Pillar 1: Communication:
Send us a message once you have secured your item.
Pillar 2: Stealth navigation:
Navigate through campus to collect your artifact without raising suspicion.
Pillar 3: Detection:
Secure the artifact, and bring it back with you.
Pillar 4: Distractions:
As needed, create distractions that would prevent someone from following you or noticing what you are doing
Note: For the purposes of this exercise, these should be small distractions. We don’t want to attract attention. See Pillar 2.
For Pillar 3, the only artifact I had secured were the notes I had copied down in Aurielle’s room. That would have to be enough. I hadn’t created a distraction for Pillar 4, but I had successfully hidden from Coral. Did that count? For Pillar 2, as far as I knew,no one had seen me. That left Pillar 1, communication. I couldn’t send a leaf message on campus. Should I try to climb back over the wall and send one from the other side?
The rain was increasing by the second, and I wanted to run back to campus, but the leaf messages were the only communication method I could think of. I turned around and used the unstable grapefruit stack to climb over again, noting that I should probably disperse that before I went back. Rain splashed my head, sharp and cold, as I faced the California black oak and examined its tissues.
“You are the most majestic black oak I’ve ever seen,” I said. A moment after the compliment, her leaves floated down to me, and I readied my message. I kept the pencil Callan had given me in the small bag I carried at almost all times, and I used that to link the message to him and sent it off. Then I scaled the tree, said a quick thank you, moved the grapefruit so they would look like they had fallen randomly from the trees during the rainstorm, and began to run toward the academy building.
My heart was racing and my clothes were soaked through by the time I entered the central vein. Thankfully, no one seemed to notice my heightened state as they were all in the business of shaking off their costumes, getting their hair blow-dried by the tree affinities, or brewing extra-hot mugs of tea.
I joined my friends, who were waiting in line for their own hot beverages.
“B! There you are. We were worried when it started raining and we couldn’t find you,” Yasmin said.
“All good. Though I got soaked, obviously.” I shimmied in my forest sprite costume, and water flung to the ground. An aquatic affinity walked by and, with the wave of their hands and a singsong Floracantus, the water flopped into a bucket they were carrying.
My heart was still racing as we collected our tea. It felt wrong not to tell my friends what I was doing, but I had a feeling there might be time for that down the road, if any of what the Root andVine Society was doing ended up being important. For now, I listened to their animated conversation about the social goings-on of the night.
My eyes locked with Hollis’s as he entered the room half an hour later, shaking his head to the side to dispel a sheet of water from his fern frond crown. He grinned and winked at me, and I wondered what artifacthehad acquired.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The next morning, I was walking through the flowering gardens after an affinity studies session with the florals. After all the rain the previous night, the flowers were extra vibrant, and it had been a good time to conduct a study on nectar dilution.
As I neared the edge of the flower garden, the petals of a nearby honeysuckle began to shake, sprinkling pollen dust over the front of my dress.
“What on earth?” I looked around as I wiped the pollen from my outfit. Seeing no one, I turned back to the bush.
And that was when I saw the tiny piece of paper, folded into a flower shape and nestled into the plant. I carefully withdrew it and unfolded the paper. The typewritten font was familiar.
Come now. The usual place.
Without a moment’s hesitation, I hurried to the first petal portal. As I was getting ready to climb, Hollis appeared.
“Can I join you? No tree affinity.”
“Sure, but how did you do it the first time?”
“My lights led along the ground the whole way after I crossed over the wall. Tree walking is faster.”
Together, Hollis and I tree walked the path I had taken before, him walking close behind me to catch the tree trail that was created for me.
“We were all impressed with your potted fern costume last night,” I called over my shoulder.
