The Deadly Bloom
By Olivia Salter
Word Count: 5,282
The greenhouse did not smell like a laboratory; it smelled like the bottom of a forest after an August rain. It was a heavy, respiration-dense heat that clung to the inside of Marisol’s wrists and fogged the lower four inches of the triple-paned glass. Outside, the gray, salt-scoured Oregon coast was frozen in a permanent, late-afternoon squint. Inside, under the high-pressure sodium fixtures, it was the tropics.
Marisol worked with a camel-hair brush, her strokes so light they barely disturbed the fine, pale down on the underside of the Excoecaria hybrid. She called it the Blazing Thorn, though its true ledger name was E. var. flamma. It wasn’t beautiful in the commercial sense—it didn't possess the symmetrical, waxen perfection of an orchid. It was a low, knotted thing, its stalk grey as driftwood, but its leaves were shot through with lateral veins that pulsed a dark, sub-dermal crimson when the light hit them at thirty degrees.
And it was heavy. When she lifted the terracotta pot to check the drain holes, she could feel the dense, muscular pull of its root system. It absorbed iron at three times the rate of any known euphorbiaceous plant, leaving the surrounding soil bleached and chalky.
She heard the door click. Not the main entry with the keypad—the small, brass-fitted ventilation hatch at the base of the north wall, the one she left unlatched by an inch to let the coastal humidity equalize.
Marisol didn’t turn around. She finished her stroke, deposited the brush into a jar of distilled water, and then reached for her paring knife—the short, curved Victorinox she used for grafting.
"The seal on the frame is rotting," she said to the steam. "You’re letting the salt in."
There was no answer, only the wet, dragging slide of rubber-soled boots across the cedar duckboards.
When she finally turned, her back against the zinc potting bench, she didn't find a corporate courier or a local inspector. The man was small, his shoulders hitched high around his ears as if he were trying to disappear into the collar of an oversized waxed jacket. He was soaked through, leaving a trail of gray, sandy water on her clean redwood floor. His skin had the yellow, translucent quality of lard left out on a counter, and his fingers—stubby, split at the nails—were twitching against the seam of his trousers.
"You Dr. Vargas?" his voice was flat, thin, scraped clean of any local cadence.
"I am. And this is private property."
"The fence was down."
"The fence has six strands of high-tensile wire and a padlock," Marisol said, keeping her thumb flat against the spine of her knife. "What do you want?"
The man didn't look at her; his eyes were fixed on the Excoecaria. His pupils were huge, dilated to the edge of the iris despite the glare of the growth lamps. "They said it was smaller. They said it would fit in a standard cooler."
"Who said?"
He reached into his pocket. Marisol tensed, her knuckles whitening on the wood handle, but he only withdrew a square of heavy, cream-colored cardstock. He didn't offer it to her. He laid it flat on the edge of the potting soil bin, his hand shaking so violently he knocked over a small pot of unsprouted liverwort.
"I have three days," he whispered. "They’re in the cellar under my sister's place in Tillamook. Two men. They don't talk. They just sit on the wood chest where she keeps the winter blankets."
Marisol looked from his face to the cardstock. Printed across the center in a small, elegant copperplate font was a single line: The Garden requests the return of its inventory.
"I don't belong to a cooperative," Marisol said, her voice dropping into the quiet register she used when she was trying to calm an overheated compressor. "I haven't taken a grant from Berlin or Tokyo in five years. This specimen was cultured from a wild cutting collected in the Ryukyu Islands in 2021. It's registered under my personal license."
"They don't care about the license," the man said. He finally looked at her, and she saw the thin, red crust of salt-rheum in the corners of his eyes. "They told me if I didn't bring the pot, they’d fill the cellar with sulfur gas. You know what that does to a person's lungs? My dad worked the fruit lines in Yakima. I know what it does."
He took a step forward, his hands rising, fingers hooked like old roots. He wasn't a professional. He was a terrified, stupid instrument, and that made him twice as dangerous as anyone with a silencer.
"Don't," Marisol said.
"Give it here. Just let me take it. You can write it off. You're a doctor, you got insurance—"
He lunged. He didn't have a weapon, just the clumsy, forward weight of a man who spent his life moving crates. Marisol didn't swing the knife; she sidestepped, her thigh catching the corner of the bench, and grabbed a five-gallon bucket of dry lime from the shelf below. She didn't throw the bucket—it was too heavy—but she tipped it forward, dumping thirty pounds of fine, white calcium hydroxide directly across the duckboards.
