"Stop screaming, Adrian! If you keep thrashing, you're going to tear your shoulder completely out of the socket before I even get the blade anywhere near the bark!" Elena barked, her hands trembling as she adjusted the clumsy grip on the industrial heat-torch she had scavenged from the corporate kit lying in the smoking debris.The heavy burner sputtered, coughing up a short, angry tongue of blue flame that hissed against the damp, heavy air of the ruined greenhouse. The smell of scorched leaves and burning ozone instantly filled the space between them, thick and choking."Easy for you to say! It's not your arm turning into an oak sapling!" Adrian yelled back, his voice cracking with a mixture of hysterical panic and sheer, blinding agony. His right side was pinned at an impossible, agonizing angle against the massive, unyielding root-tendril that had erupted from the floor. The organic fibers had burrowed straight through the fabric of his sleeve, wrapping themselves around his wrist

"Keep your head down, Toby, or I swear I'm going to let the drones turn you into a sieve," Elena hissed, dragging the trembling intern by the collar of his shredded corporate lab coat behind a jagged slab of concrete."I can't—I don't run! I mostly sit in ergonomically optimized desk chairs and compile quarterly spreadsheet forecasts, Elena! Running is not listed under my core competencies!" Toby wheezed, his glasses sliding down his sweat-slicked nose as he clutched a heavy, glowing corporate tablet to his chest like a shield."Well, update your resume, because your new core competency is dodging thermal scanning," Adrian snapped, leaning heavily against a rusted steel beam. His right arm throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache, the smooth, hardened green bark catching the pale, sickly light of the burning outer greenhouses. Every time a distant corporate scout drone hummed overhead, the vascular fibers beneath his skin tightened like coiled springs, warning him seconds before the red se