handful of people who’re screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.”
A minute ago, this woman was the subject of Adam’s observational study. Now he wants to confide in her. “It has a name. We call it the bystander effect. I once let my professor die because no one else in the lecture hall stood up. The larger the group . . .”
“. . . the harder it is to cry, Fire?”
“Because if there were a real problem, surely someone—”
“—lots of people would already have—”
“—with six billion other—”
“Six? Try seven. Fifteen, in a few years. We’ll soon be eating two-thirds of the planet’s net productivity. Demand for wood has tripled in our lifetime.”
“Can’t tap the brakes when you’re about to hit the wall.”
“Easier to poke your eyes out.”
The distant snarl breaks off, audible again in silence. The entire study begins to seem to Adam like a distraction. He needs to study illness on an unimaginable scale, an illness no bystander could even see to recognize.
Maidenhair breaks the silence. “We aren’t alone. Others are trying to reach us. I can hear them.”
From Adam’s neck down to the small of his back, hairs rise. He’s huge with fur. But the signal is invisible, lost in evolution. “Hear who?”
“I don’t know. The trees. The life force.”
“You mean, talking? Out loud?”
She strokes a bough as if it’s a pet. “Not out loud. More like a Greek chorus in my head.” She looks at Adam, her face as clear as if she just asked him to stay for dinner. “I died. I was electrocuted in my bed. My heart stopped. I came back and started hearing them.”
Adam turns to Watchman for a sanity check. But the bearded prophet only arches his brows.
Maidenhair taps the questionnaire. “I suppose you have your answer now. About the psychology of world-savers?”
Watchman touches her shoulder. “What’s crazier—plants speaking, or humans listening?”
Adam doesn’t hear. He’s just now tuning in to something that has long been hiding in plain sight. He says, to no one, “I talk out loud sometimes. To my sister. She disappeared when I was little.”
“Well, okay, then. Can we study you?”
A truth bends near him, one that his discipline will never find. Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world. Adam puts out his hands to steady himself and touches only a swaying twig. Held high up above the vanishingly distant surface by a creature who should want him dead. His brain spins. The tree has drugged him. He’s twirling again by a cord the width of a vine. He fixes on the woman’s face as if some last desperate act of personality-reading might still protect him. “What . . . ? What are they saying? The trees?”
She tries to tell him.
. . .
AS THEY TALK, the war moves up the nearest drainage. The force of each new fall shatters Adam, even as it tears swaths through the remaining giants. He never imagined the violence, like a skyscraper coming down. Needle and pulverized wood cloud the air. “The fall zones are the killers,” Maidenhair says. “They bulldoze the hell out of each landing strip, so the trees won’t shatter when they drop. It murders the soil.”
A tree as thick as Adam is tall rips away and smashes down the slope below. The earth at the place of impact liquefies.
IN LATE AFTERNOON, they spot Loki at some distance, coming through the gutted forest, right on time to escort the psychologist back through Humboldt’s blockade. But something in his forward stumble says the mission has changed. At the base of the tree, he calls for them to drop the rope and harness.
“What’s wrong?” Watchman asks.
“I’ll tell you up there.”
They make room for him in the crowded nest. He’s pale and breathing hard, but not from the climb. “It’s Mother N and Moses.”
“Roughed up again?”
“Dead.”
Maidenhair cries out.
“Someone bombed the office. They were inside, writing a speech for the Board of Forestry action. The police are saying they blew themselves up with stockpiled explosives. Accusing the LDF of domestic terrorism.”
“No,” Maidenhair says. “No. Please not this.”
There’s a long silence that isn’t silent. Watchman speaks. “Mother N, a terrorist! She wouldn’t even let me spike a tree. She told me, ‘It might hurt the guy with the saw.’ ”
. . .
THEY TELL STORIES about the dead. How Mother N trained them. How Moses asked them to sit in Mimas. Memorial service, at two hundred feet. Adam recalls something he learned in graduate