“What is it?” asked Graham.

I told them.

4.

Working our way down the back side of the mountain took the better part of an hour. David had to carry Toni almost the entire way. She’d be fine for a few steps, and then she’d brush up against a tree, and suddenly her legs wouldn’t work right. It was all unreasoning terror, and I felt a little bad about it. After all, it had been one of our conversion flowers that had done this to her.

Then again, if it had worked, if she had been digested and remade as my sister, would I have felt bad about that? Or would I have been overjoyed to meet someone like myself, someone who remembered what it was to follow the scent of heaven through a dark forest and come out the other side, transformed into something better than they’d been before?

The thought of Graham meeting a conversion flower, coming out vegetable and perfect, flitted across my mind and disappeared, leaving my cheeks hot and my skin uncomfortably tight. That, too, was a conundrum of a sort. If we were plants at heart, why did I have these damned mammalian biological responses?

Graham caught up with me, catching my elbow and pulling me closer as he whispered, “Are you sure about this?”

“Nope,” I said. There was no point in lying to him. We were committed to our course. More, I had already lied to him once today, and that was my limit. “I don’t have a better idea, though. Do you?” No car, no resources, no one to come and rescue us.

No one except Jeff, who was close enough to come get us from the base of the hill, and who had been able to track me down in the dream of a forest, where humans had no business going. He might not be the perfect answer, but he was the answer we had.

Graham shook his head, looking even more frustrated. “I wish you’d told me about this guy sooner.”

“Why? So you could have explained why he wasn’t who he was saying he was, even though it didn’t make sense for him to be anyone else?” I paused. “I hope you followed that.”

“I wish I hadn’t.” Graham glanced over his shoulder at David and Toni before looking back to me and saying, “I have always believed you when you told me where you came from. Always.”

“Yes, you have. But I feel like that was a lot easier to do before things started getting complicated.”

“Honey, things have been complicated since our first date. Remember?”