Sometime during the flight, the last echoes of merging with Magnolia Green had faded, and my sanity returned. I remembered who I was. And then I cried, and Sean said soothing things, and I told him I was sorry for scaring him and wanting to die with the inn, and that I loved him.

After I was done crying, I realized that I was carrying what was left of Magnolia Green with me. It wasn’t a seed. It was a branch without any root, almost like a cutting. If it were a normal plant, I would put it into a nutrient-rich solution and let the roots form, but inns didn’t work that way.

Inns were multidimensional organisms that broke the rules of physics. Even at the seed stage, their primary root was already formed inside the seed’s shell. When you planted an inn seed, the root anchored it to reality and physical space. Without it, even if the seed sprouted, it couldn’t hold on to our world and died.

That was why as soon as an inn opened a new door, it would try to root through the space around it to claim some of it for its grounds. That was also why two inns couldn’t coexist in proximity—it wasn’t their branches, it was their roots that created a problem.

If I put that cutting into a solution and waited for it to grow, it would only wither. It had survived this long, because it was bonded with me, and I fed it what little magic I had left.

In gardening, there was one other method to preserve a cutting, and no innkeeper had ever tried it before, because nobody before me had been given a cutting by an inn. I had no idea what would happen if we tried it.

I told Sean about it during the flight. He smiled and told me he trusted me. At the very least, we had to try it. But it would have to be done very carefully. Bringing the cutting right into the heart of Gertrude Hunt through the portal was out of the question. We had no idea what would happen. We needed to introduce it to the inn outside of the grounds, on neutral, territory, and we would need to evacuate Gertrude Hunt’s guests first, just to be safe.

Sean and I had retraced our steps all the way to the Dominion’s capital, dragging the comatose Wilmos with us, and then we split up. Sean took the portal to Gertrude Hunt, while I took one of the Dominion’s portals to Baha-char.

I made my way to the alley and waited.

A door opened in the empty air and Tony came out of it.

“Dina!”

I waved at him.