“No! I won’t—”
The root clutching me split. A thin green sprout spiraled out of it, beautiful and free of corruption. It broke free, a little branch with a single leaf on it, and I caught it.
With the last pulse of its core, Magnolia Green hurled us into the portal.
I cradled the sprout to me, trying to shield it against Baha-char’s sun. It was like a four-foot-long grape vine, but it was a brilliant shamrock green, as thick as my wrist at the base and narrowing down to a wispy tendril with three tiny leaves. Two more had sprouted in the time I carried it. It hugged me as I paced on the far side of the alley leading to Gertrude Hunt’s door.
I had no idea how long it could survive. Every moment counted, but this was an incredibly dangerous idea. It was better to be safe than sorry.
The sprout glowed softly, brushing against my neck like a kitten eager for a stroke.
“Don’t die,” I whispered. “Please don’t die.”
An hour ago, Sean, Wilmos, and I fell out of the mining portal in front of the Barsas. I couldn’t even talk at that point. Sean had loaded me and still unconscious Wilmos into the shuttle, stabbed me with every medical cocktail he could find in the shuttle’s first aid kit, and then he flew at breakneck speed toward the planet’s portal center.
Sometime during the flight, the last echoes of merging with Magnolia Green had faded, and my sanity returned. I remembered who I was. And then I cried, and Sean said soothing things, and I told him I was sorry for scaring him and wanting to die with the inn, and that I loved him.
After I was done crying, I realized that I was carrying what was left of Magnolia Green with me. It wasn’t a seed. It was a branch without any root, almost like a cutting. If it were a normal plant, I would put it into a nutrient-rich solution and let the roots form, but inns didn’t work that way.
Inns were multidimensional organisms that broke the rules of physics. Even at the seed stage, their primary root was already formed inside the seed’s shell. When you planted an inn seed, the root anchored it to reality and physical space. Without it, even if the seed sprouted, it couldn’t hold on to our world and died.
That was why as soon as an inn opened a new door, it would try to root through the space around it to claim some of it for its grounds. That was also why two inns couldn’t coexist in proximity—it wasn’t their branches, it was their roots that created a problem.
If I put that cutting into a solution and waited for it to grow, it would only wither. It had survived this long, because it was bonded with me, and I fed it what little magic I had left.
In gardening, there was one other method to preserve a cutting, and no innkeeper had ever tried it before, because nobody before me had been given a cutting by an inn. I had no idea what would happen if we tried it.
I told Sean about it during the flight. He smiled and told me he trusted me. At the very least, we had to try it. But it would have to be done very carefully. Bringing the cutting right into the heart of Gertrude Hunt through the portal was out of the question. We had no idea what would happen. We needed to introduce it to the inn outside of the grounds, on neutral, territory, and we would need to evacuate Gertrude Hunt’s guests first, just to be safe.
Sean and I had retraced our steps all the way to the Dominion’s capital, dragging the comatose Wilmos with us, and then we split up. Sean took the portal to Gertrude Hunt, while I took one of the Dominion’s portals to Baha-char.
I made my way to the alley and waited.
A door opened in the empty air and Tony came out of it.
“Dina!”
I waved at him.
He sprinted to me. Behind him the door remained open. Beast burst through it and dashed to me as fast as her little legs could carry her. A moment later Sean appeared in the doorway.
Our gazes met. I looked for reassurance and found it. We were still on the same page about trying this.
“Let’s do it,” Sean called out.
“Are you two out of your minds?” Tony demanded, braking in front of me. “If you bring a seed into the inn, both inns will die!”
“It’s not a seed. It’s a cutting.”
“What?”
“It’s a cutting,” I repeated. “There is no root.”
Tony swore. “It’s a fucking inn, not an African violet.”
The cutting of Magnolia Green slid off my neck and gently stretched toward the inn.
“Did you evacuate everyone?”
“Orro is with Marais. Everyone else went through the portal to the Dominion,” he said. “Karat, Gaston, and Wilmos are guarding Caldenia. She is…unhappy.”
“She owes me. She can wait a few minutes under the heavy guard.” As soon as this was over and if everything went well, everyone could return to the inn. “Is Wilmos conscious?”
“Yes, and pissed off as hell.”
We did save him. I should’ve been happy but right now it barely registered.
Sean waved me over. I started toward the door slowly.
“Two inns can’t occupy the same space,” Tony said. “Best case scenario, both die. Worst case, we collapse reality. If this happens, I can’t contain it.”
A long branch slipped from inside the door and waited, hovering.
“Dina, even if you bring it into the inn, you won’t be able to get it to root,” Tony said.
“I’m not trying to get it to root.”
We were almost to the door. The branch of Gertrude Hunt shivered a few feet away. Sean patted it, reassuring it.
“I’m going to graft it.”
Tony swore again.
The branch reached out to me. The sprout uncoiled itself from around my neck and stretched toward it. It was almost as if the two of them knew what they had to do.
I held my breath and reached out with my hand.
Gertrude Hunt brushed against my fingers.
Magic shot through me like an arrow from Gertrude Hunt, straight into the cutting, and back to the inn. The world vanished. A star-studded darkness blossomed in front of me with a glowing nebulous vortex unfurling at its center. An electric current of magic strummed through me, vibrating in every bone and tendon.
The darkness vanished, and I saw the branch of Gertrude Hunt slide across me back into the inn, with the sprout growing from it.
The branch slipped into the inn. A magic pulse rocked Gertrude Hunt.
Sean disappeared into the depth of inn.
I sprinted to the doorway and dove through it, Tony right behind me. The door slammed shut behind us.
The inn quaked and rumbled. The cutting was moving through it, a knot of magic sliding further away. We chased it, through the inn’s many rooms, through the hallways and the walls, to the back, to the plain hallway where a nascent door waited.
Reality exploded open before our eyes. The wall in front of us disintegrated, fracturing into exuberant sunlight. A stretch of flat ground lay ahead, sheathed in soft green and blue grass. A hundred yards ahead the ground ended, and beyond it an ocean of air stretched, with a grassy plain at its bottom. Groups of white stone mesas thrust from it toward the sky, crowned with turquoise trees. We were on top of a plateau.
A root slid under our feet, burrowing deep into the soil. It sped toward the cliff. The ground erupted. Branches spiraled up, high, higher, and higher. Hunter green leaves burst open. White flowers as big as my head opened, showing a whirl of pink stamens topped with a bright yellow clump of carpels.
A colossal magnolia, taller than the tallest redwood, wider than the widest sequoia, spread its giant branches over the plateau. Connected to the inn, and yet separate from it, but vibrant and so much alive. It felt like Magnolia Green. It was more than a tree but less than an inn. It grew from a Gertrude Hunt root, and both were well. Relief washed over me. I slumped forward, and Sean caught me and grinned.