of the saw and a slight breeze might lead to manslaughter.
That night, Loki and Sparks arrive at last. Loki ascends into Mimas’s upper camp. Sparks stays below as sentry. “Sorry we took so damn long. There’s been a little . . . infighting back at the camp. Also, Humboldt and their troops have the whole hillside cordoned off. Two nights ago, they chased us. They got Buzzard. He’s locked up.”
“They’re watching the tree at night?”
“We waited for the first chance to slip through.”
The scout hands over precious supplies—packets of instant soup, peaches and apples, ten-grain cereal, couscous mix. Just add warm water. Watchman studies the goods. “We’re not being spelled out?”
“We can’t risk it right now. Moss-Eater and Graywolf got spooked by the death threats and went home. The entire LDF is stretched thin on the ground. We’re having some internal communication issues. In fact, we’re pretty hosed at the moment. Can you stay up just one more week?”
“Of course!” Maidenhair says. “We can stay up forever.”
Forever might be easier, Watchman thinks, if he, too, were hearing from beings of light. Loki shivers in the candlelight. “Man, it’s cold up here. That wet wind goes right through you.”
Maidenhair says, “We don’t feel it anymore.”
“Much,” Watchman qualifies.
Loki harnesses up. “Gotta head down before they trap Sparks and me. Watch out for Climber Cal. Serious. Humboldt has this guy who scoots up trunks bareback, with just his spikes and a big loop of cable. He’s been all kinds of trouble at other tree-sits.”
“Sounds like a forest legend,” Watchman says.
“He’s not.”
“He’s taking people out of trees by force?”
“There are two of us,” Maidenhair declares. “And we’ve got our balance now.”
THE LOGGERS STOP COMING. There’s nothing more to argue over. Resupply from LDF ground support dries up, too. “We must still be under siege,” Watchman says. But they can see no blockade down on the surface. Humans might well have vanished from everywhere but the fossil record. High up in the canopy, they see no animals larger than flying squirrels, who nest in the warmth of their bodies at night.
Neither of them can say how many days pass. Nick marks each morning on a hand-drawn calendar, but by the time he pees and sponges clean and eats breakfast and dreams some more of a collective artwork that could do justice to a forest, he often can’t remember if he has marked off the day already or not.
“What does it matter?” Maidenhair asks. “The storms are almost over. It’s warming up. The days are getting longer. That’s all the calendar we need.”
Whole afternoons pass as Watchman sketches. He draws the mosses that sprout up in every crevice. He sketches the usnea and other hanging lichen that turn the tree into a fairy tale. His hand moves and the thought forms: Who needs anything, except food? And those like Mimas who make their own food—freest of all.
Equipment still whines, down the gaping hillside. A nearby saw, a more distant trunk skidder: the two tree-sitters get good at telling the creatures apart by ear. Some mornings, those sounds are their only way of knowing if the system of free enterprise still barrels toward its God-sized wall.
“They must be trying to starve us out.” But in that long stretch when provisions don’t get through, they have couscous and imagination.
“Hold out,” Maidenhair says. “The huckleberries will be fruiting again before we know it.” She nibbles on dried chickpeas like they’re a course in philosophy. “I never knew how to taste things, before.”
He neither. And he never knew how his body smells, and his fresh shit, turning to compost. And how his thought changes when he stares for hours at the carved light sinking through the branches. And what blood sounds like, pumping in his ears in the hour after the sun sets, and while everything alive holds its breath, waiting to see what happens, once the sky falls.
Reality tips away from perpendicular in every little breeze. Gusty afternoons are an epic two-person sport. When the wind picks up, there’s nothing, nothing at all but wind. It turns them feral—the tarp flapping like mad and the needles whipping them senseless. When the wind blows, that’s all your brain has—no drawing, no poems, no books, no cause, no calling—just the gales and your crazed ideas that bang around wild, their own careening species tumbling free of the family tree.
Once the light goes, the two of them have only sound. The candles and kerosene are too precious to spend on the indulgence