Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 130991 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 655(@200wpm)___ 524(@250wpm)___ 437(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130991 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 655(@200wpm)___ 524(@250wpm)___ 437(@300wpm)
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.