It was not uncommon to see someone running through the streets of Thelspoint on urgent business. It could be a reporter rushing back to the Spire to submit a story to the Thelspoint News Inquirer, a flight attendant for one of the dragon airlines hurrying a cart filled with meat to their scaly charge, or a pack of gnomes running to wherever it was gnomes ran to in such a hurry. Benji joined this dubious fraternity of those who were clearly late to something as he sprinted east from the university quarter, across the river, and out toward Larchgate. If the address Reena had given him was correct, the home where he needed to pick up the magical item was outside the city wall.

  The wide road leading to the gate might’ve seen its fair share of sprinters, but that didn’t mean it was particularly accommodating to them. The crowds seemed to surge in front of him, what had appeared to be openings filling with carriages, or a pack of tourists fresh off their dragon and still remembering how to walk. Thelspoint was beautiful this time of evening, its slate roofs reflecting the late afternoon sun, the winding alleys off the main road in just enough shadow to suggest something magical was happening at their ends. Statues of Varai reached their hands skyward in the god’s endless pursuit of knowledge, whether the statue was tucked into an alcove or standing massively in the middle of the road.

  With less than two hours before his university entrance exam began, Benji wished he was going fast enough not to see these sights.

  Finally, Larchgate came into view. This was where most imports entered the city, so the whole area was an ordered mess of carts lining up for inspection, merchants milling about, stablehands unhooking bridles as horses huffed impatiently. The gate itself was open. As an individual without any contraband to report, Benji hoped he would be waved through.

  “Stop right there,” said one of the guards at the gate. He had just let an Eltim pass unquestioned. The tall, blonde, nearly human creature was basking in the light just outside the wall, doing a little shuffle that could only reasonably be described as frolicking. Typical Eltim behavior.

  “Sorry,” Benji said. “What seems to be the problem?”

  The guard stared down at him. Something about the constabulary’s huge leather boots made them seem taller than they actually were. That, and the imposing Thelspoint crest on their chest, a stylized depiction of the seawall rising like a wave.

  “We’re running random inspections. Please remove your jacket.”

  Resigned, Benji unclasped the tie at his throat, then started to undo the loops of string that kept his jacket tight against his chest. As he did, the tiny pin attached to his shirt became visible. The guard paused his literal dressing down with an outstretched hand.

  “What office is that?”

  “The Office of Public Magical Items.” Benji winced. Not everyone had heard of his department, or if they had, they might disagree with their practice of loaning out valuable magical artifacts to pretty much anyone who asked.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were on official OPMI business?” the guard asked, seeming genuinely angry.

  “I . . . uh.”

  “Go on through. We need to be on the lookout for potential smugglers and dissidents, not city employees.”

  “Thank you.”

  “A word of advice? Next time wear your pin on your jacket so we don’t have to go digging for it.” He shook his head, mumbling to himself, “maybe if city employees knew how to follow protocol, we wouldn’t have so much crime in this city to begin with.”

  Benji, ego more than a little bruised, his heart sinking as he realized there was now just an hour and a half until his exam, left the gate behind and made his way into the jumble of buildings outside the wall. The warmth of the summer evening had seemed to grow throughout the embarrassing conversation. Rather than move the pin to his jacket, Benji removed his jacket altogether, letting it blow in the wind behind him as he ran toward his pickup location.

  The borrower’s house was on a deserted side street. The houses here were mostly wood, leaning into each other and topped with thatch that looked like it might go up in flame if a dragon so much as looked at it. Benji knocked on the door.

  A suspicious eye peered out as the door opened a crack. Even through the narrow slit, Benji could smell something warm and musty. It reminded him of a compost heap in a not entirely unpleasant way.

  “I’m with the Office of Public Magical Items. I’ve come to collect a . . .” He looked down at the paper Reena had given him. “A plant enfuser?”

  The door opened a little wider, revealing more of the man’s blank stare. He was perhaps in his sixties, with the sharp eyes of someone who leaves the house only infrequently, and believes fervently that there’s good reason to be suspicious of anything outside the four walls of home. He wore a yellow- and blue-striped waistcoat that had probably once been considered fashionable, but could’ve used a good wash and a half-hour of a clothworker’s time.

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  “Well, I see you’ve got one of those official pin things,” the man said. “You’d better come in so I can figure out what in Arren’s name you’re talking about.”

  Benji couldn’t have said why everyone was so fixated on his pin today. It was a promising start, at least. In the back of Benji’s mind, a clock ticked away the precious seconds before the exam. He wished he was already in the waiting area outside the examination hall, studying the last few magical theory concepts he had yet to master.

  As he walked into the living room, it became instantly clear why the home smelled of decomposition, and why its occupant had wanted a plant enfuser. Potted plants filled every corner of the room, sprawling their leaves over furniture, extending into vines that wrapped around the sconces on the wall and even ran over the oven in the kitchen. The plants were so overgrown that it was hard to even identify what color the walls had been painted. The rug in the center of the living room resembled a bed of moss.

