Sweep of the Heart

28

A door opens…

The final portal gate was a rounded arch of pale blue metal. In random places, the smooth metal shell had broken away, exposing the complex tangle of electronics underneath. A small symbol had been etched into the center of the arch at the highest point of the curve—a stylized explosion.

“Of course,” Sean said.

It was a Tuhl portal. Because why not?

“What are the chances of us exploding, do you think?” I asked him.

“Zero if we don’t enter.”

Not entering wasn’t an option. Wilmos was somewhere on the other side.

For some reason, I’d thought that the Dominion’s capital would have a direct portal to Karron. It didn’t. It had taken three portals and an hour-long flight via small military shuttle to reach this point atop a remote mountain range on Shurb, the Dominion’s least populated planet. The Dominion provided the craft, the instructions, and the coordinates, but no pilot. Fortunately, we had our own.

Sean had landed the shuttle on a wide platform cut into the side of the mountain, on the ancient stones worn by weather and time to near glass smoothness. The gate sat in the center of it. At the southern end, a huge door led inside the mountain.

We stared at the gate some more. It seemed completely inert. No mechanism to activate it. Approaching it didn’t do anything either.

“Is someone supposed to meet us?” I wondered.

“That was the plan. Miralitt’s brief said, ‘wait for the operator.’”

We waited. Despite the dorky name, Shurb was a pretty planet. It was fall, and the woods below the platform were awash with golds and reds. The air smelled fresh and crisp.

The giant door swung open with a loud clang and a throng of creatures emerged, followed by something very large and covered with an enormous tarp. The keepers of the gate stood about four feet tall on slender legs that ended in hooves. They wore quilted tunics over their slim humanoid bodies. Their heads were slightly goat-like with long narrow muzzles and very dark elongated eyes. Their ears were long and pointed and they poked through their manes of coarse hair.

“Oh no.” Our luck couldn’t possibly have gotten worse.

“What are they?” Sean asked.

“Barsas. Our translator implants won’t work, and I’m very rusty.”

“Wow, a language you’re not fluent in.” He cracked a smile.

“Nobody knows every language in the galaxy, and they almost never come to Earth.”

“There is no need to get defensive.”

The Barsas stopped in front of us. Their leader, an old white-haired male, stepped forward and raised his arms.

Here we go.

“Barsa! Barsa, barsa, barsa. Barsa.” Each word was accompanied by arm-waving and finger-pointing.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sean said. “Is that all they say?”

“Yep. Hush, I’m trying to concentrate.”

“Barsa. Barsa, barsa.”

The leader nodded sagely.

“What did he say?” Sean asked keeping his voice low.

“‘Welcome. Thank you for being eaten.’”

“That couldn’t possibly be right.”

“I know.” I stepped forward and held my palms out, making small circles. “Barsa?”

“Barsa. Barsa-barsa, barsa.”

“Oh. ‘Prepare to be eaten.’”

“That’s not better, Dina.”

The Barsas pulled on the tarp, and it slid to the ground, revealing a huge, wheeled platform, large enough to contain three semi-trucks side by side. The platform supported a massive mollusk in a spiral shell, dripping wet and brightly colored with blues and greens. It looked a little like the nautilus of Earth’s oceans, except it was a hundred times larger. Its tentacles were a bright electric pink and six feet long. A big round head that should have belonged to a snail protruded from the center of the tentacle fringe.

“Unexpected,” Sean said.

“There might be an underground lake inside the mountain.”

“Probably a sea. I smell salt water.”

That didn’t make it any less weird.

“Is that the thing that will eat us?” Sean asked.

I pointed at the mollusk and waved my arms. “Barsa, baaarsa, barsa?”

The Barsas stared at me for a moment and broke into high-pitched squeals, rocking back and forth and clutching their tummies.

“Apparently, I’m very funny.”

“I got that,” Sean said, his face communicating zero enthusiasm.

