Turn 7 of 8

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

You look at the seed in Iris's palm, and you look at Aldous, and you look at the shutters where the silence is pressing in, and you make a decision. Not the kind that comes from a book or a recipe — the kind that comes from thirty years of reading the space between a symptom and its cause. The seed is not the same seed. But it is not a different seed either. It is what the Underwood does when something that belongs to it is taken and killed and buried in dead earth: it makes another one. A replacement. A cutting, the way you take a cutting from a rosemary plant and grow it anew. But a cutting needs to be returned to its rootstock, or it withers. And this one has been sitting in Iris's pocket for three weeks, and the thing outside is getting more tired by the minute.

"Aldous," you say. "You said the seed began to die, and that is when the silence started. Not when you took it. When it began to die. The thing that follows you — it is not hunting you. It is not angry. It is the part of the Underwood that was sent to find what was lost, and it has been searching for eleven years, and it is dying too, because the connection is fraying and it cannot find its way home."

He stares at you. His mouth opens and closes.

"The Underwood sent a piece of itself to retrieve what you took," you continue. "And when the seed died, the piece could not go back empty-handed. It has been wandering, following the trail of what you carried, growing weaker. It is not here for you, Aldous. It is here for this." You nod at the seed in Iris's hand.

"And Iris has been feeding it without knowing what she was feeding."

Iris looks down at the seed. Her expression is stricken — not with fear, but with the particular horror of someone who realises they have been part of something much larger than they understood.

"The offerings," she says. "The honey, the milk — I thought something at the treeline was hungry. I thought I was being — kind."

"You were," you say. "And that is why the seed was left for you. The Underwood does not give things to people who take. It gives to people who offer. You have been tending the connection without knowing it, and that is why the thing outside can still reach this far. You have been keeping the road open."

Aldous puts both hands flat on the counter. His fingers are trembling so badly the coins rattle beneath his palms.

"Then what do I do?" he says. "Tell me what to do. I will do it. I have eleven years of — tell me, and I will do it."

You look at the seed, pale and veined and waiting in Iris's hand. You look at the shutters, where the silence has deepened to something that feels like a held breath. You think about what your mother would have said — that a remedy does not undo harm, it gives the body a chance to heal itself. The seed needs to go back to the boundary stone. The thing that follows needs to carry it home. And Aldous needs to be the one to place it there, because he is the one who broke the connection, and only the hand that took can be the hand that returns.

But the Underwood is not a place you walk into at night. And the boundary stone is in there, not at the edge, and the thing outside is barely holding itself together.

"Iris," you say. "The offerings you left — did anything else come to them? Anything besides the seed?"

She hesitates. Her hand closes around the seed, gently, as though it might break.

"Sometimes," she says, "when I left the honey, I felt like something was — grateful. Not just the thing that follows. Something bigger. Something that was watching from further in."