light in the building snaps to full brightness simultaneously.
The front doors grind open.
Valerius doesn't walk through those doors.
Something worse.
The nutrient tanks along the back wall rupture simultaneously, glass cracking in jagged lines, and the magical slurry hits the floor in a phosphorescent flood. It reaches the root systems of every stolen plant on the racks. The reaction is immediate. Violent. Stalks thicken. Leaves unfurl with audible pops. Branches extend like grasping fingers.
But the worst of it channels through the drainage grate directly beneath my feet, pooling around the base of the largest specimen in the greenhouse. A thornvine. Not a garden variety climber. A Blackspire thornvine, the kind that grows in contested orcish territory where the soil drinks blood and the plants learn to fight back.
I know this species.
I fought through thickets of them during my warband years. Lost two squad members to a mature specimen outside Khar'vol. The thorns aren't just sharp. They're barbed, serrated, designed to hook flesh and pull prey deeper into the canopy.