The leader finally managed to get his giggles under control. “Barsa, barsa barsa, barsa.”

“‘Prepare to be eaten by the portal.’”

“Oh good.”

A low hum came from the mollusk. The stripes on its shell began to spiral, first slow, then faster and faster.

“Barsa. Barsa. Barsa.” The leader waved his arms.

“Give us your arms.”

Sean gave me a look. I held my arm out. Two Barsas ran up to us and slapped small hexagonal timers onto our forearms. The digital numbers flashed with red. 5,000 long moments. 83 minutes.

“Barsa! Barsa, barsa, barsa. Barsa-barsa!” The leader put his hands together as if holding an invisible apple and opened his fingers, raising his arms. “Boom!”

“Portal must spit us back before the time runs out or…”

“We go boom.”

“Yep.”

I tapped the sensor by my right ear. A respirator unfolded, adhering to my skin over my mouth and nose. An earpiece slipped into my right ear and a clear faceplate unfolded in segments over my face. A short hiss told me my suit was sealed.

“Good?” Sean asked in my ear.

“Yes.”

The suits had about 6 hours of oxygen, so we wouldn’t run out of air. However, they wouldn’t stand up to Karron’s environment. Nothing would. The Dominion assured us that the conditions beyond the portal were optimal, but we didn’t want to take any chances.

Sean pulled his gun off his back. From the outside, the faceplate was opaque, a dark gray, smooth egg, and he looked like some faceless alien creature.

A burst of pink lightning shot out from the nautilus’ tentacles and licked the portal. It powered up in a burst of sparks and projected a small holographic screen to the side. Unfamiliar symbols glowed on it.

“Pressure: 15.2 psi,” Sean said. “Atmosphere: nitrogen-oxygen mix, O₂ at 21.3%, CO₂ is a bit high, but we should be fine. Humidity at 88%, 60⁰ F.”

“You read Tuhl?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I should’ve known. If it had to do with weapons or transportation, Sean could understand it and fix it.

The second burst of lightning struck the portal. The Barsas raised their arms in unison.

“BARSA!”

We ran into the portal.

My feet landed on something solid. It looked remarkably like a wooden floor. A rotting wooden floor, with boards marked with dark stains and speckled with black mold. Weird gray warts that had to be lichen or fungi sprouted between clumps of toxic-looking yellow sponges.

I looked up. We stood in the entryway of a house. The walls were coated in lichen and mold. Thick blisters the size of my head protruded here and there, caught in a net of plant roots. The liquid inside them glowed with dull phlegmy light. Flesh-colored slime dripped from between the gaps in the crown molding.

Where the hell were we? It was like we had landed in a petri dish with a bacterial colony grown from a swab taken at a truck stop bathroom.

I glanced over my shoulder. Behind us, the portal was a perfectly round, vertical puddle of pale pink on the wall. The holographic readout in the top of my faceplate was green across the board. The atmosphere was safe to breathe and free of contaminants, despite all the bizarre growth.

Magic slid around me, dripping from the walls, creeping just inside the floor, a revolting miasma, like decomposing body fluids.

It didn’t feel right.

The magic sensed me. The nearest stream curved, angling toward me. The entire wall around the portal was covered with it. It poured out like a foul waterfall. I took a few steps away from it.

The revolting magic bubbled up through the gap in the floorboards and touched me.

The world swam. Blood pounded in my ears. I couldn’t catch my breath. I gasped, but there was no air. Black circles crowded at the edge of my vision.

My stomach jerked.

I slapped the side of my helmet. The faceplate and the respirator retracted in a flash, and I vomited onto the floor. A horrible stench bathed me, a cloying, sickening odor of decay, and mold, and rotting wood, like the inside of a grave. I planted my broom into the floor, clung to it, and retched.

The magic spiraled around me, clamping at my feet, trying to get at my soul. I reeled. I had to get out of here. This was wrong, so very wrong. I had to get away! I had to—

Sean caught me by my shoulders and pulled me to him. Gradually his voice penetrated the haze, calm and steady. “You’re okay. I’ve got you. Breathe.”