The man’s boots hit the powder. He lost his footing on the wet wood beneath, his arms windmilling as he went down hard on his hip. The impact broke a row of starter flats, sending plastic liners and black loam flying into the air.
He screamed—not from the fall, but because his hands had landed flat in the lime. Calcium hydroxide on wet skin doesn't burn instantly; it waits for the moisture to activate, then it begins to pull the water out of the tissue with a dry, chemical greed.
"Get up," Marisol said, her chest heaving, the knife held low at her hip. "Get up and go to the sink."
The man was sobbing, scrubbing his white-filmed palms against his greasy jacket, making it worse. "I can't go back without it. They’re sitting on the blanket chest, lady. They’re sitting right on it."
"The sink," she hissed, grabbing him by the greasy shoulder of his coat and hauling him toward the cast-iron basin at the back of the house. She turned the cold tap on full, the well-water rushing out with an iron-heavy smell. She shoved his hands under the stream.
The white paste dissolved into a milky sludge, running down the drain. The skin beneath was already angry, mottled with red patches where the chemical had begun its work.
"Who are they?" she asked, her mouth close to his ear while the water roared.
"The Garden," he blubbered, his face pressed against the corrugated splashback. "That’s all they said. They got a flat in Astoria. Above the old ship chandler’s. They have boxes of those cards. Hundreds of 'em."
Marisol turned his head toward her by the chin. Her fingers were wet with his sweat and her own lime-dust. "How many people are coming here?"
"I don't know. They said I was the first because I knew the road. They’re buying up the old packing houses down by the slough. They got trucks, lady. Big, white ones with no names on the doors."
She let go of him. He stayed there, his hands dripping into the basin, his forehead resting against the cold copper pipe.
Marisol walked back to the Excoecaria. The plant hadn't been touched. Its crimson-veined leaves were perfectly still under the gold glare of the lights. She looked down at the cream-colored card on the soil bin. When she picked it up, she realized the paper wasn't pulp; it was hemp-based, heavy-gauge, water-resistant. The kind used by maritime outfits for logbooks.
"Go," she said without looking back at the sink. "Take your truck and go south. Don't go back to Tillamook."
"They'll find her," he whispered.
"They're already there," Marisol said, her voice flat. "If they sent you with a card, they aren't waiting for an answer. They’re waiting for an excuse."
She didn't sleep. By 4:00 a.m., the coastal fog had crawled through the broken ventilation latch, turning the greenhouse into an oyster-colored lung. Marisol sat at her desk in the small office attached to the rear of the structure, an old, green-shaded banker’s lamp casting her shadow long across the pine floorboards.
Before her lay three notebooks bound in black oilcloth. These were her private ledgers—the ones she hadn't digitized, the ones that didn't exist on the server at Oregon State University where she used to hold a chair in economic botany.
The entries were ten years old, written in her tight, left-handed cursive during her final summer in the Ryukyu chain.
July 14. Specimen found three miles inland from Shuri, growing in the limestone crevices near the old sugar mill. Local name: Chi-no-namida (Tears of Blood). The sap contains an unclassified latex with an extraordinarily high concentration of daphnane-type diterpene esters. Initial skin contact causes immediate vesication, but the secondary systemic effect is what concerns the locals. The goats that forage near the ruins don't die of rot; they die of respiratory arrest within twenty minutes of browsing. The local elders claim the smoke from the wood will blind a man permanently.
She dipped a glass rod into a small bottle of isopropyl alcohol and cleaned the blade of her Victorinox.
The man at the sink had been right about one thing: she had insurance, but it wasn't the kind issued by Lloyds. Her insurance was thirty jars of dried Dieffenbachia root stored in the crawlspace beneath the kitchen, four mature specimens of Ricinus communis growing in the unheated cold-frames out back, and the knowledge that nature never created a defense mechanism that couldn't be concentrated with an old iron pot and a propane burner.
She went down the short stairs into her cellar. The air down here was different—dry, smelling of onions and the gray silt she used to store her dahlia tubers.
In the corner stood her extraction rig: a simple, glass Soxhlet extractor she’d salvaged from the university surplus pile when the department cut her funding for "lack of commercial applicability."
