peacefully. After that, you’ll be removed to a place of detainment.”
Everyone on the ramparts shouts at once. No leaders: every voice must be heard. The movement has lived for months by that principle, and now they’ll die by it. Adam waits for a break in the hail of words. Then he, too, is shouting.
“Give us three days, and this whole thing can be wrapped up peacefully.” The heads of the convoy turn to him. “We’ve had a visit from the congressional office. The President is assembling an executive order.”
As quickly as he won their attention, he loses it. “You have ten minutes,” the officer repeats, and Adam’s political naïveté dies. Action from Washington isn’t the answer to this showdown. It’s the cause.
At nine minutes and forty seconds, the long-necked saurian excavator swings its ram over the trench and slams the top of the wall. Screams come from the battered ramparts. War-painted defenders tumble and run. Adam scrambles and is knocked to the ground. The claw hammers the wall again. It flicks out like a wrist and smacks the drawbridge. Another poke and the drawbridge sheers off. Two hard swipes at the brace-posts bring the entire barrier to the ground. Months of work—the most formidable barricades the Free Bioregion could build—crumble like a child’s Popsicle-stick fort.
The beast rolls up to the trench and paws the rubble on the far side. It takes the excavator only a minute to scrape the logs from the destroyed wall and slide them into the moat. The treads of the machine roll over the filled trench and through the downed wall. Cascadians, their face paint running, pour like termites from a cracked-open mound. Some head for the road. Several turn on the invaders with arguments and pleas. Maidenhair starts chanting: “Think of what you’re doing! There’s a better way!” Police from the convoy are everywhere, cuffing and forcing people to the ground.
The chant changes to shouts of, “Nonviolence! Nonviolence!”
Adam falls fast, taken down by an immense cop with rosacea so bad he looks like one of the painted ecowarriors. Fifty yards up the escarpment, Watchman get his knees clubbed from behind and slides down the scree on his blue-painted face. Only the lockdowns remain. The excavator slows its surge up the road. It reaches the first tripod and nudges at the base with its claw. The tripod wobbles. Officers turn from their mopping-up to watch. Up in her crow’s nest, Mulberry wraps her arms around the tops of the shaking pylons. Each slap of the claw against the cone’s base flings her around like a crash dummy.
Adam yells, “Jesus. Quit!”
Others pick up the yell—people on both sides of the battle. Even Doug, from his bed in the road. “Meem. It’s over. Come down.”
The claw slaps at the teepee’s base. The three trunks forming the frame groan and bend. An awful creak, and one of the poles cracks. The crack starts a hundred rings deep in the cylinder of lignin and opens outward. The fir rips, tearing off the top of the pole into a punji stake.
Mimi screams, and her crow’s nest falls. The torn pole impales her cheekbone. She bounces off the spike and topples, riding the wood down and bouncing off a rock at the bottom. Douglas releases himself from lockdown and runs toward her. The driver of the excavator yanks the claw away in horror, like a palm protesting its innocence. But the backhand swings into the child clown, who takes the force of the retracting claw and crumples like a string-snipped marionette.
The war for Earth stops. Both sides rush to the wounded. Mimi shrieks and clutches her face. Douglas lies unconscious. Police run down to the caravan and call in the injuries. The dazed citizens of the collapsed Free Bioregion huddle in horror. Mimi rolls on her side in a fetal curl and opens her eyes. Trees in shades from jade to aquamarine skewer the sky. Look the color, she thinks, then passes out.
ADAM FINDS Maidenhair and Watchman in the milling crowd, surveying the losses. Maidenhair points up the rise at the four insurgent women still lying across the road, locked down into the ground. “We haven’t lost yet.”
Adam says, “We have.”
“They won’t dare take these trees now. After the press gets wind of this.”
“They will.” These and all the remaining ancients, until all forests are housing tracts or farms.
Maidenhair shakes her dirty tresses. “Those women can stay locked down until Washington acts.”
Adam catches Watchman’s eye. The truth is too brutal for even