Warmth was everything.
Melody couldn’t remember why she had ever been afraid of it. The Mother wrapped the entire room in warmth, soft and heavy and safe, sinking through her skin until even the idea of thinking about anything else seemed exhausting. There had been so much noise before. Questions she couldn’t answer, monsters she didn’t understand, some broken sky that apparently mattered for reasons she couldn’t quite remember anymore. None of it existed here. The Mother didn’t ask questions or expect her to understand anything. It simply held her, made her body feel good, and let everything that had hurt before drift somewhere too far away to matter.
Melody rested against the open petals beneath her and slowly ran her fingers over one of the vines curled beside her hip. Its surface was smooth and warm, pulsing faintly beneath her fingertips with that familiar mana she had stopped questioning. The vine reacted immediately, curling loosely around her wrist before sliding farther up her arm almost like it was pleased by the attention.
“Good,” Melody whispered, although even speaking felt unnecessary.
The irritating little creature had interrupted Mother earlier. It had been loud and scared, pulling at her and trying to take her away from the warmth for some reason Melody couldn’t understand. She vaguely remembered being angry at it, then something resisting beneath her hand before suddenly giving way. After that the creature had stopped making noise, which was probably for the best because now everything could be quiet again and Mother could continue.
Melody closed her eyes and stroked the vine, waiting for the warmth to settle over her completely, but something nearby kept pressing against the edge of the fog in her head. Another source of mana. Smaller than Mother, but tightly packed enough that once she noticed it she couldn’t stop feeling it.
She opened her eyes and turned toward it.
The creature was still there.
Leo.
The name surfaced somewhere in her mind and almost slipped away again before she could understand why it mattered. He lay several feet away in a dark red mess, his strange golden clothing torn across his middle. Melody stared at him for a moment without feeling much of anything. The blood should probably have meant something, but what caught her attention was the warmth coming from the fleece itself.
Mana moved through every strand. It felt different from Mother, cleaner somehow, without the soft fog that made everything else seem unimportant. Tiny golden fibers were already twitching around the ruined section of Leo’s sweatshirt, pulling toward each other like the clothing was trying to remember what shape it belonged in.
Curiosity finally pulled Melody away from the flower. She crawled toward him with one hand against the floor and the other reaching for that strange warmth, barely noticing the red smeared across the petals, the concrete, and her own skin. All of that seemed distant compared to the mana gathering inside the fleece.
Her fingertips touched it.
Pain tore through her arm so violently that she screamed.
“AH!”
Melody tried jerking her hand away and couldn’t. Something locked her fingers against the golden wool while a white-hot pulse raced from her palm to her shoulder and exploded somewhere behind her eyes. She twisted hard enough to nearly roll onto her side, grabbing her own wrist with the other hand and pulling, but the fleece only brightened.
“What the fuck?! Let go!”
The damaged fabric started rebuilding beneath her fingers. Loose golden strands stretched across Leo’s stomach and twisted together one at a time, crossing and tightening until the enormous tear slowly disappeared. Melody stared through watering eyes, pain making it hard to breathe, when a drop of blood beside her knee suddenly trembled against the floor.
It lifted into the air.
Melody stopped pulling for half a second.
The drop shot toward Leo.
Then the rest followed.
Blood peeled away from Melody’s fingers in tiny red beads. The streaks covering her forearm lifted next, followed by the smears across the petals and the dark puddles surrounding Leo. Within seconds hundreds of droplets hung throughout the basement before streaming back toward his body, disappearing through the glowing fleece while the golden fibers continued knitting themselves together.
Leo jerked beneath her hand.
The movement sent another burst of pain through Melody’s arm, but something much larger came with it. The entire basement seemed to move inside her head at once.
Mother.
She felt roots beneath the concrete, vines buried inside the walls, flowers opening and closing throughout the floors above them. She felt warm bodies resting safely inside petals and an enormous hunger wrapped around all of it, mixed so completely with comfort and pleasure that Melody couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. For one awful second she understood the certainty that everything inside this place belonged to Mother, including her.
Then the golden mana ripped through it.
Something tore apart inside Melody’s head.
The pink haze vanished.
