As the entire air in front of her suddenly incinerated, the burst knocked Emika backwards to the ground. Parts of her skin tightened in the blazing heat. Her eyes felt like they had been gouged out.

When she got back up, the fire was devouring not only Eva’s remains, but also the two trees above them. For a moment, she thought she might have accidentally caused a forest fire, but the weekend’s rain had left the wood with enough moisture to withstand the flames long enough.

Emika sat in front of the ever-shrinking pile of Eva for nearly two hours, until all that was left of her was some charcoal residue. She gathered it all up with a small shovel, filling an urn she had brought with her. She then covered the charred ground with brushwood and leaves so that it looked like the forest floor around it; however, she couldn’t hide the two trees that were now completely black. Either way, it was time to go home.

After closing the entrance door to her house behind herself, Emika took one deep breath and exhaled. She placed the urn on a cabinet in her living room along with Catrine’s, lay down on the couch, and closed her eyes.

What was she supposed to do now?

In the end, she decided to go down into her basement to start working her plants. Not necessarily because she felt like it was a good thing to do; it was mostly out of habit, to find a distraction, and something to do while she could sort out her thoughts.

As she went through her notebook listing all the work she still needed to do on her plants, she saw a lot of things that wouldn’t be necessary or possible now any more; for example, preparing specimens for the next exhibition, answering customer inquiries or sending out the next orders. She did see in her calendar that one of her biggest bonsai trees, one featuring a multi-trunk cascading style, needed to be repotted this year, so she figured she might as well do it now. She felt like doing physical work might distract her the best.

It was a healthy juniper bonsai tree that spilled out of the pot to the right side, spiralling downward well beneath the desk it stood on. She’d have to remove it from its current pot, knock out the soil from the roots and cut them down, and place it back into a new pot that was slightly bigger.

Emika joined her hair into a ponytail and then started working; although she soon realised that she first had to remove her growth as it was hindering her handling the tree.

Noticeably, it seemed to get larger by the hour. Emika would have loved to just ignore it, but it was such a big part of her now that to not constantly think about it was largely impossible.

In fact, nothing was possible. There was nobody she could possibly talk to about any of this; not that she felt the particular urge to do so in the first place, with how messy it all was. She couldn’t ask anyone for help, because she would put them at risk. Her phone was broken, and that had been her one gateway to the world, as she didn’t even own a PC and had done all business using that one device. And she couldn’t just leave her home and buy a new phone, either.

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No matter how much she thought about all of this, she simply couldn’t come up with anything to do about her situation. But what did that leave? Was there truly, really nothing else for her to do than take care of her trees until slow death took her?

That said, how long would that even take? She already didn’t have any fresh ingredients for food at home; she did have some bags of rice, flour, and a few packages of pasta, but not much else. Was she going to run out of food first or die by turning into hardwood?

Did it even matter? Even considering the best case scenario of her issue to stop growing right now and forever, her life was already over. Once the authorities would be alerted to Mina’s house and find the human remains, the trail would soon lead to Emika, who was one of their closest friends.

Unless…

Emika had a thought that shot off a firework in her head. Yeah… no… But… What if nobody ever found their remains?

The thought made her stomach turn. She felt bad for even considering it. But, couldn’t she just… go and burn down Mina’s home? That way, there’d be no evidence tying her to them. She’d be completely fine.

Well, probably not completely fine. That was sugarcoating it a lot. But she needed that bit of denial right now.

Suddenly, Emika heard an unfamiliar sound. She had just knocked off a good chunk of the tree’s roots, but now stared at the stairs, focusing.

After a moment, she gently put the tree down, and then, as fast and noiselessly as possible, went up to the ground floor.

As she did that, she heard some footsteps from the end of the corridor. She went to where the sounds had originated from and finally got to her office, where she saw an open window. She gulped. That window was supposed to be closed. Another noise from her entry hall snapped Emika out of her thoughts and she ran there. When she arrived, she just saw the door slam shut.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

She ran out, hoping she could still see the intruder. But when she stepped into the garden, she recognized nothing and no one there. The gate was closed just as it usually was. Nevertheless, she hurried out into the street and looked around, but there was not a soul to be seen there either.

Despite her painfully strong heartbeats, she ventured up and down the street for a few minutes; not really because she was hoping to find anything at this point, but more so because she felt this strong uneasiness that was hard to calm down from.

Who the hell would break into her home now? There was no reason to. She had nothing of value that was easy to take; Of course, her trees were valuable, but only to people who knew how to handle them. And it would be hard to sell them since her style was fundamentally recognizable, especially here where there were much fewer bonsai growers than in the home country of her parents.

So, was this break-in connected to whatever was happening to her?

Emika’s heart started beating. If that was true… if that was really the case… then wasn’t that great news? She just had to set a trap for whoever that was, and wait for them to return, then squeeze some answers out of them. Right? Thinking about this objectively… She was already afflicted with a condition that was slowly killing her and served as a perfect fatal defence mechanism at the same time. What could go wrong?