I drop Fleur’s arm, a section of her hair catching on my wristwatch as I scrabble to fend off the vine. She yelps as a pink lock of it tears from her scalp.

Ripping away the ivy, I toss it, roots and all, onto the table. “That stupid performance of yours just cost us a lot of time. I don’t have any more plants down here. Now I’ll have to send Lixue to the gallery for another one.”

“You don’t need another one.” With an exasperated sigh, she kneels, gathering the dirt into the cracked pot.

“What are you doing?”

“Fixing it.”

“You can’t fix it. It’s dead.”

“It’s not dead,” she snaps, delicately setting the sagging vine back in the soil. “If you could feel it, you’d know.”

“You keep saying that like I know what it means!”

“It’s empathy, Doug!” She shoots to her feet, her voice rising. “The basic human ability to share someone else’s feelings! But clearly the ability to feel is beneath you, since you’re too busy playing god and renouncing your own humanity!”

“I’m not playing anything!”

“No? Prove it!” She points at the broken pot, a challenge in the lift of her chin. “Fix something.”

I get up in her face, resisting the urge to throttle her. “If I could do that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“You can,” she says, shoving a finger at my chest. “Gaia gave you that power when she made you a Guard. It’s inside you, whether you choose to use it or not.”

“I did choose it! It didn’t choose me!”

I turn and pace to the other side of the room, disgusted by the flash of curiosity in her eyes. Massaging the flare of pain where she poked me, I drag my phone from my pocket to call Lixue.

“You can have a thousand plants delivered to this room, but you’re only going to kill them all,” Fleur says irritably. “You’ll never learn how to control the magic that way. The nature of earth magic is creative, not destructive. It’s different than fire. It doesn’t respond the same way water and wind do. Learning earth magic isn’t the same as learning to fight.”

She draws a deep breath through her nose and stares at the broken pot. Her arms fall loose at her sides, and her eyes take on that faraway look again as they slowly drift closed.

Magic crackles through the room. I lower my phone, cautiously returning to the couch as the plant begins to stir. Fleur gasps. Her eyes pinch with pain, then deep concentration, as the plant pulls itself upright in its pot. Its roots dig into the soil, tiny nubs appearing on the stem and unfurling into bright new spades that spill over the edge of the pot. I grab Fleur’s arm as the stems creep toward me.