She collapsed beside Leo with a sharp gasp, her hand finally ripping free of the fleece as every sensation her brain had been ignoring arrived at the same time. Cold air crawled across her bare skin and made her shake hard enough that her teeth clicked. Her skull felt like somebody had driven something through the back of it and left it there, her mouth was dry enough that swallowing hurt, and every muscle in her body seemed exhausted on a level sleep wasn’t going to fix. Her lower body ached badly enough that Melody immediately decided she could investigate that particular problem later.
“What the hell happened to me?” she whispered, pressing both hands against her forehead and trying to force her thoughts into some kind of order.
The last thing she remembered clearly was Tasha. She remembered following her into the building, arguing with her, seeing those pale strawberries, and then Tasha leaning close with one bitten between her lips. She remembered accepting the kiss and the bright sweetness of the fruit flooding her mouth.
After that everything became heat, pink light, flashes of sensation, and the bizarre certainty that she had finally reached somewhere she never needed to leave.
“Mother,” Melody muttered.
The word made her stomach turn now.
Something warm touched her knee. Melody looked down and finally understood the red she had been ignoring since she woke up.
Blood.
There was so much of it that her brain refused to connect it to anything for several seconds. It covered the floor around her, stained her legs and stomach, streaked across her arms, and coated one of her hands nearly to the wrist. The golden fleece was still glowing beside her, drawing the last scattered droplets toward Leo.
Melody followed them.
Her stomach dropped.
“No.”
Leo lay motionless on the floor, his face pale underneath the grime and scratches. The fleece around his middle had almost finished repairing itself, but there had been far too much blood for Melody not to understand where it came from. Then another memory forced itself through the broken pieces in her head.
Leo in front of her.
His frightened face.
Her hand moving.
Something soft giving way.
A sound from him that stopped much too quickly.
“No, no, no. Leo?”
Melody scrambled toward him so quickly that her knee slipped in the blood. She caught herself with one hand and grabbed his shoulder with the other, shaking him harder than she meant to.
“Leo! Come on, wake up!”
Nothing happened.
Her hands were shaking too badly to cooperate when she reached for his neck. Melody pressed two fingers against one spot, felt nothing, moved them, tried again, and realized with growing panic that she didn’t actually know where the hell she was supposed to be checking.
“Come on. Come on, where is it?”
Something faint tapped beneath her fingers.
Melody froze.
She shifted slightly and felt it again.
A pulse.
Weak, but there.
“Oh, thank God.”
She sagged forward until her forehead nearly touched his shoulder and stayed there for a few seconds just breathing. The fleece continued working beneath her hands, tightening around Leo’s torso while the glow running through the fabric slowly dimmed. Whatever damage was underneath seemed to be repairing along with it, although Melody had no idea whether that meant he was actually okay.
He was alive.
That should have been enough to calm her down.
It wasn’t.
Melody lifted her head and looked at the blood covering her hand. This time she didn’t have the fog in her mind to make it unimportant.
“I did this.”
The sentence sounded wrong coming out of her mouth, but the memories were already filling themselves in whether she wanted them to or not. She remembered Leo trying to pull her away. She remembered looking at him and feeling nothing except irritation that he was interfering.
Then she attacked him.
She hadn’t just hurt him. She had killed him.
And Leo had only been here because he came looking for her.
Of course he had.
Melody had run out of the pawn shop in the middle of the night without waking him, left no note, and disappeared for who knew how long. The thirteen-year-old she had basically adopted by accident had woken up alone during the apocalypse and somehow tracked her all the way into this nightmare because neither of them possessed enough survival instinct to just look out for themselves.
Then when he finally found her, Melody put a hole through him.
Her stomach rolled.
She covered her mouth with one bloody hand and swallowed hard until the urge to throw up passed.
“AH HAHA YES! FUCK!”
A sound from across the basement made her look up.
Tasha was still there.
She remained tangled among the vines several yards away, completely lost in the same haze Melody had just been ripped out of. She hadn’t noticed Melody screaming. She hadn’t noticed the blood. She apparently hadn’t noticed that a kid had nearly died less than twenty feet from her.
That pulled more memories loose.
Tasha dismissing every warning Melody gave her.
Tasha eating the white fruit like candy.
Tasha kissing her while the juice was still sweet on her tongue.
The sudden heat.
Then nothing except Mother.
