Chapter 217: Green Walls Hold

Chapter 217: Chapter 217: Green Walls Hold

Erik did not go straight at the green wall.

"Circle the lake," he said. "Slowly. Keep the building between us and that antenna."

Kai shipped the outboard and took the oars, because sound carried across open water and the motor would announce them to every rooftop for a mile. He rowed them along the drowned edge of the old park, where tree crowns stood out of the water like the heads of people wading. Hrimnir hadn’t relaxed. In the small gray form he wore outside the space, no bigger than a large husky, he looked almost harmless. His growl was a vibration Erik felt through the bond more than heard, and his eyes never left the far rooftop.

"Anyone up there?" Kai whispered.

"Somebody was," Killian said from the stern, hands in his lap, saving himself. "Not now. Whoever it was moved when we moved."

Erik had expected a rifle muzzle or a shouted threat. What he got was nothing, and nothing was worse. It was the patience of someone with plenty of time. He filed it beside the ambush, and the speedboats, and the word boss.

They had almost reached the east wall when an arrow struck the water a foot from the bow.

It was a clean warning, the fletching trembling. Erik raised both hands slowly.

"That’s close enough," a voice called from the vines, hoarse and cracked. "Turn around. I mean it."

"Alex. It’s Erik."

The vines on the third floor parted. A lean figure stepped onto a balcony woven of living branches, a bow drawn to his cheek. His hair had grown shaggy, and his face had thinned to bone and stubble. His eyes went from Erik to the young man beside him, and the string went slack.

"Kai?"

Kai grinned. "Hey, Alex."

The bow hit the balcony. Alex gripped the rail with both hands, and his voice broke on a laugh that sounded like it hurt. "Look at you two. You’re standing. Erik. Oh my God. Erik."

"I’m sorry I’m late."

"You’re late? You’re alive." Alex was already moving. "Back door. Get out of the open."

The green wall had been woven into a narrow arch just above the waterline. It drew back at Alex’s touch with a slow, dry rustle, like a sleeper turning over. Erik barely made the landing before Alex crossed it in two strides and hauled him into a hug that knocked the breath out of him. Neither of them spoke. Erik felt how thin Alex had gotten under his coat, and felt the shaking in the arms around him.

"Two months and change," Alex said into his shoulder. "Not one word. I kept thinking you were dead."

"I kept thinking the same about you."

Alex let go, scrubbed his face with his sleeve, and dragged Kai into the hug too, ruffling his hair until Kai swatted him off. "Your mom. Is she..."

"Alive," Erik said gently. "Safe. That’s all I can say yet."

Alex read his face, nodded once, and understood more than the words held. His eyes moved to Killian, still on the dock, and to the small gray animal at Erik’s knee. "And them?"

"Killian’s the reason we made it here. That’s Hrimnir. Mine."

"A dog?"

Hrimnir gave him a long, flat look.

"Not exactly," Erik said. "You can trust them both."

Alex held his gaze a moment longer. "Then they’re in."

Up close, Erik saw what the wall had cost him. A raised gray vein ran along the inside of Alex’s wrist. His lips were chapped, and the hand he braced on the rail trembled.

"You’re running yourself dry."

"It doesn’t stop growing. I stop feeding it, and it dies, and then everything on this side of the wall does." Alex tried to smile. "Four hours of sleep a night. The rest of the time it’s like holding my breath."

"How long?"

"The rain’s been going seven, eight weeks. I stopped counting around then." ℴ

Erik thought of Killian’s nosebleed and Kai’s blistered palms. There was nothing to say that Alex didn’t already know.

The third-floor apartment was warm and smelled of dried herbs. Every window was covered in woven branches, and thin green light filtered through like water. Beans climbed a string by the sink. Tomatoes ripened in pots along the wall.

A woman stood in the center of the room with a hand resting on her stomach. She had short dark hair and a face that had been pretty before worry carved it.

"Michelle," Alex said. "This is Erik. The one who warned me."

"Thank you," she said softly. "We got the water and the bags packed because of you."

Two young women hovered behind her. The younger, Danielle, nineteen, was all elbows and hair and unwilling curiosity, with a kitchen knife held low behind her leg. The elder had her brother’s brown eyes and a stillness Erik noticed at once. Valerie, twenty-one. She wasn’t looking at Erik. She was looking at Hrimnir.

"That’s not a dog," she said.

Erik blinked. "Sorry?"

