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The genius’s mother was nearly at our backs. But suddenly, reaching into the earth felt no more difficult than taking a breath. I only needed to think of a flower to have a complete picture of it in my mind, root, stem, and blossom, from the apical meristems all the way to the genderless sporophytes. I focused my attention on flowering trees, how and why they grew, and the information came in a flood:

Between the heartwood and the inner bark lies the cambium where the cells divide anticlinally to widen the trunk while auxin inhibits lateral budding so the tree reaches ever upward to the sky…

With the same amount of effort it takes to blink, I raised a forest between us, stretching nearly as tall as the genius’s mother herself. Paperbarks sprouting red bottlebrush blossoms. Tupelos covered in small white blooms. Cypress trees dripping with brown catkins and purplish cones. I kept the trunks close together, making a wall of wood.

“Nice,” Sunbeam said. “But, uh…you got anything else?”

The genius’s mother was knocking the trees aside like so many bowling pins. Some she ripped out of the ground, roots and all. I’d slowed her down, but I hadn’t stopped her.

“I might have one trick left,” I said.

Flowers weren’t my only power, after all, and my new understanding didn’t stop at plants. I turned my mind to my own body, feeling for the internal alchemy that created a mineral seed and grew it into a cut and polished jewel. I concentrated on the one that I desired.

A tiny sphere of silica settles next to another, and another, and a few million more, packed into a three-dimensional grid that diffracts the light into a play of colors, ground into shape and polished to a shine…

I formed the iridescent stones deep in my trachea, keeping them rounded, keeping them smooth. With Ilyana’s ring on my finger, I wouldn’t be limited to a few sharp gems before my throat was slashed to ribbons.

As the genius’s mother emerged from the forest, I vomited out an endless stream of cabochon opals in front of her. They fountained from my mouth and piled on the ground, first a mound, then a hillock, then a mountain of semiprecious stones in every color, shimmering in the moonlight and blocking her path. A single opal might not weigh much on its own, but a heap of them rising to five times her height would be difficult to shift.

So, of course, she didn’t bother trying to shift them. Or light them on fire, or anything else that wouldn’t work. She climbed over them, as I realized when her flaming head poked up over the top. An instant later, she was past the summit and bounding down the slope, the colorful loose gravel skittering beneath her feet.

Once again, I’d slowed her down, but once again, it hadn’t done much good.

“If you have another idea, now’s the time,” Sunbeam said. Sweat lathered his neck and he was breathing in desperate gasps.

I couldn’t come up with anything. If forests didn’t impede her and mountains wouldn’t hinder her, there was nothing else I could do.

Soon enough, I could feel the heat of her flames at my back. I expected a glob of fire to smash into my head at any moment. Unless she preferred her meat raw, and hauled me off Sunbeam’s back like a tuberose getting plucked from the stem.

“Go left!” Ilyana screamed, yanking on Stinky’s reins to force the horse to swerve. Sunbeam followed the command without question, leaping sideways while he twisted in a perfect midair pivot. It nearly hurled me out of the saddle.

The genius’s mother wasn’t as graceful as the horse. Her momentum carried her forward and she plunged into the lake of quicksand that Ilyana had managed to avoid.

Cursing and thrashing, the genius’s mother tried to escape, but her efforts only drove her deeper into the muck. Only when she held completely still did she stop sinking. By then, the quicksand was up to her chest.

“Hey!” she called to us. “Er, help an old woman out?”

Sunbeam lurched to a halt some distance away, completely spent. “This,” he wheezed between labored breaths. “Bad. For. Chronic bronchitis.” Far ahead, Ilyana pulled Stinky to a halt and waited for us to follow.

The genius’s mother glanced nervously up at the fire on her head. The one she couldn’t allow to go out. Behind her, the moon was setting, huge on the horizon. “Given the situation,” she said, “I’m prepared to let bygones be bygones.”

“Will you let us go?” I asked. “And do us no harm? On your word?”

She scowled. “I’m not my son. I don’t bargain with humans. It’s beneath me.”

“Then goodbye and good luck.”

With a snarl, she swept her hand to her hair to palm another lump of fire, but the motion caused her to drop another few inches. She froze with her hand half raised. That did a good deal to reassure me I’d made the right decision.

Sunbeam turned to leave, but I put a hand on his neck to stop him. I let my thoughts spread through the ground, and a swathe of corpse flowers erupted between us and the genius’s mother. Hundreds upon hundreds. The foul scent of rotting flesh filled the air.

“Try finding our scent through that,” I told her.

I took my hand from Sunbeam’s neck and he plodded away, ignoring the threats and insults that the genius’s mother hurled after us. I raised more corpse flowers behind us, a vast field of them, and continued until long after the blue-and-white flame on the genius’s mother’s head stopped being visible. I didn’t want any risk of her finding us if she managed to escape the quicksand.

Sunbeam moved so slowly that by the time we reached Ilyana, the moon had set completely, taking most of the light with it. Ilyana and Stinky were little more than silhouettes against the night sky.

“You all right?” I asked.