of Mimas unfold above—trunks that took over when lightning clipped this one. The top of the tangled system disappears into low cloud. Fungi and lichen everywhere, like splatters of paint from a heavenly can. He and Maidenhair perch, most of the way up the Flatiron Building. He looks down. The floor of the forest is a dollscape a little girl might make out of acorns and ferns.
His legs go cold with thoughts of plummeting. He lowers the tarp. She’s staring at him, madness in her hazel eyes that spills out as cackling. “We’re here. We made it. This is where they want us.” She looks like someone summoned to help the most wondrous products of four billion years of life.
Here and there, solo spires rise above the giants’ chorus. They look like green thunderheads, or rocket plumes. From below, the tallest neighbors read like mid-sized incense cedars. Only now, seventy yards above the ground, can Nicholas gauge the true size of these few old ones, five times larger than the largest whale. Giants march down into the ravine the three of them climbed last night. In the middle distance, the forest broadens into denser, deeper blue. He has read about these trees and their fog. On every side, trees lap at the low, wet sky, the clouds they themselves have helped to seed. Skeins of aerial needles—knobbier and more gnarled, a different thing from the smooth shoots growing at ground level—sip the fogbanks, condensing water vapor and sieving it down the sluices of twigs and branches. Nick glances upstairs into the kitchen, where their own water-catchment system works away, running droplets into a bottle. What struck him as ingenious last night—water for nothing—turns crude compared to the tree’s invention.
Nicholas watches the drama as if thumbing an infinite flip-book. The land unfolds, ridge beyond ridge. His eyes adjust to the baroque abundance. Forests of five different shades bathe in the mist, each one a biome to creatures still to be discovered. And every tree he looks on belongs to a Texas financier who has never seen a redwood but means to gut them all to pay off the debt he took on to acquire them.
A shift in the warmth next to him reminds Watchman. He’s not the only large vertebrate in this roost.
“If I don’t quit looking, my bladder’s going to burst.”
He watches Olivia scramble down the rope ladder to the platform below. He thinks: I really should look away. But he’s living in a tree two hundred feet above the surface of the planet. Flying squirrels have surveilled his face. Fogs from the world’s infancy turn the clock back eons, and he feels himself becoming another species.
She squats above the wide-mouthed jar and a stream rushes out of her. He has never seen a woman urinate—something a fair number of all the human males who’ve ever lived might have to say on their deathbeds. The ritual concealment suddenly seems like some strange animal behavior that might turn up on a BBC wildlife documentary, like fish that change sex when they need to, or spiders that consume their partners after mating. He hears that revered Received Pronunciation whispering off-camera, When removed from their kind, individual human beings can change in remarkable ways.
She knows he’s watching. He knows she knows. Here, raw, now: the culture suited to this place. When she’s done, she tips the jar over the side of the platform. The wind takes the liquid and disperses it. Twenty feet, and her waste atomizes into the fog. Needles will rework it into something alive again. “My turn,” he says, when she comes back. And then, from above, she watches him crouch into the bag-lined bucket, which will go to Loki for removal and compost when he shows up next.
They take breakfast alfresco. Their chill fingers feed hazelnuts and dried apricots into mouths that hang open, awed by the view. Sitting still and looking: their new job description. But they’re humans, and soon enough their eyes fill up. She says, “Let’s explore.” The main trails from the Grand Ballroom are laid out with loops and lobster claws, rope ladders, places to hook a carabiner to. She gives him the harness. Then she makes one for herself from three nylon climbing cables. “Barefoot. You’ll stick better.”
He wobbles out on a waving branch. The wind blows, and Mimas’s entire crown dips and bucks. He’ll die. Plunge twenty stories onto a bed of ferns. But he’s getting used to the idea, and there are