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The enchanted plants were still singing as their world crashed down around them.

Terlu passed by one of Yarrow’s cousins as he carted out a pot with a flowering bush that was belting out a wordless melody in a high soprano.

Scanning the greenhouse, Terlu spotted Yarrow in the center, digging at the roots of one of the tulip trees, with his father beside him.

Neither were talking, both focused on the task at hand. The tulip tree crooned, a baritone.

Lotti was in the rafters shouting directions to the gardeners and sentient plants who swarmed beneath her.

Everyone was moving at top speed, working together to get the singing trees out of the soil and to haul the pots with flowers into a safe greenhouse before the temperature went haywire.

At least half the pots had already been transported, which was remarkable.

Terlu called up to her, “Lotti, can you see where it started?”

“What?”

Louder, she asked, “Where did the failure start?” She knew she should help with the digging and hauling, but if she could pinpoint the cause…

She couldn’t stop this greenhouse from dying, but perhaps knowing the source could help her predict which greenhouse would be next to fall.

If she could guess that with any degree of accuracy, they could move the plants to safety preemptively.

It was worth sparing a few precious seconds now.

“Firrrst cracks were on the east waaall,” Dendy said as he passed her, propelling his root ball forward with his leaves. He spared one tendril to point eastward.

She hurried to the east wall of windows, where the cracks were continuing to spread. Each new crack sounded like a slap. Swarming over the glass, multiple talking plants—the ivy, the orchid, and the fireweed—were casting the crack-healing spell as quickly as they could.

That won’t help if the temperature fluctuates like it did in the last one.

But she let them try.

“What doesn’t make sense is why all the spells fail at once,” Terlu said, mostly to herself.

It had to be that one failure triggered the next, not that they all coincidentally failed simultaneously every time.

All the greenhouse-creation spells were linked to one another, as she’d discovered when she tried to pry them apart, which meant it had to be a cascading failure, didn’t it?

So if she were able to stop the first malfunction…

Kneeling, she traced the cracks from the floor upward.

What caused the failure? She’d thought it was simply the age of the ingredients.

If that were the case, though, then the greenhouses should be failing in the order in which they were created, and they weren’t.

She knew for a fact that this greenhouse was a later one.

According to the dates in the notebooks, Laiken had only experimented with the singing plants well after he’d collected seedlings from around the Crescent Islands.

The earlier greenhouses were all straightforward recreations of environments on the other islands.

In fact, the very earliest ones held vegetables, and the majority of those had shown no sign of failure yet.

So why this greenhouse? And why now?

Was it just random, or was there a reason?

She thought of Laiken’s ghost and wondered if it had any idea as to what was causing this.

I have to find a way to ask. This couldn’t be allowed to continue to happen.

It didn’t matter how much of his code she cracked or how many spells she puzzled out if it was all going to be destroyed in one catastrophic moment.

Around her, the chaos swirled as the people and plants worked and shouted, but she blocked it all out.

Working alone, she followed the cracks, tracing them to their source.

All of them started from the foundation and spread upward.

Why? What does that mean? Could the failure come from the earth somehow?

Had Laiken buried the ingredients? She knew from his notebooks that he hadn’t.

He’d kept them open to the air, for a wider area of influence—he’d specifically noted how he’d discovered that was necessary.

So why did all the cracks begin at the ground?

Why not the cupola, which had to suffer the bombardment of wind, rain, and snow?

Why not the seams between the windows, which had to be the weakest points?

One of the sentient plants shrieked for help.

Questions can wait; there are plants to rescue.

Leaving the mystery, Terlu hurried back to the others. Yarrow passed her a trowel, and she began to dig at the roots of a flowering bush, moving the soil away from the soft naked strands beneath the plant. The flowers crooned in a minor key, punctuated by wail-like arpeggios.

Up in the rafters, Lotti began to howl, “Cold coming!”

Terlu looked up to see frost spreading across the cracked glass.

It blossomed in flowerlike patterns, as the pillars and rafters became coated in ice.

The leaves of the bush in front of her shriveled, and the flowers collapsed into shriveled, brown knots.

