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“W hat is this place?” said on an exhale, her pulse loud in her ears. She tore her eyes from the scene and looked to Sonder.

“Ah.” He’d removed his coat and stood with his hands in his trouser pockets, looking more nervous than when he’d taken her into the shadows and said he wanted to show her something. “Well, some would say this is the last vestige of my sanity unfurling.” Sonder ran a hand through his hair, a grin tipping up the corners of his lips. “But I call it research.”

Gingerly pushing back overzealous vines, Sonder ushered her toward the tree trunk, another twisted hawthorn she noticed as they approached it. Two sets of bones were held there, nearly invisible for the flora, but a sliver could be seen here and there, the skeletons side by side like lovers entombed in vines.

“This is the epicentre,” he explained. “It all seems to originate from this body, all these vines and flora. When you wrote that paper on mycelium and its connectivity to the rest of the whole, to other plants, I began to think perhaps that’s what this place is.”

reached out to brush her fingers along a dark violet bud, its stem entwined around the radius bone of the corpse Sonder was referencing.

This time, the migraine began at the crest of her skull, blooming like a flower, making her sway on her feet. She tore her hand away before Sonder could notice, but not before she saw the woman from her room. The one in bed, in agony, her veins turning black. The one from the giant portrait in Sonder’s sitting room.

“Why have you shown me this?” she asked him in awe.

“Because I believe this is the final piece you need. To understand how to be rid of the Plague.”

started. “Me?”

”Yes, you. There is something we’re missing and I believe the secret is in the flora. We both know this isn’t natural. Lungs and hearts and other organs don’t sprout flowers. They don’t grow things foreign to our”—he moved his hands, pacing back and forth in front of a woody, perennial plant—“our planet .”

’s pulse beat strong in her palms, her throat, her chest.

“I’m no botanist, but I know these aren’t natural. That fresh graves don’t bloom like this and push bodies up from the depths of the soil when they've been buried properly . —” He ran his hand over his jaw, then his hair, making it stand up in places. “What if—” He stopped again.

“Say it, Sonder.”

He paused his pacing. Looked her dead in the eye. “What if the Plague victims aren’t infected?”

“What do you mean?” She’d toyed with mad ideas, of course she had. But they were just that— mad .

“There’s something more to this. It doesn’t follow how viruses and diseases work. It isn’t contagious, it selects humans seemingly at random. What if it’s not an infection or disease at all? But something else?”

“These are the ravings of a madman, Dr Frankenstein.”

“Of course they are. But it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

It did. Jesus , it really did.

“Sonder, where did you get the cadavers for this?”

“This is the part where you may run for the hills. Have me arrested. Hell, committed .”

“They’re your parents, aren’t they?”

He nodded somberly. “They are.”

Her heart broke for him. For his parents. For all the beauty their deaths caused. Because it was nothing but Juliet’s kiss, Macbeth’s decapitation, the murder of Desdemona. Achilles mourning Patroclus. “Sonder, I’m so sorry.”

A gale howled outside. He sank onto a stool, looking older and yet somehow younger. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I’ve never shown this to anyone before.”

approached him and slipped her hand into his. Immediately, he clasped his fingers around her palm like a lifeline. “Let’s go back to the main house,” she said.

A bit rattled, he led her through the grounds, the wind whipping her hair until it stung her face. Back inside the drafty house, he still held onto her hand and led her to a room that made her heart ache even more. If she thought his Trinity office was a severe, academic haven that encapsulated him, his study at home was downright draconian. It was a living memoriam of Sonder Murdoch with its black, panelled walls, masculine leather and dark wood furniture, and a full wall of specimen jars, various organs floating in ethyl alcohol.

Sonder squeezed her hand once, then let it drop. He poured two glasses of whiskey at the sideboard and sank into a worn leather chair, holding one of them and handing the other. She took it but abandoned it on a side table to light a fire in the hearth, realising they’d been so engrossed all day that they’d only lit the one in the library.

When the fire was roaring, illuminating all the angles of Sonder’s face, she came to sit on the coffee table in front of him. “Tell me what happened.”

He tipped the dregs of his whiskey into his mouth and unbuttoned his collar.

“I was living in County Cork, preparing to return to Dublin. I’d just gotten the position as Professor of Morbid Anatomy after I presented the board with an embalming fluid of my own design that preserves the body for a few days longer.” He rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “It provided anatomists and pathologists with more time to perform an autopsy, that’s all.”

After refilling his drink, he went on. “This was a little over six years ago. I planned to return to Trinity and begin my career, but then I received a call from my father. He wanted me to move back here to Murdoch Manor. My mother was ill, and he was worried about her. She wanted me here. Naturally, this terrified me. My strong-willed, brilliant mother, who’d all but shoved me out the front door to explore the world, to find a life that made me happy, was asking me to be by her side—under the same roof again.

“I told the Trinity Provost and the Dean of Medicine, Lynch, that I would be living outside Dublin proper rather than in the rooms set aside for me in the city, and they agreed. By the time I made it from Cork to Dublin—” He took ’s untouched glass of whiskey and drained it, setting it back on the table with a crack. “I’d never seen a live person appear dead before. One look at my mother, and I knew she had days left, if that. I stayed by her side constantly. I tried to save her, I?—”

squeezed his hand, her heart sinking because this was probably why he hated being called ‘Dr Murdoch.’