I sagged against him, shivering. The magic pooled at my feet, and more was coming, rushing toward me. It veered around Sean and went straight for me. Despair rose from it like a tsunami and dragged me under. Spasms rocked me, and I cried.

“Take your time. It will be okay.”

This was so much worse than the corruption I had felt in the dead ad-hal. This was something deeper, more obscene, more horrifying, worse than anything I had ever experienced. Worse than the baby inn dying, worse than…

Sean clamped me tight. “Does it hurt?”

I tried to answer, but only sobs came out. I felt so sad. All I could do was grieve. I shook and shuddered, but the tears wouldn’t stop.

Sean turned me and stepped toward the portal.

“No,” I managed.

“You’re going back.”

“No—”

The wall to the right burst open. Two corrupted ad-hals rushed at us. Sean fired. The weapon whined, spitting a stream of supercharged plasma. It took the first ad-hal in the chest. The creature shrieked, throwing its clawed hands in front of it, trying to conjure a barrier.

I had to help. I forced myself upright and stabbed my broom into the floor. My magic swelled inside me.

A slimy, rotting tendril burst out of the wall behind me, caught my waist in its loop like a lasso, and dragged me back. My feet left the ground. I flew backwards, through the house. Sean spun toward me. I saw his face, bleached with alarm and shock, and then walls snapped closed between us one by one, as the tendril carried me through the rooms, right, left, right, ripped the broom out of my hands, and hurled me into darkness.

I tucked my head in as I fell, rolled across the floor, and came up to my feet. The practice sessions with Sean paid off. I’d have a few bruises, but nothing was broken.

I was in a small room. The lights came on, the same nasty blisters. A trail of smashed fungi and moss darkened the floor where I had fallen. My broom was nowhere to be seen.

I wiped the nasty smudge off my cheek with the back of my hand and turned. A doorway formed in the wall in front of me, a rectangle of blue-green light.

This was an inn. I was sure of it. The rotting corpse of one, but still an inn. Somehow it was here, inside the Dominion’s mining facility, slowly decaying, decomposing into sludge.

Who would do this? This was monstrous.

Magic spilled from the walls. The floorboards sweated it out in large beads. It streamed to me. I understood now. I was an innkeeper, and this wretched abomination of an inn knew it. It was beyond healing, but it was reaching out just the same, like a dying dog, crawling to a human for one last pet on the head. Dragging itself, battered and broken, for just one more cuddle to ease the pain.

It hurt so much.

I wiped my tears. I would find whoever did this. I would rip them apart with my bare hands.

And I would have to find them. If this was an inn, someone was controlling it. They would never let me get to Sean. My best chance was to locate the innkeeper and kill them.

I took my whip out of its strap and walked through the doorway. A big domed room spread before me, lit by a blue cube caught in a network of robotic arms that formed a pillar between the floor and the ceiling. Ahead the rotting boards ended in a ragged semicircle, leaving a bare polymer floor. The rotting walls went up about one third of the way up, and then fell short, mirroring the boundary defined by the floor. The rest, the walls, the high rounded ceiling, was transparent material, and beyond it, olive nothingness spread.

The cube pulsed. A pearlescent wave passed through the glass-like dome. It took me a minute to put it all together. We were under Karron’s ocean, and the base was running a short range forcefield generator to keep the planet at bay. Someone had brought an inn inside the mining facility, but it couldn’t thrive here. It was poisoned, corrupted, and dying, so weak it couldn’t even claim this room all the way.

High-tech instrument consoles lined the perimeter of the dome. The lights still blinked. If I was right, the cube was a zero-point energy generator siphoning power from a microscopic dimensional pocket. I had seen one before, powering an artificial wormhole. The Tuhls had no respect for the universe, but occasionally their gadgets worked. This was one of those rare times their tech was stable. No wonder Kosandion was sure the mining facility was operational. The cube would power it nearly indefinitely, running all support systems and keeping the force field bubble around the facility so Karron couldn’t touch it.

