Cassie had never actually entered the bramble from the other side of the fence.

She’d been past it innumerable times, flying a kite in the open gopher-holed expanse of the park grounds, or riding her bicycle along the boundary path, or occasionally in search of an escaped frisbee—but not in the dark. Still, even after all these years, she had no trouble finding her way to the parkland entrance; the sidewalk was well-lit by streetlights, and the bollards dividing asphalt from weedy dirt glimmered with retroreflectors.

Her hurried walk turned into an anxious trot as soon as she crossed into the parkland; the waning moon cast just enough light for her to navigate the path. If her mother sat upstairs in a darkened room long enough for her eyes to adjust and stared out the window, she would see Cassie coming, but that was a risk Cassie felt she had little choice but to take. She’d already done what destination obfuscation she could by taking the long way around.

For a moment, Cassie worried that it wouldn’t work from this direction, that she wouldn’t be able to meet Rubus, that the vector of the miraculous only operated along one axis: between house and bramble. Maybe coming round this way was the equivalent of pulling the wardrobe away from the wall and trying to axe into Narnia from the backside. But Rubus was a being, not a place—wasn’t he? Did it matter?

Before Cassie could further develop this line of thought, she saw him. She stumbled a little in her relief, and slowed to a walk. She was panting.

Perhaps in deference to his neighborhood visibility, he appeared completely human. He was even wearing shoes. He strode to meet her, stopping abruptly a dozen paces away, looking as agitated as she felt. “Cassie.” His eyes searched her face. “Cassie, what’s wrong?”

“This is as far as you can go, isn’t it?” she blurted. It was not at all how Cassie had planned to open this conversation—although she hadn’t really had a plan. And it was relevant.

“Yes.” Rubus stood on the path before her, tense as the first time they’d met. Cassie shivered.

“What happens if you try to go further?”

“I can’t,” he said simply.

She began to weep. Rubus looked stricken. “Please,” he begged, “come to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”

Cassie closed the distance between them at a run and grabbed his hands. “Your bramble,” she cried, “they’re going to rip it out!” She was nearly blind with tears. “They’re going to kill you!”

Rubus froze. The wind began to blow. “When?” it whispered. “When?”

“Three days!” Cassie strangled her shriek down to a whisper. The wind tugged at her hair, and a sound too low to hear rumbled beneath her feet. “To build a fence. A new fence at the property line. I don’t think I can prevent it; I might be able to delay them by claiming they’ve got the wrong address, or canceling Tyler’s order, but there’s no permanent explanation I can give that doesn’t end with me involuntarily committed, and then I won’t be able to help at all.”

Squinting against the wind, Cassie looked up into his face. His eyes were wide. Something roiled underground.

“I can’t stop them,” he said. His voice was the crackling thunder of a tree falling to the forest floor, and his hair whipped in the wind. “They’ll come with chainsaws and chemicals; I’ve seen it happen to other plants. They cut the cane to the ground and rend the roots with rotary claws, then poison the rhizomes and raw earth left behind. A child with a ball, a man with shears, I can fight. But not this.” He grabbed Cassie’s shoulders, eyes wild. The ground trembled. “Cassie, I cannot stop them.”

His grip on her shoulders was so fierce it hurt, but Cassie didn’t care. She reached up and placed her hands on either side of his face. Thorns pricked her fingers but she didn’t let go. “I’m going to get you out,” she vowed.

“How?” The ground quaked again.

There was only one way. “I’m going to transplant you.”

⥈

The light was broken in the garage, so Cassie worked by the dazzling pinprick of her phone propped against a can of paint. Quietly, so as not to wake her mother, she shuffled the few plant containers she could find into a row. Almost everything her mother had was already in use. This wouldn’t be enough.

Cassie turned to the shadow lurking between a rickety wire-rack shelf draped in a deflated six-foot Christmas lawn snowman and a bicycle with a torn seat cover. “How big were you when you first became aware—when you recall your first memory?”

“Larger than what this can hold,” Rubus replied flatly, not bothering to step into the light. Cassie couldn’t even see his eyes.

She bit fretfully at a hangnail. There was no time to go to a store. They had to start tonight.

“Wait here.”

Cassie raced inside silently and wrenched open the cabinet under the sink. There it was: the Bag of Bags. Several Bags of Bags, in fact, stuffed firmly against the piping like crinkling plastic polyps. Their time had come at last. Cassie excised them and carried them back into the garage.

“Here,” she said, handing one wad to Rubus, “pick out all the thick-plastic ones—most of those should have the little arrow-triangle ‘recycle’ symbol on them—and triple-bag them. Toss the flimsy ones, they’ll break with the weight of the soil.” A short while later, a cluster of semi-rigid bag containers listed around the short line of plant containers like a ghostly armada. Cassie looked at Rubus hopefully, desperately. “Is this enough?”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

He crouched over his last bag, pinching the plastic between his long fingers. “Will it all fit in your car?”

“Yes. Barely. It’ll be tight.” It wouldn’t be the first time Cassie had driven with a plant on her lap, if necessary.

“Then we’ll have to try.” He stood, rising out of silhouette and into shadow.

“I could rent a truck…”

“No.” Rubus’ voice was brittle. “Either this is enough, or nothing is.”

Cassie couldn’t see his face, but in none of her memories could she recall him sounding like this; hollow and splintering. “The tumbleweed traveled hundred of miles,” Cassie said, unsure if she was trying to reassure Rubus or herself. “Even the ficus moved in her pot.”

“I am not a tumbleweed. Or a ficus.”

