The thought arrives very simply, stripped of everything except its own plain truth. I need help and I am in the greenhouse and the greenhouse door is locked—I locked it. I locked it to prevent Nicholas from following me if he woke.
I reach the door.
The handle is cold and my hands are wet and the handle will not turn, the blood giving no purchase. My fingers keep sliding off the iron again and again while I try to make sufficient contact to work the latch. I press my palm flat against the door instead and push with my shoulder, as though the door might simply yield to pressure if the handle will not cooperate, but the door does not budge.
I scratch at the wood.
My fingers find the surface and they press and they drag, the nails catching in the grain, and I call for him in a voice that has gone wet and thin and strange.
“Nicholas, help me! I cannot get out!”
The vine is moving in my throat. I can feel it, the roots extending through tissue and pressing against structures that had not been consulted about any of this. My throat feels full. My lungs feel wrong. I cannot breathe. The green-gold light pulses in front of my face, cast by the vine now living inside me, and I think distantly that I should note this in the journal—the internal bioluminescence, the subjective experience of the sap beginning to circulate, the pain shifting from sharp to something more diffuse and spreading.
I am going to write it all down.
I am going to write it all down when Nicholas opens the door.
He will be angry. He will be so angry, and so frightened, and I am going to let him be both of those things because I am going to be alive to receive it and that is the entire point.
I scratch at the door.
“Nicholas!”
The light goes green and then it goes dark and the floor comes up to meet me and the vine keeps growing, claiming its new territory with a hunger and rage so profound that it seeps through my veins.
I hear a voice. It is quiet and full of cold, seething anger. It is inside my head.
I will revenge my injuries. If I cannot have my love, nor shall you.
My gaze tunnels on the bin, the bin I swept the vine’s companion flower into, and I realize too late that I have made a terrible mistake by separating them.
When I open my eyes, Nicholas is there.
I am on the worktable and his hands are warm and calm and sure of themselves as he threads the needle back and forth across my throat, his face bent close, his jaw set with a concentration that is holding grief at arm's length through sheer discipline.
He is so handsome.
He is so brilliant.
He will save me.
I need to tell him about the flower.
The voice in the back of my mind hums with a sudden desperate approval as I part my lips to tell him the vine must stay with the flower.
The vine needs its flower. They are lovers. Two parts of a whole.
The flower soothes the monster. The monster cannot live without its flower.
I know these things now because the monster is inside of me.
It is in pain.
It is angry.
It will destroy everything in its path, including me, if it does not get its companion back.
“The flower,” I say, my voice a strangled whisper.