And right now, the robotic arms were blocking my view.

I walked forward. The magic followed me, chasing after me, pooling in my footprints. I stepped off the boards onto the high-tech floor. The magic swelled behind me, unable to follow. More and more of it flooded in like a tide, desperate to keep touching. Every contact with it hurt like watching a loved one take their last breath.

“I’ll be right back,” I whispered.

The magic tide shivered, emanating so much distress I stumbled.

I walked across the floor to the far end of the dome, rounding the pillar.

To my left, in the open, Wilmos stood frozen in a column of light, caught in a stasis field.

He must’ve come to after they brought him in, because the werewolf inside the column was in the wetwork shape. Big, with a shaggy dark mane streaked with gray, Wilmos looked ready to leap, his arms raised, his mouth gaping, the sharp fangs daring an attack.

My pulse sped up.

I stood very still, listening and looking. Wilmos was bait.

The dome lay empty.

“Daughter of the Wanderer…” a male voice said behind me.

I turned slowly. A creature stood on the polymer floor. No, not a creature, a man. An innkeeper in a dark robe, tattered and torn, with his hood up, holding a white broom. The robe flowed, shifting color from tar black to mottled gray, and black again. Its frayed hem flared above the floor, moving, sliding, melting into nothing and regenerating.

The tendrils of the innkeeper’s power slithered to me. It touched me. Ice washed over me in an electrifying wave. My skin crawled.

The robe wasn’t fabric. It was the corruption, the source of the darkness inside Michael, my brother’s best friend, and the ad-hal I had crushed out of existence at Baha-char. He was clothed in corruption. It was pouring out of his body. He and the robe were one.

And he knew my father.

“Your father is a problem.” He had a terrible voice. It faded as he spoke, brushing against my skin like cold slime. “Your mother is a problem. Your brother is a problem. Now you are a problem.”

“Is.” He said “is.” My parents were still alive.

Everything in me wanted to lash out at him. No innkeeper could see that putrid husk of the inn and not want to disintegrate the one responsible. He was an abomination. But I had to talk to him. If I didn’t, we would never know why any of this had happened.

The man turned his head and looked at the olive ocean outside. I could just make out the narrow sliver of his jaw. It was an odd color, a kind of slightly purple tint, like a Caucasian body frozen in mid-livor mortis.

“There are two of us. You and me.”

Okay, we established he could count.

“Did it hurt when the seed died?”

How did he know about the baby inn? Should I answer?

I took a shot. “Yes.”

He nodded. “Does it still hurt?”

“Yes.” It hurt me every time I thought about it. Most innkeepers never survived the death of the inn they were bonded to. Even though our bond had lasted mere minutes, witnessing that inn’s death nearly ended me. I had been very lucky to survive it.

He nodded. “It hurt me too when I killed my inn. Every inn I kill hurts. The pain is never-ending.”

What inns? How many?

“Why?”

He didn’t answer.

“Why would you kill your inn? It trusted you. It loved you. Why would you betray it?”

He turned to me, and I saw the bottom half of his face. “Ask them.”

Them who? “The other innkeepers?”

“Ask them about Sebastien North. Ask them what they’ve done. How I have suffered.”

Oh.

“You have.” His voice rolled through the dome, melting into a hiss. “They didn’t tell you.”

“What didn’t they tell me?”

“Of all of us, you and I are the only ones who survived to know the pain. We carry it with us, always.” He paused. “I will give you one chance. Take the werewolves and go. Leave your inn. Leave your planet. Don’t look back, and I will come for you last.”

“Why would I need to leave the planet?”

“Because I will devour it. Every inn, every innkeeper, every ad-hal. Every human.”

There was an awful finality to the way he said it. He wasn’t angry, or hurt, or conflicted. He simply stated a fact.