  “So, a plant enfuser is sort of like a growing guide for a plant,” Benji explained. The man had not offered him a place to sit—not that there was really a spot available unless he wanted to peel vines off the bench or armchair. “You embed it in the soil, and the plant remembers its core growing structure. It’s good for rangy plants, because it gives them a stable shape without losing any growth.”

  The man gave him a look that clearly said, whose plants are you calling rangy? Then he introduced himself as Grenn.

  “Can’t say it rings a bell. I’ll have to check the plants in the bedroom. You stay out here.” Grenn disappeared into a room in the back. Benji thought that if he was being set up to be entombed by a rapidly growing hive of invasive plants, this was probably the place where it would happen. The clock on the back wall ticked down toward his exam, stirring the vines around it with each tick. He now had under an hour to find, collect, and return the enfuser. Not to mention making it to the examination hall. Some of his thoughts echoed Reena’s jibe that he might be better off not going through the disappointment again, when he clearly knew what the result would be. The much larger, more hardheaded part of him, wasn’t going to let that hour pass without attempting to be at the exam on time.

  Fourteen tries at passing the exam. How had it been that many?

  Time moved along. Scraping sounds emanated from the back room, as if Grenn was moving furniture around.

  More time passed. Benji began to wonder if Grenn had forgotten about him. Should he go find him? Was waiting here worse than walking uninvited into this man’s bedroom?

  “You doing alright in there?” he tried.

  There was no answer. Through the quiet, Benji thought he could hear grumbling and the sound of metal scraping against a rock. Was he digging?

  Ten minutes later, Grenn appeared, covered to the forearms in dirt and with a spade in one hand. And no enfuser in sight.

  “No luck. I can’t for the life of me remember where I stashed it. Don’t you fine OPMI folks have like an item sniffer or something?”

  “An item sniffer?”

  “You know, to sniff out items?”

  Benji couldn’t bear to go further down this road. “Unfortunately, no. That’s not a thing, I don’t think. Maybe it’s somewhere out here?”

  They looked around the room doubtfully. There were hundreds of pots and hanging baskets, each of which could theoretically have an enfuser in it. Grenn reached into his back pocket, and hurled something metal in Benji’s direction. He let his self-defense instincts take over, catching the metal object by the blade. It was another spade, fortunately dull enough that it only scraped his fingers.

  “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a project!” Grenn said.

  They set to work digging around the base of each plant, displacing dirt until they were satisfied it didn’t contain the enfuser. The item was capsule shaped, and wouldn’t be more than a couple inches long. A couple times Benji struck something hard and was filled with hope, only to have the hope dashed when he pulled a rock out of the dirt.

  There were now just thirty-five minutes until the exam. With each scrape of dirt, each stab of the spade into the soil to reveal only more soil beneath it, panic began to grow. He hated Reena for making him do this, hated himself for not knowing a better way to find the enfuser, hated the university for even having an entrance exam in the first place. He couldn’t bring himself to hate Grenn, even if the fact that he cackled each time they didn’t find the enfuser was beginning to grate on Benji’s nerves.

  Benji was so busy hating just about everything that he almost didn’t feel when the plants started guiding him.

  It wasn’t like human or animal language, of course. Plants weren’t known for their loquaciousness. But as he dug his spade in, one of the plants gave a gentle shiver, almost like a shake of the head. As if to say, I don’t have it, idiot.

  Benji was more resigned than alarmed at the fact that he was clearly losing his mind. This stuffy room seemed as fitting a place as any to let the last of one’s marbles skitter away.

  A tall bromeliad in the corner sighed. If Grenn hadn’t been there, Benji probably would’ve asked it what in Arren’s name it wanted, but instead he rose from where he had been crouched on one knee, fruitlessly excavating a massive toadstool (which wasn’t a plant anyway, he remembered with a further pang of embarrassment) and made his way to the bromeliad. The spines along its trunk swayed.

  No, not swayed. Pointed. They were all pointing to the urn next to it, which had no visible sign of plant activity. Benji leaned over the urn, expecting it to be empty. Instead, just past the lip, he saw scraggly gray roots rising from a bed of sandy soil. Next to it, purple and with the faintest glow, was the enfuser. He pulled it out triumphantly.

  And froze when he saw the time. Only twenty minutes left until the exam. He would have to run back in almost half the time it had taken him to get here.

  “Ah, I knew I’d stuck it in there!” Grenn said.

  It would’ve been reasonable for Benji to have questioned why, if he knew it was there, Grenn hadn’t pointed them in the urn’s direction in the first place. But Benji was a professional, and a professional must be courteous in the face of human insufficiency.

  “Thank you for helping me find it,” Benji replied, feeling anything but grateful. He pocketed the enfuser and started a headlong sprint back toward the wall, back up the hill into Thelspoint, hoping to make it back quickly enough to fail his exam for a fourteenth time.