Violet’s breathing was even and deep now, and Iris knew that she had to go. Her eyes still closed, she ran over her route one last time, checking and double-checking that she remembered everything.
She opened her eyes and got to her feet.
Then she sat down on the edge of her bed, suddenly intensely, overwhelmingly afraid.
It would be easy – so so easy – to stay here in the Garden, she knew. She could start drinking the morning tea and the warm bedtime milk again and fall back into the haze, slip under the consciousness of the realities of life, float away into the world of having no power and never having to make any decisions. She had her tasks, her duties, her routines. It was all so familiar here and that made it safe in ways that the world out there was not.
She had no idea who or
