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THUMP.

I stare at them.

THUMP.

Ezra goes white. Rhett stops smiling. Malakai closes his eyes.

THUMP.

I put my hand against my stomach and nothing moves. Then something tiny presses against my palm.

Not a foot. Not a hand.

A root.

My mouth falls open. The sunrise turns the sky blood red. Behind us, Ward Farm burns. In front of us, the road stretches toward home.

And inside me… something ripens.

17

Ripened

Ezra

Three days.

That’s how long it takes Sage to realize I’m avoiding her.

I expected less.

She’s been distracted.

We all have.

Freedom, apparently, comes with an alarming amount of paperwork.

There are police reports to navigate, statements to coordinate, hundreds of terrified people with conflicting memories of what happened at Ward Farm, and enough videos circulating online to guarantee I’ll spend the next decade explaining why the ground appeared to attack several hundred paying customers.

Rhett thinks it’s hilarious.

Of course he does.

He’s also spent the last three days discovering everything he couldn’t experience while bound to Ward Farm, which so far includes driving across county lines simply because he can, standing barefoot in the ocean for nearly an hour, and ordering an unreasonable amount of shit online.

Malakai has been quieter.

He disappears every morning and returns with dirt beneath his fingernails, testing how far his connection to the land reaches now that the Harvest no longer controls it.

And Mercy… Mercy is alive.

I still don’t know what to do with that.

She came with us when we left Ward Farm.

There was never a discussion about it. Sage took one look at her standing beneath the morning sun for the first time in two hundred and thirty-five years and told her she was coming.

Mercy looked at me.