He wouldn’t tell me anything more unless I found common ground. He sympathized with me because we had both endured the greatest tragedy an innkeeper could suffer. If what he said was true, he existed in a state of constant suffering. There had to be some shred of human emotion left in him. I had to find it and exploit it. I needed to know why he was doing this.

“Did you have a cat?”

He didn’t answer.

“I found a cat, a big gray Maine Coon with green eyes. He has a collar with the initials SN on it.”

“Belaud.”

Oh wow. It was his cat.

“He yet lives? Is he well?”

“Yes. If I had my phone, I would show you. I took pictures of him. He walks through the inn as he pleases. It opens walls for him.”

The man’s voice was almost wistful. “That was always his way. I found him during a thunderstorm. He was so small, he fit in one of my hands. It was May 30^th. I remember because the next day, Royal Governor Martin fled the Tryon Palace for New York, and my father had opened a treasured bottle of whiskey. That was my first sip of spirits.”

Tryon Palace was in New Bern, North Carolina. My father had taken us there to visit. Martin was NC’s last Royal Governor, and he’d fled in 1775. I knew this because dad remembered Martin and didn’t like him. Holy crap. This man was my father’s age.

“Why do you hate my father?”

“I don’t. The Wanderer got in the way. He always gets in the way. Now you are in my way.”

And we had come full circle.

“I know you are looking for my soul,” the man said. “You will not find it.”

“I want to understand why. What is it you want?”

“To kill us all.”

“But to what end? Something terrible must have happened to you but murdering everyone won’t make you feel better.”

“It’s not for me. I will feel nothing. The inns and innkeepers shouldn’t be. I will purge their symbiosys from existence. It’s not necessary for you to understand it. Accept it as inevitable and go.”

“No.”

A deep sigh echoed through the dome. He turned, his robe swirling. “Why do you persist in being difficult? Take my gift. Get out of my way, foolish child. Do not trample on my last act of kindness. There will be no more.”

“You were an innkeeper once. You felt the bond with your inn. They rely on us. They trust us. Whatever faults innkeepers have, whatever crimes they committed against you, the inns are innocent. Does that not mean something to you?”

“Why should it? My inn was taken from me. My family, my face, they took everything, and I will leave them with nothing. I will kill every inn in the galaxy, so the innkeepers can never resurrect themselves again.”

“But you still feel the pain. You still long for the bond.” I pointed to the remains of the room at the other end of the dome. “You brought an inn here, and now it’s dying. It’s rotting and suffering. How can you stand this?”

He turned to fully face me. His bloodless lips stretched, and he smiled, showing sharp conical teeth.

“I brought it here for you.”

What?

“Do you still not see? Look around you. Does it not look familiar? Does it not feel like home?”

I stared at the semicircle of the rotten floor, the slimy walls, the remnants of the decaying furniture… There was a couch on the left. Mildew had slicked its upholstery, but some of the original color remained, a happy summer sky blue with big yellow dandelions. My mother had upholstered that couch for me when I was seven years old. I had picked out the fabric. Our dog, an old boxer, had chewed on the front leg of it, and the bite marks were still there…

Oh my God.

I saw it now. The crooked lamp—Maud and I had knocked it over when she was chasing me around the house, and we could never get the lampshade to sit straight again. My old desk. The remnants of my rug.

This was my bedroom. This was my parents’ inn. My home. He ruined my home. He was torturing our inn.

I stumbled away from him, toward the rotting floor and the magic that waited for me there. It washed over me, stabbing into my heart, and I felt the last weak pulses of Magnolia Green. The magic I had sensed, the one so desperately trying to touch me, was the lifeblood of the inn spilling from its dying core.

His voice chased me. “Do you understand now?”

I made my mouth move through the pain. “Yes.”

I understood.

“This is a demonstration of my power.”

