Summer knelt in her garden and stared at the unfamiliar stem pushing through the soil. She'd planted every cutting herself, catalogued every graft, but this one didn't match her records. The leaves were wrong — broader, with edges that caught the light differently. She pulled her notebook from her pocket and flipped through two seasons of failures. None of her grafts had taken root in this spot. She'd cleared it last week. The stem shouldn't exist at all. But here it was, thick and healthy, with a bud at the tip that shimmered faintly in the morning sun. Summer touched the bud with one finger. The petals felt cool and smooth, like nothing she'd grown before. She sat back on her heels. Three days until the festival, and something impossible was growing in her garden.

Summer sat beside the stem and opened her notebook to a blank page. She'd spent two seasons recording failures, but this plant wasn't in her notes. It had appeared on its own, which meant she could study it — learn what made it different. Maybe even reproduce it. She built a trellis against the garden's east wall and carefully trained cuttings from the mystery plant along its wooden frame. The stems took easily, spreading faster than anything she'd grown before. Within hours, new buds formed along each cutting. By evening, those buds had opened into shimmering flowers that spread their roots into the soil below. Summer stepped back and watched the blooms climb higher, then noticed something wrong. The trellis vines were pushing into her other plants, wrapping around stems she'd spent months cultivating. The mystery flowers were choking everything else out. She grabbed her shears and started cutting, but for every stem she removed, two more appeared. By nightfall, half her garden was covered in silver petals. Summer sat in the dirt and stared at what she'd done. She'd wanted something that couldn't be replicated, and now she had something she couldn't control.