Melody looked back at Leo and watched his chest rise shallowly beneath the fleece.
Alive.
For now that had to be enough.
“Tasha.”
No response.
Melody forced herself upright. Her legs nearly folded immediately, and she had to grab the edge of the huge flower until the room stopped tilting. Her clothes were scattered somewhere nearby, the dagger was farther away, but the snake sword lay close enough that she could reach it without crossing the whole room.
She stumbled over and wrapped her hand around the grip.
The familiar weight steadied her more than it should have.
Behind her, Tasha made another pleased sound.
Melody turned.
The anger that came over her wasn’t explosive at first. It was cold, heavy, and much easier to hold onto than everything else she was feeling.
She walked toward Tasha and sliced through the thick vine curled around her.
The plant recoiled with a wet shriek as the smaller tendrils snapped backward. Tasha dropped onto her hands and knees, sucking in a startled breath as the haze around her was interrupted.
“FUCKING COCKBLOCKER, STOP!”
She twisted toward Melody with the same furious expression she had worn the first time.
Then she noticed the sword pointed at her face.
Tasha stopped moving.
Melody stood over her shaking from exhaustion, cold air raising goosebumps across her naked skin while Leo’s blood dried across her hand, her arm, and torso. There wasn’t enough room left inside her for embarrassment.
“What did you do to me?”
Tasha stared along the blade before looking back at Melody, and for a second there was actual fear in her face. Then her expression shifted into frustrated disbelief, like Melody was the one refusing to understand something obvious.
“What did I do to you? Girl, seriously?” Tasha pushed herself a little straighter. “You followed me in here. You kissed me. You wanted me just as much as I wanted you, and now you wake up feeling weird and suddenly I did something?”
Her eyes drifted toward Leo.
The indifference in them made Melody’s grip tighten.
“Is this because of him? I have no idea who that is. Is he a friend of yours?”
“You fucking drugged me?!”
“I think you're freaking out because whatever was happening wore off.” Tasha rubbed at one arm and glanced toward the surrounding vines like their absence bothered her more than the sword. “Everybody feels better in here, Melody. That's the entire point. Nobody's hungry. Nobody's freezing. Nobody's running around screaming about monsters every five minutes. You finally stopped fighting everything for five damn minutes, and now you're acting like that was some horrible thing.”
Melody stared at her.
Tasha genuinely believed what she was saying.
That somehow made it worse.
“You need to put the sword down,” Tasha continued. “We had fun. That's it. You clearly needed it, I definitely needed it, and I'm not responsible for whatever weird family problem you've got going on with your boytoy.”
“Weird family problem? BOYTOY?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No.” Melody’s voice came out quieter than she expected. “I really don't.”
Something vibrated against her palm.
Melody glanced down.
The snake sword was trembling.
At first she assumed it was just her arm. She could barely keep herself standing, so shaky hands weren’t exactly mysterious.
Then green light appeared inside the blade.
The thin silver veins running through the dark metal began glowing a sickly emerald, and faint mist spilled from the edge. It curled between Melody’s fingers without hurting her. One droplet formed near the tip and fell onto the concrete.
The floor hissed.
A tiny smoking pit appeared where it landed.
Melody stared at it.
Acid. Of course.
Tasha leaned back slightly. “Okay. What the fuck is that?”
Melody barely heard her. Leo was still behind her, barely alive because she had forgotten who he was while this place filled her head with warmth and made everything else seem unimportant.
Tasha looked toward the vines again, almost pleading with Melody to understand. “Look, I'm sorry your night got weird, but the plant didn't make you into somebody else. It just makes everything easier. That's why everyone stays. You wanted me, you wanted this, and you were fine until your boyfriend showed up and ruined it.”
Melody’s head snapped toward her.
“He’s thirteen!”
Tasha flinched.
“He came looking for me because I disappeared!” Melody could hear herself getting louder and no longer cared. “He came into this building looking for me, and I killed him because I couldn’t even remember who he was!”
“I didn't make you kill him!”
“You gave me the fruit!”
Tasha blinked. “So? Everybody eats it.”
“So! I couldn’t fucking think!”
“Oh my God.” Tasha threw both hands up. “It's fruit, Melody. Food. The plant makes it for us. It calms you down. You're acting like I poisoned you.”