“It’s a demonstration of your fear.” I called on my magic and poured my pain into it. I shaped and molded my power as only an innkeeper could. “You feared my parents. You tried to kill them and failed, so you defiled their inn in your impotent rage. You used its suffering to convince yourself that you won. And now you fear me. You have gone through all this trouble to give me a warning, because deep down you are afraid. You’re right to be afraid.”

He sighed. “So be it.”

The man smashed his white broom into the floor. Corruption burst from him in twisted dark currents and bit into the walls, burrowing into the inn, forcing it to comply. The wooden floor moved like a churning sea, speeding toward me.

I sank all my magic into the floor under me. It burst through the currents and eddies of Magnolia Green’s lifeblood, colliding with the corruption squirming through them. My power shot through the fading inn, rushing through its branches, its roots, all the way to its injured core.

Our magics collided. The bond reignited in a blinding burst of power. The patina of corruption that permeated the inn, sliding over its branches and smothering its roots, burned away in an instant, opening a clear bath between me and the core.

Magnolia Green was mine.

The corrupted innkeeper screamed. His polluted currents slammed into me, battering the inn, hammering at my defenses, each blow sending an agonizing jolt through us both.

I held my hand out, and my broom landed in it.

“It won’t help you!” he snarled.

My power wound through the broom in a tight spiral, ready to be unleashed. My body buckled, struggling to channel all that power, and I had to force the words out.

“This inn cradled me as I took my first breath. No matter how hard you try, it will never be yours.”

I planted the broom into the floor.

Magic tore out of me like a magic hurricane and smashed into the corrupted innkeeper.

The corruption flailed around me, burning and raging. It was pure hate. Hate and anger, a torrent of it streaming from him. There was so much of it, more than any being could contain, and I could not understand how it didn’t tear him apart. Every lash of it frayed my soul. There was blood in my mouth. My chest hurt, every breath a conscious fight against the anvil sitting on my ribs.

I gripped him with my magic and squeezed.

We tore at each other, he with his corruption and I with my innkeeper magic. The dome quaked. I felt the rotting walls collapsing behind me. The substance of the inn disintegrated, as it sacrificed more and more of its power to feed my attack.

He’d drowned Magnolia Green in his corruption. It fed like a leech on the inn’s magic for nobody knew how long. The inn had fought against it, trying to survive, trying to preserve some small part of itself. But now I had asked for its help.

Magnolia Green loved me from the moment I was born. It gave everything to me. All of its power. All of its magic. Every last drop.

Its branches withered. Its roots turned to dust. It kept nothing for itself.

Magnolia Green was killing itself to protect me.

I pushed against the current, trying to hold it back. The magic swept my resistance aside and poured out of me. The inn had made up its mind. It would defend me. I was powerless to stop it.

We were bound, the three of us, caught in a terrible circle of power—me channeling my innkeeper magic, him whipping currents of corruption that seared agony into me, and Magnolia Green, tied to us both, split in the moment of death between coercion and love, devoured by one and freely sacrificing itself for the other.

The horror of it was too much to take. I heard a sound and realized I was screaming, crying like a child from pain and grief. I would be the end of my parents’ inn. Magnolia Green knew it and still it fed me. Its desperation coursed through me. It knew that its death throes would take me with it. I would not survive the death of the inn where I was born. Our bond was too strong.

We would die together here. But we had to kill him first, so no other inn would be violated and left to rot.

We pushed against him as one. The magic pouring out of me had color. It glowed like a blade of grass with sunlight shining through. I had merged with Magnolia Green.

The corrupted innkeeper howled, hammering at me with pulses of his fetid magic. I turned my magic into a pale green dome around me, trying to shield myself enough to stay conscious. Orange lightning sparked within the corrupted currents and smashed against my defenses. The explosion of pain nearly dropped me to my knees.

He flailed harder, whipping the lightning back and forth across my shield. The corruption bit at me, and its teeth were freezing like the space between stars. It was not human. It was a part of him now, but it wasn’t born from him. He had found it and made it his own.