Its song quieted into a whisper, then fell silent.

Oh no, it’s happening. She’d hoped they’d have more time—

“Grab what you can,” Yarrow called, “and get out now !”

The sentient plants, who had been through this before, sprinted for the doorway. The humans were slower, but Yarrow abandoned the roots of the singing tree he was working on and instead herded his relatives out the door.

His father continued to struggle with the roots of his tulip tree.

“Leave it,” Terlu said. “The temperature will fall too fast. You’ll die too.”

“Help me,” Birch cried.

She dug into the roots with her trowel, hacking at them— better a wounded plant than no plant at all . The tree sang louder, a kind of wailing keen, as its petals shriveled into brown husks. The faint floral smell deepened into a medicinal kind of odor, the stench of decay.

Yarrow returned and the three of them unearthed the tree. They dragged it by the branches to the doorway and through. Yarrow slammed the door. He turned on his father who, without his cane, was sagging against a pillar. “What were you thinking?” Yarrow exploded. “I said to get out!”

“I couldn’t leave it,” Birch said. One of the cousins handed him his cane, and he clutched it. “I left before. I’m not going to do it again.”

“Your heart—”

“—is fine.”

One of the others gasped, and they broke off their argument to look to the door. Frost spread over the glass, and then a second later, it melted away. Terlu sank to the ground and panted.

“Nasty spellwork,” Birch said.

“What do you mean?” Terlu asked, looking up.

He waved his hand at the door. “That’s not natural.”

Well, obviously it wasn’t. None of the greenhouses on Belde were natural. “I think it’s a cascading failure,” Terlu said, “stemming from a single weak point in—”

“There’s no evidence of any enemy at work,” Yarrow said to his father, over her. He was scowling at Birch, and his hands were clenched at his sides. “I’ve been here longer than you, and since you left, there hasn’t been a single soul to step foot on Belde in—”

Terlu got to her feet. “Wait, what enemy? What are you talking about?”

“It’s one of the many things we disagreed on,” Birch said.

He leaned heavily on his cane, and she noticed that his muscles were shaking.

He’d pushed himself too hard, too fast. She glanced around, looking for a chair to shoo him into, but he wasn’t budging.

Continuing to shake, he scowled at his son.

“I believe that the failures aren’t natural.

They’re caused by a spell, cast by a rival sorcerer. ”

“And I say there’s no rival sorcerer,” Yarrow snapped. “How could there be? Laiken spoke to no one, and there’s no one but us on the island. It’s simply the old spells decaying. That’s all. Entropy, a natural occurrence. If we can revitalize the spells—”

“They’ll still fail.” Birch stabbed the ground with his cane for emphasis.

“I am telling you, there’s something rotten at the core of this island.

Say you’re right, and there’s no rival sorcerer.

Only Laiken. Still doesn’t mean it’s natural.

It could be his fault—he could have sabotaged his creation.

He didn’t want the greenhouses outlasting him and so he ensured they’d die. ”

“You’re wrong,” Yarrow said. “He wanted them to last forever. In fact, it was his major concern.” He turned to Terlu. “You’ve studied the spells. Tell my father it’s just time and decay.”

Terlu froze. She hadn’t told any of Yarrow’s relatives that she’d studied Laiken’s spells. What if Birch asked why she’d studied them? What if he connected the plants’ activities to her? What would he say when he realized she broke the law?

But Birch didn’t even glance at her. He was too busy glowering at Yarrow, his bushy eyebrows so low that they nearly swallowed his eyes.

Maybe he doesn’t care that I’ve cast spells?

Or maybe he was too distracted to care now, but he would later when he’d had a chance to think about it.

“The island’s cursed,” Birch insisted. “We should have never come back, and you should have left with us.”

“There’s no curse,” Yarrow said.

Mulling it over, Terlu frowned at the door to the dying greenhouse.

Actually, she thought, it would explain a few things—the suddenness and randomness of the failures, for example.

What if there was a spell intended to cause the failures?

If there was, then no matter how many greenhouses they fixed, they’d still continue to fail.

“And no rival sorcerer,” Yarrow said stubbornly.