Cassie turned to Rubus and actually seized him by his shirt. “No,” she agreed fiercely, “You are Rubus armeniacus, the Armenian blackberry. You are an invasive species. Your kind escaped from cultivation and established themselves so thoroughly in this part of the country you will never be removable. I am going to plant you on a sunny hill by a stream with... birds, and... raccoons, and... and acres of space to grow.”

Rubus lifted Cassie’s hands, still fisted around the thin cloth of his shirt, to his lips and pressed them there for a long moment. The pale white light of Cassie’s phone glinted in his hair—thorns or curls, Cassie couldn’t tell. “Is this place far away?” he asked finally, mouth moving against her knuckles.

“No. There are many places like that. I’ll be surveying a lot of them for my fieldwork.”

“Will it take long to get there?”

He’d never been in a car—never gone faster than a run or further than the range of his bramble. He had no tumbling wanderlust, only a need to grow and fruit. He must be in pure existential terror. “No,” Cassie replied. “Maybe half an hour. The trickiest part is going to be car accessibility.”

Rubus nodded against her hands but said nothing. Cassie took a deep breath. “Let’s get started.”

They worked until dawn. Crouched together in the bower, close as always, but this time scooping great mounds of dirt into the ersatz containers, Cassie with a trowel, Rubus with his hands. It was hard to see exactly how he did it; he seemed to simply plunge his fingers into the soil, as though it offered no resistance, and then sank in up to his bony wrists, before raising his hands up again with a massive clump of dirt held fast between them. Startled earthworms coiled wetly in the mass; Rubus murmured to them apologetically as he lowered the dirt into each bag.

Cassie’s efforts were puny by contrast, chipping away at the dense earth with the tiny trowel. She filled perhaps one bag for every four of Rubus’. By the time they were finished, a rough crater existed where once the soft duff lay. Cassie wanted to cry, with loss and fear and exhaustion, but she swallowed her tears for Rubus’ sake. Whatever she felt couldn’t compare to what he must be going through.

“You can begin?” she asked hoarsely, smearing dirt across her cheek as she pulled a strand of hair from her eye.

“Yes.” Rubus stood looking down at the array of bags in the weak gray light that had just begun to filter through the bramble, face grave. “I will begin propagating.”

Cassie nodded. “I need to sleep, but once I wake up I can get you some fertilizer, if you think it won’t burn.”

Rubus shook his head. “This is my soil,” he said quietly. “I don’t need fertilizer.”

“Do you need to sleep too?”

“No. Not yet. After the propagation, yes.”

Cassie nodded again and pulled off her gloves wearily. “I should go in before anybody else wakes up. I’ll come out and check on you later.” As she turned to go, a thorn caught gently at her sleeve. A moment later, she felt Rubus’ fingers brush her arm. “Cassie…”

Cassie turned and buried her face in Rubus’ shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her and nosed her hair. “I’m sorry,” she choked. “I should have told you earlier about selling the house… I didn’t think they’d kill you for it… I thought you’d still be here, safe, and I could come visit…”

Rubus waited until she stopped talking. “You don’t need to apologize,” he said softly. “You are saving me. I love you.”

Cassie’s heart stopped. He loved her. He loved her. She already knew that, of course—it was obvious—but did she love him? How on Earth would she know? There was no definitive criteria for such a thing. She didn’t think she’d ever loved before, romantically speaking. Never been in love. She’d had a few boyfriends throughout the years, and she’d certainly had feelings for them—what she could characterize as a deep fondness, an abiding concern for their happiness and wellbeing, something to mourn with tears and creature comforts when it ended. But love, the way other people talked about it, where they could think of nothing else, where it drove them to do crazy things, risk their lives—never.

Surrounded by grocery bags filled with dirt, holding tight to a fantastical being, she could easily be mistaken for crazy. But she wasn’t actually: she was operating as logically as possible under highly unusual circumstances. So she didn’t know. Didn’t know if she was in love, didn’t know what to say to Rubus, didn’t know how to leave and go to bed without addressing his statement somehow.

Something rustled at her feet. Cassie started and looked down. All around her, the bramble was alive with subtle motion and the stretching whisper of accelerated growth. Canes bowed, arching low as they searched for a bag to bury themselves in. The disturbed patch of earth in which they stood seethed as rhizomes broke the surface, knobbly and pale, and followed the canes into the bags, trailing hair-fine rootlets as they went.

Cassie would have bent over to watch the process more closely, fascinated, but Rubus still held her, rigid as a tree. His breath was shallow and irregular, and his fingers clutched at her back and hair. She looked up into eyes burning so brightly they cast shadows across his face and made the thorns in his hair glint green. His pupils were invisible. Cassie closed her own eyes and rested her head against his chest, circling her arms around him in turn, Baucis to his Philemon.

They stood entwined as the propagation susurrus surged, peaked, and abated. When at last all was quiet, Rubus breathed a long exhale and released Cassie from his grip. She held him as he sank to the earth.

“Are you all right?” she asked, hands fluttering nervously around his face and shoulders.

He nodded wearily. “Just tired.”

“Do you need anything? Water?”

“No,” he whispered. “Rest. Just rest.” He opened his eyes for a brief moment; they were dull as the dirt he sat on. “I have to go now. You won’t see me, but I’ll still be here. Rooting.”

“I understand.” Cassie kissed his brow and stepped back. Rubus sighed again, and for a moment, there was only a dappling of dawn light and shadow that looked like a man where he had lain.

Then there was nothing.