"The skull’s too broad across the brow, and the muzzle’s too long. The way he carries his weight." She stepped closer, unafraid. "That’s a wolf. A small one, or he’s folded himself down somehow."

Erik stared. Nobody had ever looked at Hrimnir in that form and seen anything but a dog. He felt the wolf’s reluctant interest ripple along the bond, faintly rattled.

"How can you tell?" Kai asked from the arm of the sofa. "I’d have bet money. Where’d you learn all that?"

"Vet school." Valerie crouched, and Hrimnir allowed her palm along his flank. "Third year. I was supposed to start clinicals in September." Her mouth twisted. "He’s healthy. Good coat, good weight. Someone’s feeding him properly."

"We try," Erik said.

"Valerie’s been our doctor since the first week," Alex said quietly. "When Michelle got sick, when Danielle ran a fever."

"I’m the closest thing," Valerie said, and Danielle muttered, "You’re more than that," and Valerie ruffled her hair.

Alex told the rest at the table, in pieces. The men who had circled the building in a speedboat two weeks ago and called up for whoever was inside. The vines sealing the windows. One of the men looking at the building a long time and writing something down.

"And the roof across the lake?" Erik asked.

Alex’s fingers tightened on his cup. "Someone’s up there most days. A woman, I think. She doesn’t hide it. I don’t like how she looks at us. Not the building. Us."

"We’ve talked about leaving," Michelle said. "My mother’s four hours away by boat if the water’s clear. But the baby’s coming, and the wall is the only thing between us and the water."

A baby. Erik’s eyes dropped to her stomach, and the room rearranged itself in his mind. He stood.

"Excuse me. Where’s the bathroom?"

"End of the hall," Alex said. "Door sticks."

The door did stick. Erik shut it behind him, leaned on the sink, and reached for the thin silver thread.

The bathroom went out like a candle.

Penelope was in the orchard, sitting under a tree with a book open on her knee. She looked up when his boots hit the grass, and her face went through three expressions before it settled on suspicion. "That was fast. You were supposed to be out there looking, and it’s barely been an hour."

"I found him."

She was on her feet at once. "Is he okay?"

"Alive. Thin. Burning himself out holding a wall of vines against the whole flood." Erik told her the rest: Michelle and the baby, the sisters, the woman on the roof who watched the windows. Penelope listened without moving. When he finished, he said, "I need you to check my thinking."

She raised an eyebrow. "That’s not how you usually open."

"It’s Alex." He said it flatly, without apology. "I’d trust him with my life, which is exactly why I don’t trust my own read on this. So I’ll tell you where I stand, and you tell me where I’m wrong."

"Go on."

"For bringing them in: the wall is killing him, and it’s a matter of weeks. And they’re worth having. Alex’s wood power means crops and cover that grow on their own, something none of us can do. Valerie has the veterinary training to care for the animals we’re breeding, and she’s the closest thing to a doctor we’d have besides Vanya. Michelle packed seeds before she packed clothes, and she knows how to keep them alive." He paused. "Against: four people through the gate, one of them pregnant. Every one of them becomes a person who can talk about what’s behind it. Four more mouths, and a baby that cries. Even a short walk through the building on the way to the stairwell puts the others in front of eyes. And nobody can say what they’d do under pressure, because I haven’t seen it."

"You haven’t seen Alex under pressure?"

"I’ve seen him in a garden and at a barbecue. That isn’t the same." Erik rubbed the scar on his forearm. "I’m not asking whether I want to save my friend. I do. I’m asking whether I’d make this call about a stranger with the same facts, and I don’t think I’m the right judge of that."

Penelope studied him for a long moment. "You already know what you’d do with a stranger."

"I’d help in a bounded way. A boat, a route, maybe a safe house away from us."

"And a stranger with a pregnant wife, a vet student, and a power that grows food?"

"Probably more than that." He exhaled. "Which tells me the facts carry weight apart from my feelings. But it’s not my decision to make alone. Mom’s here. Aunt Lucy. Aurora. Everyone in this space has put their lives in the same place, and a call that changes their risk should be put to all of them." He met her eyes. "Gather them. I’ll lay it out the way I just did, and they can vote however they like. If the answer’s no, I’ll find another way to help him."

Something eased in Penelope’s face. She closed the book and set it against the tree trunk. "That’s better than I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"That I’d have to talk you down." She almost smiled. "You didn’t come in here with a decision. You came in with a case."

"That’s the idea."

"Then I’ll gather them. And Erik?" She caught his sleeve before he turned. "If it comes to a no, you can tell me you’re angry. You don’t have to be fine."

