Reborn Before the Bloom: I Grow the Last Fortress

Chapter 8: Test Bloom

Priya called at 9:40 in the morning, and she didn't say hello.

"Calloway Park. Pulse in under an hour. My sensors on the east ridge just jumped four hundred percent."

Jonah was standing in the nursery's long greenhouse with his sleeves rolled up, tape in his teeth, a tray of grafted privet cuttings in front of him. He spat out the tape. His phone said 81 DAYS. "That's not supposed to happen yet."

"I know it's not supposed to happen yet. It's happening. Can you move?"

He was already loading the flatbed.

Twenty-four potted privet saplings, each one grafted over the last three days with bramble thorn and scrub oak, each one barely knee-high. Sorrel Briggs watched him throw the last pot on the truck and said, "That's a damn fool plan."

"I know."

"Take the masks." The old man shoved a cardboard box into his arms. Dust masks, a hundred of them, bought for the nursery's mulch work. "And don't let any kids stand in the open."

Calloway Park was packed.

It was a bright Saturday, a field day for a local elementary school, and the big lawn in the middle was a mess of orange T-shirts and folding tables and a bouncy castle. Jonah parked on the grass, which a park ranger in a green vest did not like.

"Sir! Sir, you can't drive on the lawn!"

"I need to plant something." He was already pulling pots off the truck. "Right here, along the east side. I'll be quick."

"You need a permit. Sir. I'm calling this in."

"Call it in." Jonah dug his hands into the turf and shoved the first sapling into the ground. "Please. Just give me twenty minutes."

Priya's car rolled up, and she jumped out with a laptop under one arm. She looked at the lawn, at the kids, at him on his knees in the dirt. Then she dropped the laptop on the hood of her car and started digging beside him with her bare hands.

They planted in a long curve. Twenty-four saplings, spaced two feet apart, a crescent on the east edge of the lawn. When Jonah laid his palm on the last pot, the panel blinked.

Graft active: Thorn Hedge (24). Estimated growth: 52 minutes.

"Fifty-two," he said. "We don't have fifty-two."

"Eleven minutes," Priya said, staring at her screen. "Maybe fifteen."

The ranger had stopped talking. He was staring at the row of little green plants as they began to rise.

The cloud came out of the storm drain at the north end of the park, thin and yellow and silent.

For a second nobody noticed. A child pointed at it. A woman at the picnic tables laughed and said something about pollen.

Then the grass moved.

Clover shot up knee-high in the time it took Jonah to breathe in. A dogwood by the path split its bark with a loud crack, and its branches began to bend and crawl. Somewhere a kid started screaming.

"Everyone move!" Jonah was on his feet, pulling masks out of the box. "Behind the hedge! Go! Go!"

The hedge stood waist-high. Then shoulder-high. It was still growing, black thorns bristling up out of dark green, and Jonah pushed through the first panicking adults and dragged them toward it. A woman with a stroller was already running the wrong way.

"Not that way! This way!"

A teacher in an orange shirt was trying to herd thirty second-graders away from the bouncy castle, and the children were already coughing. The taste of the spores hit Jonah in the throat, sweet and metallic, the same as in the greenhouse. For half a second his legs wouldn't work.

No. Not again.

He ran at the kids. "Masks! Put them on, hold hands, follow me!"

The vines were coming now. A thick green cord ripped out of the lawn beside the picnic table and whipped across the grass. It hit the hedge and shrieked.

It actually shrieked, a high, grinding sound, as the thorns bit into it and held. The vine thrashed once and went still. Another came. Another. They slapped against the wall of thorns and stuck there, tearing themselves open.

The teacher stared. "How...?"

"Inside! Get them inside the curve!"

Jonah counted heads as they poured through, and he counted twice, because his hands were shaking and his count came out wrong. Thirty-one. Thirty-two with the teacher. The hedge had closed behind them by the time the last kid was through, and the cloud rolled over the lawn thin and yellow and weak. It coughed itself out in four minutes.

He sat down on the grass. His legs wouldn't hold him anymore.

The panel opened without being asked.

Rescue complete. 41 survivors. Thorn Hedge performance: exceptional.

New recipe unlocked: Filter Vine. Cleans spores from air within 6 meters. Requires: Study 100% of target species.

Jonah laughed, a rough cracked sound, and pressed the back of his hand against his eyes.

By evening the clip was everywhere.

A bystander had filmed the whole thing from across the lawn: a man planting tiny saplings, a wall of thorns rising out of the ground, vines slapping against it and dying. A local news anchor said, with a straight face, "The hedge man of Calloway Park."

Jonah watched it on his phone in the nursery kitchen with a mug of Sorrel's terrible coffee. He winced. His own face was in the corner of the frame, mouth open, shouting.

"Hedge man," Sorrel said, without looking up from his plate. "You'll be famous."

"I'd rather not."

A knock came at the screen door.

A skinny kid stood on the porch with a duffel bag over one shoulder and mud to the knees. Seventeen at most, sunburned, jaw stuck out. "Mr. Pike? I'm Mateo. I work the Dorsey farm, down the road. I saw the video. I want to work for you."

"I don't have anything to pay you."

"I don't care."

"You're seventeen."

"I'm good with my hands, and I'm a hard worker, and I won't quit." Mateo's voice cracked, and he flushed, and he kept going anyway. "Please. I've been pulling weeds since I was nine, and I've never seen anything like that. I'll sleep in the barn."

Jonah looked at Sorrel. Sorrel looked at his plate.

"Fine," Jonah said. "Five a.m."

The kid grinned.

Priya found him on the porch afterward. She was holding her laptop against her chest.

"You should see this."

"Is it bad?"

"Look at it first." She opened the screen. It was a map of the park, speckled with red dots where the spores had touched down. "Sensors confirm it. This wasn't a random pulse, Jonah. The spores spread outward, in a perfect radial pattern. They had a center."

He felt his stomach drop.

She dragged a transparent layer across the map, and the lines ran backward from the park, out through the city, toward a single bright point on the edge of town.

"The origin matches the Pike estate," she said.