She is too shocked to protest. She watches him turn away from her as if in a dream. He walks up the steps to their house, carrying the girls, then stands for a moment, his hand on the doorknob.
It’s a dream, she thinks. It’s only another dream.
“Go,” he says, and he doesn’t turn to her. “That’s what you really want, isn’t it?”
“I have to warn him,” she whispers. “I’ll come back. I promise.”
Beneath her feet, a steady rumble, rumble, in the ground.
Estajfan is not at the greenhouse. She heads past it, toward the forest, pushing her way through the underbrush. Sweat pools in her collarbone and trickles down between her breasts. When she reaches out to push the vines out of the way, her hands sting where they touch the green. She stops to examine them—small welts rise and fade as she watches. A trick of the light, she thinks, and pushes ahead, ignoring the pain. She’s good at that.
Another rumble hits—so hard and so loud she almost falls. When she rights herself, she’s barely past the greenhouse. She retreats back against it, looks up into the trees.
“Estajfan,” she calls. “Estajfan.”
“Heather.” Suddenly he’s beside her, before her, everywhere. Mountain air and light and sky.
She wants to collapse, to cry, but she gets a hold of herself. “Estajfan, listen to me. They’re coming up the mountain. You have to go—you, Aura, Petrolio. Please. I don’t know what they’ll do. They’re—everyone is so hungry, and so desperate.”
Estajfan shakes his head. “They can’t come up the mountain.”
“I know that—”
“No.” He grips her shoulders again. “Heather—something deeper is wrong. I’ve been trying to figure out what the ground magic is saying—”
“Ground magic?” She stares at him.
An unleashed banshee wail shoots at them from all directions. Heather covers her ears and bends low. Low enough to see the lilies around the greenhouse open their petals like mouths and scream. The glass shatters. Vines crawl through the shards and loop around her arms. She yanks free but the vines wind tighter, pull her down to the forest floor. Tiny green tendrils burrow into her arms. A thousand tiny pinpricks, a thousand pictures in her head.
A father tucks his son into bed, lifts up the pillow, and smothers the child. Then he jumps headfirst from a third-storey window and his neck snaps like a twig.
A mother bursts into tears at a dinner table and stabs her daughter through the eye with a fork, then takes her own life.
Children face down in a filthy tub. The mother and father slumped against the sink, a gun on the floor, blood and brain matter splashed over the wall.
In their city. In cities far away.
Then her girls and B, dangling from a beam in the kitchen.
The screaming. The screaming. She’s screaming with it.
The ground surges around her, green things thrumming in triumph. The air smells like the world has a fever.
Estajfan rips the vines away and picks her up. She turns into his shoulder and feels them start to climb.
Mama, says Greta’s little voice inside her ear.
Da, says Jilly.
They are gone—her girls.
There are no stories that will protect her from this.
They are gone from her, forever.
10
Tasha is in the clinic, her stethoscope against a little boy’s chest. She tries to concentrate on the heartbeat in her ears, but all she can see is Annie, pale and withdrawn in the corner of the room. When they woke up this morning, arms and legs tangled around one another, Annie had jumped away from her as though she couldn’t stand her touch. She’s been distant all day—even more distant than she’s been recently.
Tasha tried to distract herself by seeing patients. Those who managed to drag themselves into the clinic today all showed the same signs—they were restless and weary, jumpy and odd, their eyes feverish.
Candice had come, complaining of a fever. Tasha brought her into the examination room and pulled the curtain across.
“Sleep,” she said. “Sleep, and try to drink as much water as you can.”
“There’s no water left,” Candice said, dreamily.
“Annie will give you some.” Tasha glanced at the curtain. “Candice,” she whispered. “What happened to your little boy?”
Candice blinked at her, the words seeming to come from far away. “He died,” she whispered.
Tasha swallowed. “Did you—did you take him to the mountain?”
“I couldn’t,” Candice said. “I couldn’t do it. We got stuck in the snow—I tried to keep him warm, but nothing helped.”
Relief made Tasha dizzy; she reached out and held the other woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“I would like to sleep,” Candice continued. “I want to sleep and forget that any of this ever happened. But I just have nightmares. I never get any rest.”
Tasha doled a few precious antibiotics out into Candice’s waiting palm. “These will help,” she said. She felt renewed and also weary beyond belief; when Candice stood up to go, Tasha hugged her, then let her move beyond the curtain.
As she moves through later patients, she notices they all say the same thing. A young boy comes in, trailed by his mother. She listens to his heart while his mother mutters something about strange dreams.
“Dreams?” Tasha says. It’s probably the flu, she tells herself. Delirium brought on by fever.
“I just want food,” the woman whispers. “But those damned flowers keep taking it away.”
“What?”
A rush of wind outside the building brings the mingled scent of sweet flowers and dirty little boy to her nose. The mother only shrugs. “The vines eat everything, and give us only berries.”
Tasha puts a hand on the mother’s arm. “What have you eaten?”
Then, all around them, a scream.
The window shatters. The mother cries out and reaches for the boy, covers his ears. She begins to laugh—softly at first and then loudly—and then she screams, and her hands are around the little boy’s neck and she snaps his head, and now he’s sliding toward the floor, his eyes unseeing.
The mother stops screaming and whispers, “I’m not enough. We’re all going to starve. I can’t stop it.” She lunges past Tasha and throws herself at the shattered window—her fingers scrabbling for broken glass. As Tasha watches, horrified, the mother slashes her own neck.
Tasha can’t move. The screaming hasn’t stopped. Vines snake their way over the glass in the window frame, slither toward her, across the floor.
She backs away and comes up against a cupboard, spreads her hands wide, sidles along the counter until she realizes she’s looking for a phone. Futile.
“Tasha.”
She turns at Annie’s call. Her wife’s arms are bare. Something sharp glints in her hand. Glass.
“Annie.” Tasha sidles along the wall. Annie stands between her and the door. Vines slither up her legs.
“I was never enough for you,” Annie says. “I did everything you wanted. It’s never going to be enough, is it? I am never going to be enough.”
“Annie.” Tasha raises a hand “Annie, please.”
Annie lunges. Tasha kicks a chair in her way and scrambles along the wall, her hand reaching for the doorknob of the room that they’ve converted into a supply closet. She swings the door open and jumps inside, heaves it closed, locks the knob. Annie slams into the door and everything shakes.