Chapter 1 — The Klak Grove

The Klak tree was big.

Right. Sorry. The tree was big — fourteen stories of dark bark and blue-green leaves, and it had been growing in the center of this particular grove since before the grove had a name. The leaves didn't fall in winter because winter here wasn't natural, and the bark didn't change color with the seasons because the bark had decided, at some point, that it was done changing. The roots went down farther than anyone had checked. The branches went up farther than you could see from the base without straining your neck.

Big T, they called it. Which was not the most imaginative name, but it was accurate.

At five in the morning the light through the leaves was a blue-green that existed nowhere else on the plateau. It moved the way light moves through water, slow, shifting, always changing what it touched. Marcus had noticed this the first morning he'd woken up early enough to see it, three years ago, and he'd noticed it every morning since.

He was at the base of Big T, sitting on one of the wide roots that surfaced from the ground like the knuckles of something sleeping. His shoulder ached where he'd been bandaging it — an old wound that went cold in the early morning, which was inconvenient. He'd been ignoring it for a year. He was good at ignoring things.

He heard her before he saw her. A footstep on the rope bridge forty feet up, barely anything, you'd miss it if you didn't know the sound of her footsteps. Then the sound of Eevi jumping, which was different from the sound of Eevi climbing down, different again from Eevi simply appearing somewhere she hadn't been before.

This was the jumping sound.

She landed on the root beside him, precisely, the way she did everything. Her jacket was damp from the morning mist that collected in the higher branches.

"You're up early," she said.

"So are you."

"I never went to sleep." She said it without weight, just information. She pulled her knees up and looked at the light through the leaves. "It does this every morning?"

"Every morning."

She was quiet for a while. That was one of the things about Eevi: she could be quiet the way a room is quiet, not like she was waiting for something, but like she'd decided the silence was a reasonable place to be.

"We should wake them up," she said.

"Chrys said five-thirty."

"It's five-twenty."

"Then we have ten minutes."

She considered this.

"Hide and seek," she said.

He looked at her.

"I'm already hidden," she said. "Count to thirty."

She was gone before he closed his eyes.

Thirty seconds in the klak grove at dawn was enough time to learn that Eevi Kolkko had not been hiding in any of the places he checked first, or second, or third. He went up the rope bridge to the second platform. Not there. He went along the north branch where the leaves were thickest — not there. He checked the gap between the supply shed and the bark, which was barely wide enough for a person, and a person was not in it.

"Twenty," he said. Counting backward now, because it seemed fair.

From somewhere above him, nothing. No sound. No displaced air. No footstep. Eevi moved through space with a tidiness that bordered on rudeness.

"Fifteen."

He looked up. The branches made a lattice against the pale sky, still mostly dark. There, very high up, higher than anyone would reasonably climb before sunrise, a stillness in the branches that wasn't the stillness of leaves.

He started climbing.

"Ten."

The bark was smooth under his hands, dry despite the mist. The shoulder complained. He ignored it. The branches up here were thinner, swaying slightly with his weight, the drop below him getting significant.

"Five."

He was almost there. He could see her now, sitting on a branch no wider than his forearm, perfectly balanced, watching him with the expression she had when she was entertained but wasn't going to show it.

"One."

He reached for the branch above her.

She stepped off hers and fell.

He grabbed wrong direction, his stomach dropped, and then she wasn't falling anymore, she was twenty feet below him, standing on the wide root where they'd started, looking up with her hands in her jacket pockets.

"Found you," she said.

Marcus climbed back down. The shoulder made its opinion known. He didn't mention it.

"The others," he said.

"The others," she agreed.

By six, all seven of them were in the grove.

Sam had arrived with her hair half-done, which she finished on the way down from her room, sitting on the rope bridge railing with the calm of someone who had decided gravity was a suggestion. Akio came down from his room at the top of the tower and immediately tried to convince everyone that it was still night.

"The sun is up," Chrys said.

"The sun is wrong," Akio said.

The twins were already in the grove before anyone remembered asking them, which was also how they usually arrived, Celestine with a piece of fruit and her boots on the wrong feet, Sienna stopping to switch them without comment. Sienna had come with tea — she made it the way she did most things, with more attention than the task seemed to require, and the result was always better than it had any right to be.

"Morning exercises," Marcus said.

"We're doing morning exercises?" Sam said. She looked at Chrys.

"Don't look at me," Chrys said. "I'm just here for the air."