She didn't use the Excoecaria. That was her seed stock, her life's work. Instead, she took down a jar of dark, oily seeds she’d harvested from her Ricinus crop the previous October. Castor beans. To the untrained eye, they looked like fat, mottled beetles. To a biochemist, they were small, self-contained factories for the production of a ribosomal-inactivating protein that could stop a horse's heart if it found its way into the bloodstream through a broken fingernail.
She didn't make the poison—that was illegal, and more importantly, it was messy. She made a paste. A thick, grey mucilage mixed with dimethyl sulfoxide—a heavy industrial paint solvent that cut through the skin's lipid barrier like water through gauze—thickened with pine resin and linseed oil. It had no smell, but if you smeared it along the iron latch of a door or the rim of a window frame, anyone trying to force the lock without heavy rubber gloves would find the toxin carried straight through their epidermis into the capillaries within minutes.
As she worked the mortar, the pestle making a rhythmic scritch-clack against the stone, she heard the first vehicle.
It wasn't a truck. It was a small, four-cylinder sedan, its engine timing off, missing on the third cylinder as it turned off the highway onto her gravel lane. It didn't have its lights on. She could hear the crunch of the river stone she’d laid down five years ago to keep the mud from swallowing her driveway.
Marisol blew out the candle on her workbench. In the dark, her ears became her eyes.
The car stopped eighty yards out, near the line of old, salt-killed spruces. Two doors closed—not the heavy clunk of an old Ford, but the thin, tinny pop of a Japanese import.
She climbed the cellar stairs, her knees popping in the quiet house. She didn't feel fear; she felt a cold, academic curiosity. The Garden had sent a broken man with a card first to see if she was soft. Now they were sending the mid-level staff.
She moved through her kitchen without turning on a light. She knew every squeak in the fir floorboards; she knew that if she kept her weight to the outer edge of the doorframe leading to the porch, she could move without a sound.
Through the window, she saw them. They were silhouettes against the gray fog, two figures in hip-length oilskins. One carried a short, iron crowbar; the other had nothing in his hands, but his coat was unzipped, the hem pulling back on the left side where something heavy hung from his belt.
They didn't go for the greenhouse. They went for the house.
Marisol reached onto the top of the refrigerator where she kept her winter boots. Beside them sat a wide-mouthed glass jar containing three pints of crude oil mixed with the crushed leaves of Urtica ferox—the New Zealand tree nettle. She’d imported the seeds under a false customs declaration three years ago. The trichomes on the leaves were like small hypodermic needles; they didn't just contain formic acid like the local nettles; they contained an unclassified neurotoxin that caused a condition the Maori called ongaonga—a permanent, neurological burning that could last for months.
She stepped onto the back porch. The wind was coming off the water, cold and smelling of kelp.
"The key is under the mat," she called out into the dark.
The two silhouettes froze. The one with the crowbar turned his head toward the sound of her voice, his face a pale oval in the fog.
"Dr. Vargas?"
"The key is under the mat," she repeated, her voice perfectly conversational. "But if you touch the brass doorknob, you'll need a hospital bed by sunrise. I’ve treated the metal with a transdermal ricin extract mixed with DMSO. It pulls right through the skin."
The man with the crowbar laughed. It was a wet, smoker's chuckle. "You think we're stupid? We know who you are. We know you haven't had a live culture license since the state pulled your accreditation."
"I don't need a license to grow weeds," Marisol said.
The second man—the one with the heavy coat—took three steps toward the porch steps. He didn't pull a gun, but he kept his hand inside his pocket. "The board wants the notebooks, Doctor. The ones from Okinawa. And the three mature specimens in the south bay. We have a truck coming at daylight with a flatbed. Don't make us clear the house first."
"Who is the board?"
"People with more money than you have names for," the man said. He reached the bottom step. His boot clicked against the stone. "We're not here to argue with an old woman who talks to her ferns. Get inside."
Marisol didn't move. She held the glass jar by its wire bale. "You should have checked the wind before you came up the lane."
She didn't throw the jar at them. She threw it down onto the hot-water discharge pipe that ran from her cellar kitchen to the drainage ditch beside the porch. The pipe was old iron, uninsulated, carrying the boiling overflow from her extraction rig's cooling system.
The glass shattered against the iron. The crude oil didn't catch fire—it wasn't hot enough for that—but the sudden heat vaporized the volatile oils from the crushed Urtica leaves, creating a small, grey plume of steam that the sea wind caught and drove directly down the steps.
