This one is four feet tall and growing fast, its main trunk already thick as my thigh, canes whipping outward in spiraling arcs. The slurry supercharges it. Six feet. Eight. The canes hit the ceiling struts and change direction, fanning horizontally across the greenhouse like a net closing over us.
"Door. Now." I grab Junia's shoulder.
A cane slams down between us and the exit. Thorns as big as steak knives punch into the concrete. A second cane sweeps low, and I jump it, pulling Junia with me. A third blocks the side window.
Trapped.
The rosebush is still cradled against me in my bundled overshirt. I back against the far wall, shielding it. The thornvine doesn't care about us specifically. It's expanding outward in every direction, drunk on magic, claiming territory the way its wild cousins claim forest clearings. But anything caught in the expansion gets shredded.
A cane whips toward Junia. She drops flat. It passes over her head and buries six inches of thorn into the aluminum rack behind her. Seeds and soil explode outward.
"Give me the rosebush," she says.
"What?"
She's already on her feet, shears up, circling the main trunk. Studying it. Reading the growth pattern the way she reads every plant that crosses her path, with that terrifying botanical intuition that turns taxonomy into combat intelligence.
"The main root cluster is feeding from the grate. If I can get underneath and sever the primary taproot, the whole thingcollapses." She holds out her hands. "But you can't fit under there. I can. And I can't fight my way in while holding your rose."
She's right. The gap between the trunk base and the floor is maybe eighteen inches. My shoulders are thirty-two inches across. The math is brutal and simple.
I hand her the rosebush.
She doesn't take it.
She tucks it inside her jacket, zips the jacket to her throat, and wraps both arms around her own torso. The root ball presses against her stomach, cradled in fabric and flesh. Protected by every inch of her body.
"Junia."
"Shut up and clear me a path."
I grab a fallen rack support. Steel tube. Six feet long. Heavy enough to matter. I swing it two-handed into the nearest cane and feel the impact shudder up through my wrists, my elbows, my shoulders. The cane cracks but doesn't break. Sap sprays. I swing again. The cane snaps and recoils, whipping back toward the trunk.
Junia moves.
She's low, shears in her right hand, left arm locked across the rosebush at her belly. A cane drops from overhead. She doesn't dodge. She takes it across the back of her shoulder, and I hear the fabric tear, hear the thorns rake across skin, and she doesn't even slow down. Blood wells through the ripped jacket. She keeps moving.
Three feet from the trunk. A secondary cane sweeps her legs. She goes down hard on her hip, and the concrete rings with the impact. The rosebush stays pinned against her. Protected. She curls around it as thorns drag across her forearms, leaving parallel red lines that bead immediately.
She doesn't drop the plant.
She rolls under the sweeping cane, comes up on her knees, and jams the pruning shears into the trunk where it meets the grate. The blades sink in. She twists. The trunk shudders. Sap gushes over her hands, hot and glowing, and she pulls the shears free and stabs again, deeper. Twists harder.
A cane catches her across the ribs. She grunts, a sound punched out of her, and I'm swinging the steel tube wildly now, smashing everything that reaches for her, but there are too many and they're too fast.
She stabs a third time and the taproot gives.
The sound is enormous. A wet, fibrous ripping that fills the greenhouse like a scream. Every cane in the building goes rigid. Trembles. Then drops, lifeless, crashing to the concrete in a thundering cascade of dead wood and deflating leaves.
Junia lies on the floor in the wreckage, arms still wrapped around her middle. Blood runs from a dozen thorn gashes across her shoulders, her forearms, the backs of her hands. Her jacket is shredded.
She unzips what's left of it and pulls out the rosebush.
Intact. Every root. Every cane. No breaks.
She holds it up to me, grinning through the pain.
I drop the steel tube and take the rosebush from her hands. The root ball is slick with nutrient slurry and warm against my palms, alive in a way that makes my throat tight. Every node intact. Every graft junction solid. Twelve years of work, saved by a woman bleeding from a dozen punctures who refused to let go.
