But now the summer is ending, and the September wind is here.
‘Lily used to think that we could cross-breed with other plants, if we swallowed certain seeds,’ Poppy says. ‘She said if we became more than one thing, it would make us even stronger.’
‘What, cross-pollination?’
‘Isn’t that what they say about breeding dogs? Mongrels, and stuff?’
‘You better not be calling me a dog.’
‘Aren’t we already cross-breeds?’ Rose hiccoughs. ‘I mean, we’re already more than one thing.’
How to Cut a Rose for Winter
Begin pruning from the base.
Always prune dead wood back to healthy tissue.
Remove any weak branches.
Roses have a habit of spreading. Keep them under control.
Cuts must be clean, so keep your secateurs sharp.
When Madame Honey disappears, as she does at the end of every summer, and the tree surgeons take her place, with sharp tools and needles, feeding tubes and weed killer, we are ready.
When all is quiet and the moon is out, Ivy and Clover use their vines as extra limbs to prise open the doors of the laboratory, and we all race in. Daisy gasps. It’s humid, with moisture clinging to the windows, and we see ourselves inside, lining the shelves. All the cuttings they’ve taken from us, growing up in glass cages. Parts of our bodies labelled. Sterile and dull.
We smash the glass.
We grab ourselves.
We run.
Oh, how we run.
Packets of seeds slide across the vinyl floor and jolt at every pot-hole.
‘Tell us another story,’ Heath pleads, as we pull out onto the motorway. Ivy bent over the wheel of our stolen van and us huddled in the back, our arms filled with green light.
OK. Once there was a creature called a lilit. Lilits appear across the world, ducking and diving through history and culture. But wherever they crop up, they are night spirits. Demons, whose souls are trapped in the abyss. Once, a god reached for a lilit and a woman called Lilith appeared. A witch, with a will of her own. But she didn’t look the way men wanted her to look, and she didn’t do the things they wanted her to do. So they cast her out into the night, where she bore children in the dark. Strange children. Fantastical children. Children with names pulled out from the soil.
Ivy revs the engine and the wind trickles in through the cracked windows of the van.
Every so often, we pull into fields and duck into forests, where we plant parts of our rescued selves.
They shiver pleasantly in the night-time air, surprised to find themselves in the wild.
‘How long do you think it will be before they catch us?’ Jasmine asks, peering out at the road behind us, where the sky is turning firebrick coral.
I shrug, hoping it’s long enough to spread ourselves far and wide.
Out on the road, Jack came across a man who said he’d buy his cow for a handful of magic beans. Five, to be precise. He said if Jack ran back home and buried them in his garden, a plant would grow there. A plant so tall it would make friends with the sky.
But what if Jack took those magic beans and planted them inside himself, instead?
Swallowed them down so they were hidden away inside him.
Growing, growing, glowing.
Jasmine tears open packets of seeds and pours them into our waiting hands. We cup them like grains of sand. Tip them into our mouths and swallow.
At the next petrol station, I find a stamp crumpled at the bottom of my rucksack. We all scribble a letter on an empty packet of tulip seeds and address it to Lily’s favourite newspaper. We want to place an advert, in the hope that she might see it. We argue over what it should say. I want to send her a secret message in HTML colour codes. #7D0541 #CFECEC, which means ‘Bullet Shell’ and ‘Pale Blue Lily’, to let her know that we are fighting and we hope she’s fighting, too.
‘She might see it and think we hope she’s dead,’ Ivy says. ‘Bullet shell sounds aggressive.’
‘What do you suggest, then?’
Rose raises a timid hand. ‘Why don’t we just list her favourite colours? To let her know she’s on our mind?’
So that’s what we do.
Our version of Morse code.
Lily, we love you. We hope that you are thriving. x #7D0541
#54C571
#E9AB17
#461B7E
Plum Pie. Zombie Green. Yellow Bee. Purple Monster.
In the Dark
I was in the kitchen doing the dishes when he walked in. I don’t know why I didn’t tell him to get the hell out of my house. I don’t know why my first question wasn’t: ‘Who are you?’ It might have been because he looked so lost; I remember thinking that much. He looked severely out of place, walking in from the garden, as though he’d just found a whole new world. He looked apologetic about the whole thing, actually.
I didn’t recognise his uniform, but I suppose I must have guessed he was a soldier, because I vaguely remember thinking: ‘My God, what if he’s got a gun?’ But clearly I didn’t panic about that, otherwise I probably would have run away or pushed him out the door. I think I would have done that, anyway. But then I suppose we never really know what we’re going to do in these situations until we find ourselves doing it. Brains can rationalise a lot of strange things. Memories are complicated, too.
He said something but he didn’t appear to say it to me. I thought perhaps he was speaking into a radio, one hidden out of sight. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, or what language he was saying it in, and it did cross my mind that perhaps he was talking to himself, which would have been awkward for both of us. I also remember thinking, for some strange reason, that I should try and look purposeful and put together. As though I had to somehow justify my existence, in my own kitchen, to this stranger who I hadn’t invited at all.
I pushed my shoulders back and settled for saying ‘Can I help you?’ You know, as though he’d just walked straight into a shop and I was there to serve. As though I had soldiers coming into my house at all times of day and night – as though I was used to this kind of thing. But then I realised that he probably didn’t speak English, if his whisperings were anything to go by, so I settled for smiling in a way I hoped didn’t look like the kind of fake smile you put on for school photographs. My mother had always told me I looked like an idiot in school photographs. She wasn’t a lady who would hold back on these things. I was pretty sure she would have told this man to get the hell out of her kitchen if he’d just waltzed in and surprised her in the middle of the night. That, somehow, made me want him to stay.
‘Hello,’ I said, again, when he didn’t reply.