He was lying, but in the comfortable way, the way you lie about something small because the truth of it is private.

He came down every morning at dawn. Marcus had known this for two years. He came down and stood at the base of Big T and looked at the light through the leaves, and then he went back up before anyone else was awake. Or so he thought.

They ran the grove paths. Sam set the pace, not punishing but honest. The roots broke the ground at angles that required attention, and the lower branches crossed some paths in places that required ducking, and by the time they'd done two full circuits the light had shifted from blue-green to something closer to gold and the dew had come off the grass and the grove smelled the way it did in the morning: like bark and soil and something else that didn't have a name, something that was simply the specific smell of air that had been moving through Klak leaves all night.

Sienna ran the paths the same way she did everything, quietly, efficiently, with the particular quality of a person who is paying attention to things you can't see. She had been like this since Marcus had known her. She felt things, was the way you'd put it if you were being simple about it. She felt what people around her felt, not like a skill but like weather. It simply arrived. You got used to it or you didn't.

She was feeling something now. He watched her face during the second circuit. She ran with a small line between her brows that meant she was processing, not exerting.

He didn't ask. She'd say when she wanted to.

After the run, Akio announced he was going to get bear burgers.

"The place behind the mountains doesn't open until eight," Chrys said, not looking up from whatever he was doing with a panel in the bark of Big T.

"The place behind the mountains opens for me at any hour," Akio said, "because I am charming and persistent."

"Behind the mountains is an hour's walk," Sam said.

"Yes," Akio said. "That's why I'm telling you now."

He went. The others settled into the comfortable business of the morning: Chrys and Marcus at the base of Big T working on something structural, Sam cleaning the Sage73 she'd been given for her birthday and then taken apart the same day to understand, Sienna and the twins in the upper branches playing the game that had no name but involved passing a small object between them without touching it.

An hour passed. Then an hour and ten minutes. Then twenty.

Sam said, "He should be back."

"He'll be back," Chrys said.

"I know he'll be back. I said he should be back by now."

"There's a difference," Marcus said.

"Yes," Sam said. She reassembled the Sage73 in the time it took to say it. "That's what I said."

The twins had stopped their game. Sienna sat very still on her branch, her eyes open but not looking at anything in the grove.

Then —

The air three meters from the base of Big T did something unusual. It compressed. It made a sound: the particular sound that nothing has when it becomes something quickly — a soft implosion, like a door opening in a room with no other exits. And Eevi was there, standing in the space she'd displaced, holding three paper bags and wearing an expression of someone who has been doing something for much longer than she'd planned.

She looked weathered. That was the word. Her jacket had dried and re-dampened. There was soil on her left boot that wasn't the soil of the grove. Her hair had escaped whatever she'd done with it this morning.

"I got the burgers," she said.

"How long," Marcus said.

She looked at the light. The angle of it, the way it had moved since she left. She did the math.

"A while," she said.

"Eevi."

"Twenty-three minutes." She said it simply. "Give or take."

The grove was quiet. Twenty-three minutes was not the travel time for a mountain crossing and a burger errand. Twenty-three minutes was — something else. Something that lived in the gap between where she'd been and where she now was.

She sat down on the root. Put the bags between them. "They're still warm," she said, as though this were the relevant information.

Sienna came down from the branches. She sat beside Eevi without a word and didn't say anything for a long time. Eevi let her.

"The tea," Chrys said, eventually.

"One moment," Sienna said. She went up.

The tea of rebirth came from the same grove, klak leaves processed a specific way, which Sienna had figured out by accident the way she figured out most things, by paying attention longer than anyone asked her to. It had a window of about one minute between the right temperature and mint water. In that window it did something that Sienna couldn't fully describe and had stopped trying to: it made your body feel like it had slept, regardless of how long it had actually slept. For Eevi, this morning, it meant something specific.

She brought it down in a clay cup, the steam moving sideways in the grove breeze, and put it in Eevi's hands.

Eevi looked at it for a moment. Then she looked at the paper bags and the smells coming out of them. Then back at the tea.

"Drink the tea first," Sienna said.

Eevi drank.

The light through the klak leaves shifted. Akio arrived at a run from the east path, out of breath, carrying absolutely nothing. He stopped when he saw the bags.

"There are burgers," he said.

"There are burgers," Marcus said.

Akio sat down on the root. He looked at Eevi. He didn't say what his face was saying.

Nobody said it.

They ate.