“She woke twice. Once to tell me she was glad to see me, that she loved me and my father. The next time, she was terrified. Unrecognisable. We were unrecognisable to her.” He ran a finger around the rim of his glass. “That night, she passed.” He cleared his throat. “I came downstairs to call the coroner. When I went back up, I found my father dead next to her, tears still on his cheeks. He’d drunk a vial of my new embalming fluid.” His voice hitched on the last word, and wrapped his hand in both of hers. “It killed him instantly.”

She didn’t think words would suffice. There was nothing for her to say. Nothing that could make such an unspeakable pain feel less of a burden. So she stayed silent, holding his hand, and he let her.

“She always said she wanted no wake. Only to be buried under the old, twisted hawthorn. So that’s what I did. I buried them side by side. Two lovers in one grave to feed the grove.”

He held her hand fast and they stayed that way for a while before he pulled away, gesturing to the necklace of his mother’s he’d put on her earlier. “She would have liked you. Same take no shite spirit and wild, brilliant mind.”

He reached out and took the vial in his fingers, his knuckle brushing her breastbone. The heat of his hand sent shivers up her spine. Gently dropping it back against her chest, he stood and pulled off his undone tie. “Come on.”

“Where are we going now?”

He reached over his messy desk to grab a notebook and pen, handing them to her. “You’ve heard my sob story. Now let’s get you the notes I know you’re itching to take.”

How did this man know her so well after only a couple of months? It was as if he could see inside her soul.

She took the writing materials gratefully and followed him back toward the Hawthorn Grove. Before they made it outside, he stopped at a closet that was larger than ’s entire room. He handed her a woollen peacoat that smelt like him because they’d left theirs in the atrium. She put it on and snuggled into it, while he put on an almost identical one in a deep green.

The sun had sunk lower in the sky, the temperature dropping drastically when the wind had blown in earlier. Clouds were gathering quite heavily, but it didn’t yet look like a dousing rain. They went into the magnificent atrium of ironwork and glass, immediately shucking their coats and laying them on top of the other two.

“I didn’t realise you knew how to cultivate plant life like this,” she said, flipping past his anatomical notes to a fresh page in the notebook.

“I don’t.” She glanced at him. “Not at all. This has all grown completely on its own.”

“But the temperature is tepid. Perfect conditions for flora like this to grow.” She looked around, but it didn’t actually make sense. “There are no heating lamps in here.”

“As I said, the corpses began to flower before I knew what was happening. By the time I came to visit their graves, this was already well underway.”

furiously took notes, walking around the greenhouse, stepping close to some plants to sketch them, touch them. Most were somewhat similar to things she’d seen before, but just like the flora they’d found in Lauren and all the John and Jane Does, they weren’t completely identifiable.

She gently fought past a mess of nearly sea-like fronds, approaching where the bones of Sonder’s mother lay, pushed up from the ground, nestled against the old hawthorn tree.

She knew it was her and not her husband, because there was a beautiful ring on the bone of her left ring finger. The ring had seen in her portrait. She turned to Sonder. “Do you mind if I—” She gestured with the pen toward his mother.

“Not at all. Do what you need to do.”

just caught him turning away though, as she bent over the arm, following it up until she could just make out the rib cage, covered in mycelium and moss. If only she could see the heart. Or where the heart had been. It had to be the epicentre, not just the body as a whole—the mycelium control centre.

Gingerly, she used her pen to prod at the tiny fungal root system responsible for all the foliage. After a few moments, she managed to make a small opening and could see through the left side of the rib cage.

gasped. The heart was still there, over six years later. Black as pitch and covered in congealed blood that was so thick and coarse it had become fertile soil for the mycelium. But it couldn’t be. . .

“?” Sonder called from farther away than she thought she’d left him.

Her hand slipped.

She should have worn gloves.

That was her last thought as the pain seared across her eyes, everything going green, then bloody black and glaring white.

A woman. A beautiful, frail woman. Olivia Murdoch writhed on her bed of white linens stained with her infected blood. She called out a name. For her son. The vision shifted—the white glazing into a forest of fog and snow-covered ferns. Silver teeth like daggers lunged for her throat.

released her grip on Olivia’s rib cage and staggered back, becoming entangled in vines.

Sonder was there in a second, cutting them away with a machete. “No!” she cried, but he was already through them, reaching for her. She heard the hiss. Heard the voice in her head.

Slash their hearts and gouge their eyes. Give us what is ours in time.

“Are you all right?” Sonder hauled her backwards to a pathway clear of bramble.

“Yes. I’m fine.” She put her hand to her chest. “Oh, no! Your mother’s necklace. The chain broke.” rushed back into the mess of vines, Sonder on her heels.

They both stopped dead in their tracks. They needn’t search for the small vial at all. It had fallen against the stones and smashed, the Tears of the Grieved spilling onto a leaf that was withering, decaying before their very eyes.

“Let’s get out of here.” Sonder took her hand and pulled along until they were back out in the open, cold air.

clutched the notebook and Sonder’s coat to her chest, letting him pull her into the house and lock the door.