The man in the heavy coat took one breath of it.
He didn't scream. He made a sound like a wet towel being snapped against a wall—a hard, involuntary spasm of the glottis as his vocal cords instantly constricted. He went down on his knees, his hands clawing at his throat, his face disappearing into the grass.
The man with the crowbar backed away, his boots skittering on the gravel. "What did you do? What is that?"
"It’s an allergen," Marisol said, her voice rising slightly over the sound of the surf. "His immune system thinks he’s being stung by five thousand bees simultaneously. If you don't get him to an emergency room with an epinephrine drip within ten minutes, his tongue will swallow his throat."
The man with the crowbar looked at his partner, who was now rolling in the wild clover by the path, his chest making a high, whistling rattle like an old bellows. He didn't try to touch Marisol. He grabbed his partner under the arms, dragging him back toward the tinny sedan, his boots slipping in the mud.
Marisol watched them go. She didn't feel the adrenaline hit until the red tail-lights of the car disappeared over the rise toward the highway. Then her hands began to shake—not with fear, but with the cold realization that her sanctuary was gone.
She went back inside, pulled the black oilcloth notebooks from her desk, and put them into a canvas rucksack. Then she walked into the greenhouse, lifted the Excoecaria out of its terracotta pot, and wrapped its root ball in a wet burlap sack. She didn't look at the rows of seedlings or the glass walls she’d spent seven years cleaning with vinegar and newspapers.
She went to the kitchen, took the propane torch she used for searing weeds along the path, and carried it down to the cellar. She turned the valve until the gas hissed, struck the flint, and held the blue cone of flame against the dry pine joists beneath the living room floor.
The motel was called The Shilo Inn, but it had nothing to do with the chain. It sat on a strip of gravel between a diesel repair shop and a swampy creek outside of Astoria, its neon sign humming with a dry, insect-like click.
Marisol sat on the edge of the bed, the wrapped root ball of the Excoecaria sitting in the porcelain shower stall behind her to keep it from drying out. The room smelled of old carpet shampoo and tobacco smoke from 1994.
There was a knock at the door—three light taps, then two heavy ones.
She didn't open it. She took her grafting knife from her pocket and opened the blade. "Lila?"
"It’s me," a voice said through the hollow-core plywood. "I brought the log from the harbor office."
Marisol slid the chain back.
Lila was twenty-six, but she had the gray, institutional look of someone who had spent her teens in juvenile diversion programs and her twenties working sixty-hour shifts at the fish processing plants down by the docks. Her hair was chopped short with kitchen shears, and she wore a grease-stained canvas apron over her hoodie.
She slid into the room like salt water through a bad seam, her eyes immediately going to the bathroom door where the plant was stored.
"The house is still burning," Lila said, dropping a thick, manila folder onto the Formica table. "The volunteer fire department from Gearhart showed up around five, but they couldn't get within fifty feet of the greenhouse. They said the smoke smelled like burning rubber and made their eyes bleed. Two of them are in the hospital in Seaside."
"They shouldn't have used water," Marisol said. "Water activates the latex in the bark."
"They didn't know," Lila said. She sat down on the single plastic chair, her knees together, her hands tucked into her sleeves for warmth. "Nobody knows but you, Doc."
Marisol opened the folder. Inside were photocopies of the harbor logs from the Port of Astoria for the last three months. Every entry was flagged with a yellow highlighter where a vessel named The Cerinthe had cleared customs.
"It’s registered out of Monrovia," Lila said, pointing a dirty fingernail at the ledger. "But the fuel bills are cleared through an agency in Zurich. The same one that bought the old ice house by the river last winter."
"Who signed the bills?"
"A guy named Calloway. Ethan Calloway. The harbor master said he has an office in the old bank building on Commercial Street, but he’s never there. He spends his time on the water."
Marisol closed her eyes.
She could still smell the tea he used to drink—that cheap, smoky Lapsang Souchong he kept in a tin behind the balances in the university lab. He had been the one who signed her travel vouchers for the Ryukyu trip. He’d been the one who told her that her work on plant-derived toxins was "the only thing in the department worth a damn."
"He isn't a botanist," Marisol said to the dark behind her eyelids. "He’s an accountant who knows how to read a chemical journal."