The sword vibrated harder.
Green mist poured from it now, rolling down the blade and gathering around Melody’s hand. The angrier she got, the brighter those veins became.
Tasha finally noticed.
“Melody.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m serious. Put the sword down.”
“SHUT UP!”
Melody swung at the flower behind her.
She had only meant to cut the thing.
Instead green mana exploded from the blade in a wide spray.
Tasha threw herself sideways too late. Some of it caught one side of her face and shoulder while the rest struck the massive flower behind her, and both of them screamed at once.
Tasha collapsed clutching her face.
The flower’s petals blackened where the mist touched them. Thick plant tissue bubbled, curled, and melted into dark sludge that ran down the side and hissed against the floor.
Then the whole building shook.
Melody stumbled as a deep vibration rolled through the concrete hard enough to drop dust from the ceiling. Vines tore themselves away from walls, pulled free of doorways, and began moving toward the basement. Somewhere upstairs people started screaming.
The wall beside Melody suddenly came alive.
A vine thicker than her leg whipped toward her head.
She ducked and swung.
The snake sword cut halfway through it, and the acid did the rest. The severed end slammed onto the concrete thrashing hard enough to crack it while another vine came from behind.
Melody turned and caught that one too.
“Oh, now you fight back?”
The Mother apparently took that personally.
Roots ripped free of the floor. Vines uncoiled from pillars. The giant flower started folding itself closed while the smaller growths attacked from every direction.
Melody stopped caring about technique.
She didn’t know how to use a sword properly anyway.
She just moved forward.
Every swing left green mist hanging in the air. Vines that escaped the blade blistered and fell apart when the mana touched them, and within seconds Melody had cut through the first wall of growth. One thick tendril caught her across the side and threw her into a pillar hard enough to split the skin along her forehead, but she bounced off it, nearly fell, and kept moving before her body could convince her to stay down.
“STOP!”
Tasha’s voice came from somewhere behind her.
Melody ignored it.
She reached the Mother and drove the snake sword into one of its enormous petals with both hands. The flower shrieked so loudly Melody felt the vibration in her teeth. She twisted the blade and pushed more acid into the wound.
The petal collapsed.
Behind it was another layer of thick plant tissue.
Melody cut through that too.
The Mother began folding in around itself, petals closing like walls while vines wrapped over the opening to protect whatever was hidden inside. Melody hacked through them, shoved one shoulder between two closing petals, and finally saw what the entire building had apparently been built around.
A tiny red flower glowed in the center.
Melody stared at it.
It was barely larger than her fist.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
Every vine in the basement lunged.
Melody moved first.
She jumped through the narrowing gap and brought the sword down with both hands.
The little flower split in half.
Mana detonated.
Blue-white light swallowed the room so completely that Melody never saw what hit her. One second she was standing over the core, and the next she was flying backward through dead vines before slamming into the floor and skidding into the base of a pillar.
She lay there for a few seconds trying to remember how breathing worked. Her ears rang, blood from her forehead ran into one eyebrow, and her back felt like somebody had driven a car into it.
Then the Mother started dying.
The enormous flower sagged inward as color drained from its petals. Glowing veins throughout the basement went dark one after another while vines dropped from the ceiling and roots that had been moving seconds earlier shriveled across the concrete. The collapse spread upward through the building with the sound of breaking glass, falling furniture, and people suddenly realizing the living things wrapped around them were no longer moving.
“No!”
Tasha crawled toward the Mother.
“No, no, no! Please!”
Melody pushed herself onto one elbow and watched her drag a dying vine against her chest. Tasha was crying hard enough that the words kept breaking apart, one hand still pressed against the burned side of her face while the other rubbed desperately at the shriveled plant as though she could somehow wake it back up.
“My baby. Come on, please. Grow back. You can grow back. Please!”
That stopped Melody.
Tasha didn’t sound like somebody whose favorite toy had been broken. She didn’t even sound like an addict who had just watched her supply disappear. She sounded like somebody watching a person she loved die.
Which meant the Mother had probably been deeper inside her head than Melody realized.
Maybe much deeper.
Unfortunately for Tasha, that realization came after Leo had nearly died.
