sir,” she says. “Plenty of great questions. And some bona fide epiphanies too.”
“The new Ranger patrols didn’t get in your way, did they?” he asks with his chest puffed proudly. “I secured some funding to step things up now that the raids are becoming more frequent. There’s concern that the Mainlanders could make it into the resort.”
“My Pilgrims never even knew they were there, and I feel much safer just knowing they’re around,” Jake says with a tight smile. “But I did note a slight anomaly earlier,” she adds, as offhandedly as she can manage. “A touch of needle browning on some unremarkable firs near the staff cabins. Certainly nothing to worry about, but it should be examined. With your approval, I’d like to sign out a microscope, some rainfall meters, and a soil collection kit, just to be sure.”
“You won’t be messing around with any of our old-growth trees, will you?” he asks skeptically. “If the Rangers catch anyone out in the Cathedral with a microscope, they’ll be banished before I even hear of it.”
“No, of course not,” she replies, feeling her stomach twitch with the lie. “It’s not the old-growth at all. Just a few trees around my cabin, and only to satisfy my own curiosity.”
“I appreciate your interest in our majestic forest, Greenwood,” Davidoff says, with a smile that his dead eyes fail to match. “You’re cleared to sign out whatever you need from the Maintenance Shed. But I need you well rested for tomorrow. You’re booked for a private, bright and early.”
“Me?” Jake says. She never gets booked for private tours, most likely because she’s ten years older than the other Guides and it’s always male Pilgrims who book them. Her thoughts veer to the celebrity in her group today—Corbyn Gallant—whose visit she overheard a few of the recruits mention breathlessly at dinner. “Who with?”
“Not sure exactly,” he says. “But some higher-ups at Corporate requested you specifically. So I need you to bring that old Greenwood charm tomorrow.”
While hurrying to reach the Maintenance Shed before it shuts down for the night, Jake considers the unsubstantiated tales she’s heard of private tours where, following a quick jaunt through the trees, a $5,000 “massage” with cedar-scented oils is provided to a Saudi solar panel prince by an unnamed Forest Guide. And given the fact that by this date next year her ballooning student loan interest payments will swallow her entire bi-weekly salary, she’s ashamed to admit that she’d probably do the same. How different things would be for her if she were afloat in family money like Torey and the rest of the Forest Guides. Because there’s nothing like poverty to teach you just how much of a luxury integrity truly is.
THE GREAT WITHERING
WHEN JACINDA GREENWOOD is eight years old, her mother, Meena Bhattacharya—a first-chair violist for the Los Angeles Symphony—is returning home to New York City from a solo concert she’s given in Washington, D.C., when her commuter train slips its tracks and arcs forty feet down onto the busy interstate below. First responders locate her body in the thin greenbelt of trees that divides the interstate’s northbound and southbound lanes, her skull crushed yet her reading glasses somehow still fixed in place. Her mother’s death teaches Jake, too early in life, that the human body is fragile, and that our brief lives can be halted at any moment, as unexpectedly as a breeze blowing a door shut.
With her mother gone, it’s as though the colour has been sapped from Jake’s world. She seldom eats and speaks only in murmurs. She’s sent to Delhi to be raised by her grandparents, civil servants living in a middle-class suburb on the city’s southern fringe. Immediately, Jake misses the U.S. The neat geometry of its sidewalks, the splat of ketchup on French fries—every memory is like a thorn in her flesh that she can’t extract. But worst of all, she misses the sound of her mother playing her viola in the next room, a soothing warble almost indistinguishable from her voice.
A week after her arrival in India, Jake finds a cardboard box on her bed, on the side of which her mother has written LIAM GREENWOOD. All Meena ever told her about her father was that he died while working illegally as a carpenter in the U.S. when Jake was three. Perhaps because she’s never seen his face, not even in pictures, Jake has always imagined him as Paul Bunyan–like, nearly a tree himself, with a halogen smile, a carpenter’s