"He’s got four men at the ice house," Lila said. "They’re loading crates. Big ones, insulated with styrofoam. I saw them from the pier this morning. They aren't fish crates, Doc. They have bio-hazard labels on the corners, but they’ve been scraped off with a wire brush."
Marisol stood up and walked to the window. Across the highway, the gray waters of the Columbia River were moving toward the bar, six miles of flat, muscle-colored current that could swallow an ocean liner if the pilot missed the channel by twenty yards.
"Why did you leave them, Lila?"
Lila didn't look up. Her fingers were twisting the hem of her apron. "They wanted me to mix the sprays. For the cranberries down in Long Beach. They bought three hundred acres of bogs through a shell company. They told me it was a new kind of liquid fertilizer that would kill the weeds without hurting the fruit."
"And?"
"I saw the deer," Lila whispered. "Two of 'em came out of the woods near the ditch where we were testing the pumps. They drank from the runoff. They didn't even make it back to the trees. They just… their legs went stiff, like iron bars, and they fell over into the brush. When I went to look, their tongues were black."
She looked at Marisol, her eyes small and dark in her pale face. "They told me if I talked to the county agent, they’d tell the sheriff I was the one who broke into the pharmacy in Warrenton three years ago. I didn't do it, Doc. I was just in the car. But nobody believes a girl with my name."
Marisol walked into the bathroom, lifted the wrapped Excoecaria out of the tub, and set it on the sink counter. The burlap was turning yellow where the sap had seeped through the fibers.
"We aren't going to the county agent," Marisol said.
"Then what are we doing?"
"We're going to see Ethan," she said. "He always liked to look at my notebooks before they were published. It’s only polite to show him what I’ve been working on since he left the university."
The old bank building on Commercial Street had twelve-foot ceilings and a floor made of small, hexagonal marble tiles that had turned the color of mutton fat after eighty years of wet boots.
Ethan Calloway did not look like a corporate pirate. He looked like an emeritus professor who had spent too much time in the sun and too much money on his tweed jackets. His hair was thin, white, and combed straight back from a high, freckled forehead. He sat behind a massive oak desk that had nothing on it but a brass desk clock and a small, green ceramic pot containing a single, stunted geranium.
"You look tired, Marisol," he said when the door clicked shut behind her. He didn't look up from his ledger.
"I’ve been traveling," Marisol said. She stayed near the door. Lila was outside on the landing, her back against the frosted glass, holding an old brass fire extinguisher she’d taken from the motel hallway.
"The fire at your place was a shame," Ethan said, finally setting his pen down. He looked at her with that wide, pale gaze that had once made her think he was a genius. "The state fire marshal thinks it was an electrical fault in the growth lamp ballast. They found some bone fragments in the cellar, but they think it was an old dog."
"It was a pig," Marisol said. "I kept six sides of salt pork in the chest down there. For the lard."
Ethan smiled. It was a small, dry movement of his lips. "Always practical. That’s what I told the board. I said, 'Marisol won't throw her notes into the sea. She'll bring them to me because she doesn't have anyone else who can read them.'"
He reached into his drawer and withdrew a checkbook bound in black calfskin. "We’re prepared to offer sixty thousand for the Ryukyu logs. And a retainer. Three thousand a month to oversee the Long Beach project. You can have the lab at the ice house. It has a modern ventilation hood. No more lime on the floor."
Marisol walked to the desk. She didn't look at the checkbook. She looked at the small geranium in the green pot.
"This is Pelargonium graveolens," she said, touching one of the fuzzy leaves with her bare thumb. "It’s been starved of nitrogen. You can tell by the yellowing at the margins."
"It’s an old office," Ethan said, his voice dropping its academic warmth. "We don't get much light here."
"You don't get any light here, Ethan," she said.
She withdrew her hand from her pocket. She wasn't holding a knife, and she wasn't holding a glass vial. She held a small, plastic spray bottle—the kind used by jewelers to clean watch faces.
"The man you sent to my house—the first one—told me about the cellar in Tillamook," she said.
Ethan’s eyes didn't leave her hand. "He was a local hire. Cheap. Not particularly intelligent."
"He was terrified," Marisol said. "And the two men you have sitting on the blanket chest in that cellar—they’re from the security firm in Portland, aren't they? The ones who handled the strike at the paper mill?"
"They're logistical assistants," Ethan said. He reached for his desk clock, his fingers moving slowly, deliberately.