Melody pushed herself upright using the sword for support. Calling what she was doing standing felt generous. Her legs shook beneath her, her back throbbed where the pillar had caught her, and blood continued slipping down the side of her face.
Tasha finally looked up.
“You killed her.”
Melody raised the sword.
The point settled toward Tasha’s chest.
For several seconds neither of them moved. Melody could hear her own breathing coming too quickly through clenched teeth, and the sword shook along with her arms. One swing would be easy.
Tasha brought her here.
Tasha gave her the fruit.
Tasha dismissed everything Melody said about the world outside because the plant had convinced her none of it mattered.
Leo nearly died.
Melody tightened her grip.
Then she actually looked at Tasha.
The burning cheek.
The terror.
The way she held that dead vine against herself like a child.
Melody remembered what it had felt like when the Mother was in her own head. She remembered Leo lying in front of her and somehow seeming less important than getting back to the warmth.
Tasha had been under that influence longer.
Maybe since yesterday.
Maybe she hadn’t really understood what she was doing either.
That did not make Melody forgive her.
It just made killing her harder.
“Fuck off.”
Tasha blinked through the tears. “What?”
“I said get away from me.” Melody’s voice shook, partly from anger and partly because her legs were seconds away from giving out. “Get out of this building. Go wherever the hell you want, just get away from me and stay away from Leo.”
Tasha stayed on the floor, clutching the vine against herself. “Melody, my face, it hur—”
“NOW!”
The word tore out of Melody hard enough to hurt her throat.
Tasha finally moved. She scrambled backward, nearly slipping on the dead vines before catching herself against the wall, then stumbled toward the stairs with one hand covering the burned side of her face. She didn’t stop for clothes or supplies. She didn’t even look back at the Mother again before disappearing upstairs, crying hard enough that Melody could still hear her after she was gone.
Melody remained standing until the footsteps faded.
Then the snake sword slipped from her hand and hit the concrete with a metallic clatter.
Without Tasha there to be angry at, everything holding Melody together seemed to disappear at once.
She turned toward Leo.
“Oh shit.”
The golden fleece still gave off a faint glow across the basement, but Leo hadn’t moved.
Melody tried walking toward him and made it exactly one step before her knee gave out. She caught herself on both hands, hissed as pain shot through her palms, and considered trying to stand again for approximately half a second.
Nope.
Crawling worked.
“Leo, I’m so sorry.”
She dragged herself toward him one knee at a time, trying not to look at the blood still smeared across the floor.
“Come on, squirt. Please.”
Leo didn’t answer.
By the time Melody reached him, the edges of her vision had started going dark. She pressed one shaking hand against his chest and held it there, terrified enough that for the first second she genuinely couldn’t tell whether anything was happening.
Then his chest moved beneath her palm.
Melody waited.
Another shallow breath followed.
She kept her hand there until it happened a third time because apparently twice wasn’t enough either. His body was warm beneath the fleece, and when she shifted her fingers toward his neck she found that faint pulse still tapping away.
A sound escaped her that was somewhere between laughing and crying.
“I’ll never leave you again. I’m so sorry.”
She looked over the golden sweatshirt. The enormous tear she remembered around his stomach had disappeared completely, and the glow beneath the wool was fading little by little, but Melody had no idea what that meant for the damage underneath. Maybe the fleece had repaired everything. Maybe it had only closed the wound and he was still hurt inside. Maybe Leo was going to wake up in five minutes and complain because she was lying on him.
Melody desperately wanted that one.
“You’re alive,” she whispered, mostly because she needed to hear herself say it. “That’s good. We can work with alive.”
She wanted to check him properly and figure out whether the fleece had actually healed everything. She wanted to know if his pulse was normal, if anything inside him was still damaged, and whether he could wake up. More than anything, she wanted him conscious long enough for her to apologize, although considering what she had done she suspected that particular apology might take the next twenty years.
Her body reached its limit before she could do any of it.
Melody lowered herself beside him and managed to pull one arm across his chest. The golden fleece felt warm against her cheek, but it wasn’t the heavy artificial comfort of the Mother. This warmth was smaller. Real. Leo’s chest rose beneath her arm again, and Melody stayed awake just long enough to feel it happen one more time.
Then her eyes closed and exhaustion carried her off.