Before she could select more than a handful of volumes, the door to the workshop slammed open and Dendy lurched through the doorway, his leaves sprawling across the floor. “Terluuu! Aaanyone else here?”
She rushed to him. “Just me and Emeral. What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“Another greenhouse is faaailing! Caaalling everyone tooo come help.” He darted back outside, swinging himself out by his tendrils.
Terlu dropped the notebooks on the table and followed, grabbing her coat as she passed by it. “Which greenhouse?” she yelled after him. “Where do I go?”
“The siiiinging one,” he called as he hurried toward the dock.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The enchanted plants were still singing as their world crashed down around them. Terlu passed by one of Yarrow’s cousins as he carted out a pot with a flowering bush that was belting out a wordless melody in a high soprano. Scanning the greenhouse, Terlu spotted Yarrow in the center, digging at the roots of one of the tulip trees, with his father beside him. Neither were talking, both focused on the task at hand. The tulip tree crooned, a baritone.
Lotti was in the rafters shouting directions to the gardeners and sentient plants who swarmed beneath her. Everyone was moving at top speed, working together to get the singing trees out of the soil and to haul the pots with flowers into a safe greenhouse before the temperature went haywire. At least half the pots had already been transported, which was remarkable.
Terlu called up to her, “Lotti, can you see where it started?”
“What?”
Louder, she asked, “Where did the failure start?” She knew she should help with the digging and hauling, but if she could pinpoint the cause… She couldn’t stopthisgreenhouse from dying, but perhaps knowing the source could help her predict which greenhouse would be next to fall. If she could guess that with any degree of accuracy, they could move the plants to safety preemptively. It was worth sparing a few precious seconds now.
“Firrrst cracks were on the east waaall,” Dendy said as he passed her, propelling his root ball forward with his leaves. He spared one tendril to point eastward.
She hurried to the east wall of windows, where the cracks were continuing to spread. Each new crack sounded like a slap. Swarming over the glass, multiple talking plants—the ivy, the orchid, and the fireweed—were casting the crack-healing spell as quickly as they could.
That won’t help if the temperature fluctuates like it did in the last one.
But she let them try.
“What doesn’t make sense is why all the spells fail at once,” Terlu said, mostly to herself. It had to be that one failure triggered the next, not that they all coincidentally failed simultaneously every time. All the greenhouse-creation spells were linked to one another, as she’d discovered when she tried to pry them apart, which meant it had to be a cascading failure, didn’t it? So if she were able to stop the first malfunction…
Kneeling, she traced the cracks from the floor upward. What caused the failure? She’d thought it was simply the age of the ingredients. If that were the case, though, then the greenhouses should be failing in the order in which they were created, and they weren’t. She knew for a fact that this greenhouse was a later one. According to the dates in the notebooks, Laiken had only experimented with the singing plants well after he’d collected seedlings from around the Crescent Islands. The earlier greenhouses were all straightforward recreations of environments on the other islands. In fact, the very earliest ones held vegetables, and the majority of those had shown no sign of failure yet.
So why this greenhouse? And why now?
Was it just random, or was there a reason? She thought of Laiken’s ghost and wondered if it had any idea as to what was causing this.I have to find a way to ask.This couldn’t be allowed to continue to happen. It didn’t matter how much of his code she cracked or howmany spells she puzzled out if it was all going to be destroyed in one catastrophic moment.
Around her, the chaos swirled as the people and plants worked and shouted, but she blocked it all out. Working alone, she followed the cracks, tracing them to their source. All of them started from the foundation and spread upward.Why? What does that mean?Could the failure come from the earth somehow? Had Laiken buried the ingredients? She knew from his notebooks that he hadn’t. He’d kept them open to the air, for a wider area of influence—he’d specifically noted how he’d discovered that was necessary. So why did all the cracks begin at the ground? Why not the cupola, which had to suffer the bombardment of wind, rain, and snow? Why not the seams between the windows, which had to be the weakest points?
One of the sentient plants shrieked for help.
Questions can wait; there are plants to rescue.
Leaving the mystery, Terlu hurried back to the others. Yarrow passed her a trowel, and she began to dig at the roots of a flowering bush, moving the soil away from the soft naked strands beneath the plant. The flowers crooned in a minor key, punctuated by wail-like arpeggios.
Up in the rafters, Lotti began to howl, “Cold coming!”
Terlu looked up to see frost spreading across the cracked glass. It blossomed in flowerlike patterns, as the pillars and rafters became coated in ice. The leaves of the bush in front of her shriveled, and the flowers collapsed into shriveled, brown knots. Its song quieted into a whisper, then fell silent.Oh no, it’s happening.She’d hoped they’d have more time—
“Grab what you can,” Yarrow called, “and get outnow!”
The sentient plants, who had been through this before, sprinted for the doorway. The humans were slower, but Yarrow abandoned the roots of the singing tree he was working on and instead herded his relatives out the door.
His father continued to struggle with the roots of his tulip tree.
“Leave it,” Terlu said. “The temperature will fall too fast. You’ll die too.”
“Help me,” Birch cried.