"I know," he said. "But I’ll be fine."

They sat in a loose circle by the spring. Erik laid it out the same way he had for Penelope: what the family was worth, what bringing them would risk, and how little he could say about how they’d behave under pressure. He didn’t soften the last part, and he didn’t push.

When he said Alex’s name, Aunt Mary sat up straight.

"Alex?" she said. "The boy who used to eat all the biscuits?"

"He’s thinner now."

"He’s family." She said it as a fact. "I vote yes. But I also heard everything else you said, and I’m not dismissing it."

Aunt Lucy asked about the baby’s due date, and Erik admitted he didn’t know. Dahlia asked what Alex’s power cost him, and Erik told her about the gray vein on his wrist. Victor asked how many people knew the building was there. Ben asked if they needed medicine, and Persephone asked what else they’d been growing.

Silver asked the question nobody else had. "If we refuse, what will you do?"

"Find another way to help him," Erik said. "Somewhere that isn’t here."

Silver nodded slowly. "Then I vote yes, on one condition. They don’t learn about this place. Not the space, not the spring, not the time. Not until I decide they can be trusted. They’ll be told it’s a fortified building with sealed floors and nothing more."

"Agreed," Erik said, and the circle murmured with him. The yeses came one after another until the last of them had said it.

When he stepped back out of the bathroom, no time had passed that anyone could measure. Killian and Kai were waiting in the hall, pretending not to.

"You were gone a while," Kai said.

"I went to ask."

"Ask who?" Kai’s eyes narrowed, then widened. "Oh. Oh."

Erik gave them the short version. When he finished, Kai said, "Obviously yes." Killian was quieter. He looked at the door to the apartment and said, "Four people. One pregnant. A hull that needs to hold all of them."

"Can you do it?"

"Once." Killian’s mouth thinned. "It’ll flatten me. But once."

"Then we do it once."

They put it to the family at the table. Alex took the invitation like a man hearing a verdict. Michelle’s hand went to her stomach, and Valerie went very still.

"You’d take us all," Danielle said.

Everyone turned. She had planted herself by the window, knife still low. "People you barely know, and a baby on the way, to a building you won’t tell us anything about. Why? People don’t do that anymore. What do you want?"

"Danielle," Alex said.

"No. It’s a real question."

Kai laughed. It wasn’t unkind. "She’s right, you know."

"Kai," Erik said.

"No, she is. Danielle, I’ll be honest." He leaned back. "It’s not kindness we hand out lightly. We passed a woman on a roof this morning waving a sheet at us, begging for help, and we went around her. I still hate it. We do that every day. We’re not saints."

Danielle stared at him.

"So when we say come with us," Kai said, "it’s not because we’re nice. It’s because Alex is family, and family comes first. That’s the only reason we’d do it."

Danielle looked at her brother. Then, slowly, the knife lowered. "Okay," she said. "That, I believe."

They packed in an hour. Valerie took her medical kit and a ledger of every illness in the building. Michelle took the seeds, wrapped in cloth. Danielle carried a wire hutch herself and refused help. Inside it, two rabbits, one grey and one brown, pressed together in the corner.

"You kept rabbits?" Kai said, staring.

"Valerie paired them the first week," Danielle said, hoisting the hutch higher. "She said boats stop running eventually, and then you eat what you raised."

Valerie shrugged, as though it were nothing. Erik looked at the beans and the tomatoes and the paired rabbits, and thought about how much planning it took to build a future inside a building with a hostile roof across the lake. He revised his estimate of this family upward.

Alex stood in the middle of the apartment with his hand on a vine as thick as his wrist, and for a long moment he didn’t move.

"If I let go," he said quietly, "it dies."

"It’s served its purpose," Erik said.

Alex nodded. He closed his eyes, and the green wall shivered, and a long exhalation seemed to run through the whole building. The color began to drain from the leaves.

Below, Killian laid both palms against the skiff and went white to the lips. The hull groaned and widened, plating rolling outward like poured metal, until it could carry all seven of them. When he straightened, he swayed, and Kai caught him by the elbow without a word.

They loaded the family in silence. The hutch rode in the middle of the hull, strapped down, with Danielle’s hand resting on top of it. Hrimnir took the bow and watched the rabbits the whole way with an expression of deep and silent restraint. Valerie, without being asked, sat down next to him.

Erik was the last to step aboard. He looked back once at the dying green.

Then Kai started the outboard, and the boat slid away into the mist.