If only I could separate the corruption from him. If I could isolate it, I could crush it out of existence.

It was pouring out of the center of his chest, from behind his breastbone. He’d hidden it before, but he’d gone into a frenzy and forgot to guard himself.

I could either attack or defend. Not both. This would be it. Magnolia Green was at its very last limit. There was nothing left except its core and one last root, too weak to break through the floor and reach me.

I dropped the dome, shaping my magic into a needle-thin beam of brilliant green and stabbed at his chest with it.

The corruption slapped me and tore right into my soul.

There was no word for that kind of pain…

My magic struck him. He screamed and yanked his power back, whipping the corruption about him in a tight spiral, forming his own shield. My green beam bore at it but couldn’t penetrate. I couldn’t get through it.

There wasn’t enough power. I didn’t have enough.

I failed…

Sean burst through the wall, a huge, enraged beast, covered in slime and blood.

A single whip of fetid darkness snapped from the corrupted innkeeper’s dome and lashed Sean, cutting a bloody gash in his shoulder.

He ignored it and cleared the distance between me and him in a single leap. He landed in a crouch, gripped my broom with one clawed hand, and drove the other into the floor. I felt his magic stream from his fingers into the floor. It was just like my own, the power of an innkeeper accumulated and nurtured over months of taking care of the inn.

The floor under our feet split. The last remaining root of Magnolia Green broke through and wound around us. Power punched me, nearly taking me off my feet.

I fed it all into my beam. The corrupted shield popped like a dirty soap bubble. The green beam struck the corrupted innkeeper in his chest, right into the source of his power. His robe tore. For fraction of a second I saw the smudge of the innkeeper’s true face and his eyes brimming with fear.

He screamed and hurled something behind him. White lightning tore from the cube as something drained the zero-point energy generator’s power in a flash. The fabric of space split, and through the ragged tear I saw trees the color of blood.

No! No, damn it, no!

He dove through the dimensional rift, the tatters of his robe spinning around him as he vanished. The tear snapped shut.

He got away. He escaped. Aaaaaa, he escaped!

The generator’s cube turned dull. The pearlescent light dissolved into nothing. The dome around us creaked as Karron took the mining facility into its mouth and bit down.

My arms were red. My face felt wet, my neck, my body inside my suit… All of me was covered in blood. It had slipped out of my pores. It didn’t matter. Magnolia Green was dying, and I would go with it. Every pulse of its core resonated through me, and they were so weak and slow. I would hold the inn to the very end, so it wouldn’t perish alone. I owed it that.

The stasis light around Wilmos died, and the old werewolf collapsed onto the floor. The dome quaked, groaning.

Sean sprinted across the room, slung Wilmos over his shoulder, and hurried back to me.

The core of Magnolia Green had grown so dim. It wouldn’t be long now.

“We have to go!” Sean snarled.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “Leave me.”

He grabbed me. “Dina, you can’t be here when it dies!”

Something crunched. Cracks formed on the dome. Karron’s ocean was coming in.

Sean grabbed me by my waist and jerked me off my feet, away from my connection with the inn.

“I can’t let it die alone! Leave me, Sean!”

“Never.”

The last root of Magnolia Green snapped, caught the three of us, and dragged us through the dust, through the sterile hallways, through the hole in the ceiling… Behind us thunder pealed.

The portal loomed in front of us.

“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.

“We can never tell anyone about this,” Tony said.

“Are you speaking as an ad-hal or a friend?” Sean asked him.

“Both. Nobody can know. The Assembly will… I don’t even know what they will do, but we won’t like it.”

“Then they don’t need to know,” Sean said.

A beautiful bird cried out overhead and landed on the magnolia’s mighty branches. I had never seen one like it.

“Where are we?” I wondered.

Tony was looking out past the tree, where twin moons rose, one larger and tinted with purple, and the other small and orange.

“This is…” he said.

“Daesyn,” Sean finished for him. “Home planet of House Krahr.”