A woman who works in an office tower and feels past her prime has a chance encounter in an elevator that leads her to the botanical garden on the top flower and a strange transformation.
This is an odd story that didn’t go quite where I expected it to. It seemed that we were being set up for the “ugly duckling finds a magical portal” trope, but the garden at the top of the office tower is not uniformly positive – it is described in terms of decay and rot as much as fecundity and brightness, with dark shadows and mysterious, menacing corners. And the person Candice meets, Ben Stanley, is a disconcerting and shape-shifting creature who does not seem to have the best intentions; Candice does come out of the experience changed, but the change is ambiguous at best.