Jack reached the clearing at dawn to find someone else already climbing his beanstalk. The stranger was twenty feet up, moving fast but wrong, grabbing at leaves instead of the woody stems that would hold weight. Above the clouds, a roar split the morning air. The giant was awake early, which meant Jack's careful timeline had just collapsed. The beanstalk twisted upward in a spiral of purple and green, its leaves glowing faint blue where the morning light hit them. Jack had planted it in his mother's garden three days ago, trading her seed stock for five beans that looked like polished stones. The seller had called them elemental, which Jack hadn't understood until the stalk punched through the clouds overnight. Now a stranger was climbing toward a castle Jack had barely escaped the first time, and the giant who lived there already knew his face. Jack grabbed the stalk and started up. His hands found the thick woody sections by memory, the places where the spiral created natural handholds. The stranger was faster but sloppy, and Jack could hear leaves tearing thirty feet overhead. Another roar echoed down, closer this time. The giant was moving. Jack needed that harp sitting in the castle's great hall, the golden one that played itself and sang history like a living thing. Men would pay a year's food to hear it for an hour. But he couldn't get it if this fool woke the giant before Jack even reached the clouds. The stranger's foot slipped. Jack lunged upward and caught the man's ankle before he fell. The stranger looked down, eyes wide with terror and something else, something hungry. Jack recognized it then, the same desperation that had made him climb the first time. The man whispered two words: "My daughter." Jack's grip tightened. He couldn't let the stranger go up alone and die, and he couldn't go back down and let his mother starve. So he made the only trade that made sense. He would take them both up together, past the giant he'd barely fooled once, and pray his poor disguise would buy them enough time to run.