"If you touch the clock," Marisol said, "I’ll clear the air in this room."
"With what? More nettle juice? We have masks in the hall, Marisol. We aren't amateurs."
"It’s not nettle juice," she said. She leaned over the desk, her face six inches from his. He could smell her—she didn't smell like earth anymore; she smelled like smoke and the vinegar she’d used to wash the soot off her skin. "I spent the last three hours in the motel room with the Excoecaria. Do you know what happens when you cut the main taproot while the plant is in its dormant cycle?"
Ethan’s eyes widened slightly. "It bleeds."
"It doesn't bleed latex," Marisol said. "It exudes an alkaloid called daphnetoxin. It’s water-soluble. I ran it through the coffee maker three times. The room smelled like almond paste. It was very pleasant."
She tilted the small spray bottle toward the stunted geranium.
"You think I'm bluffing," she whispered, her thumb tightening on the pump. She pressed it once, a half-stroke. A microscopic, dry mist hissed from the nozzle, completely invisible in the dim office light.
Ethan didn't blink, but his nostrils flared as the faint scent of crushed almonds reached him across the oak desk. His hand froze an inch from the brass clock. His finger twitched.
"You're a researcher, Marisol," he said, his voice dropping an octave, losing its smooth cadence. "You don't have the stomach for a strike like that. You spent twenty years writing papers on sustainability."
"I spent twenty years watching you sell my work to companies that use it to kill the brush along railway lines so they don't have to hire men with scythes," she said. "I’m sixty-two years old, Ethan. My house is a hole in the dirt. My plants are dead except for the one in my bag. I don't have a syllabus for next semester."
She laid the small bottle flat on his ledger, her palm resting on top of it, holding the trigger down just enough to keep the spring tense.
"Pick up the phone," she said. "Call the men in Tillamook. Tell them to leave the cellar. Then call the crew at the ice house. Tell them to dump the flats into the river."
Ethan stared at her palm on the bottle. He looked at the window, then back at her eyes. For three long seconds, the only sound in the room was the heavy, rhythmic clicking of the brass desk clock.
Then, slowly, his jaw tightening until the muscle bunched at his cheek, he reached out with his left hand, picked up the receiver, and began to dial.
The cargo ship The Cerinthe did not leave the dock at daylight. It sat in its berth at the foot of 14th Street, its diesel generators coughing a gray, oily smudge into the rainy sky, until the tide turned at 3:12 p.m.
Marisol and Lila stood on the wooden pier under a single, shared oilskin coat. At their feet sat the canvas rucksack containing the black notebooks and the wrapped root ball of the Excoecaria.
The white trucks were gone from the ice house. A trail of small, green leaves—the rejected starter plants from the Long Beach project—lay scattered across the gravel where the loaders had cleared the bays with a fire hose. They looked like bright, artificial beads against the black mud.
"They'll just build another one," Lila said, her hood pulled low over her forehead. "In Coos Bay. Or California. He’s got the money."
"Let him," Marisol said. She reached into her pocket and withdrew the seed packet—the one she’d taken from her kitchen before she set the fire.
She didn't open it. She held it in her palm, letting the rain soak through the paper until the small, grey disks inside began to swell, their outer husks turning soft and gelatinous. These were the seeds of Ulex europaeus—the common gorse. But they weren't common. She’d spent three years cross-breeding them with a mountain variety from the Pyrenees until she had a strain that could grow in pure sand, that could withstand sixty-knot winds, and whose thorns were so dense that no animal could pass through them. Once it took hold in the coastal dunes, it would take twenty years and three million dollars in herbicides to clear a single acre.
She dropped the wet packet over the edge of the pier.
The current caught it instantly, pulling it down into the dark, cold water where the river met the sea. It would float south with the longshore drift, landing on some spit of sand near Clatsop or Tillamook, where the roots would find the dark and begin their work.
"Come on," Marisol said, turning her back to the water. "The bus to Crescent City leaves at four."
Lila picked up the rucksack. She looked back once at the gray shape of The Cerinthe as it cleared the bridge, its foghorn blowing once—a long, low, iron groan that sounded like something dying in the woods.
"You think they'll look for us there?" Lila asked.
"They'll look for a botanist," Marisol said, her boots crunching on the wet gravel as they walked toward the highway. "We aren't going to grow anything where we're going. We're just going to clear the ground."
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