The Tree of Ecrof

by Kobe Bryant

  Just the thought of losing grana made her shiver. Pretia had become so used to her grana, even though she never used it, that the idea of it missing—well, it made her feel a little faint, like she might pass out if she thought too much about it. What would it feel like? Pretia couldn’t imagine. She didn’t want to imagine. Would it be like losing a limb? Would it be like losing your mind? Would it—

  Stop, she told herself. Stop.

  Finally, she found the stairs that led up and out a back entrance. In the fresh air, she put her hands on her knees to clear the sharp eucalyptus air from her lungs.

  “Which way do you think she went?” Rovi asked.

  “I don’t know.” Pretia looked left and right. It was dark, and the only light came from the moon, which cast a silver glow across the campus. She didn’t see Vera.

  “How would you run away from Ecrof?” Rovi asked.

  “It’s impossible without a boat,” Pretia said. “But I’d probably try the beach.”

  They locked eyes. “The Decision Woods!” they chorused.

  They circled to the front of the TheraCenter. Pretia and Rovi sprinted for the woods, their feet in sync. They passed through the stadium, raced through the tunnel, and reached the edge of the woods. They raced through the obstacles—swinging from vines, running across branches, clearing hurdles until they reached the cliff.

  As they emerged at the cliff, Rovi stopped. He put a finger to his lips. “Shhhhhh,” he said. “Do you hear her?”

  Pretia tried to listen. She thought she heard something, but she wasn’t sure. She and Rovi spun around, looking up and down the cliff. Suddenly Rovi pointed. “What is that down there?”

  Something was hovering in the air near the cliff.

  Pretia squinted. The moon was full, but still it was hard to make out. “I think it’s the Infinity Track,” she said. “Do you think Vera might be there?”

  “Worth a try,” Rovi said.

  They dashed toward the track.

  Pretia cupped her hands over her mouth. “Vera,” she called. “Vera, where are you?”

  There was no answer.

  “Vera!” Rovi tried.

  Then they heard footsteps, followed by a burst of movement as someone darted along the cliffs farther ahead. “That’s her,” she said. “Vera, wait!” The track was slightly ahead of them. Half of it was dangling over the cliff, half over a pile of rocky rubble.

  Vera ran on ahead. Pretia and Rovi followed. “Go away,” Vera called back to them. “I’m leaving to get Julius the help he needs.”

  “That’s impossible,” Rovi shouted. “There’s no way off the island.”

  Pretia watched Vera race underneath the track. “She’s not getting on it,” she said.

  Now Pretia and Rovi were beneath the track. “Where is she going?” Rovi asked.

  “Vera, stop, please,” Pretia shouted.

  They had all left the track behind and were racing along the rocky cliffs, trying to avoid the scraggly bushes and small trees that sprang from the ground. The land over here was untamed. It was wild. It had none of the polished landscaping of the Ecrof campus.

  Pretia was having trouble seeing in the dark. She had to trust her feet to find their own placement and not slip on the smooth quartz rocks. She looked over her shoulder. The track was disappearing in the distance.

  “Leave me alone,” Vera shouted. “Stop chasing me.”

  “Vera—” Rovi called after her.

  “I said, leave me alone,” Vera yelled again. But as she did, she stumbled and went skidding along the ground. She picked herself up, but not before Pretia and Rovi were able to catch her.

  They had come to a clearing along the cliff—a flat area without many trees. Pretia could see the crumbled remains of a long-forgotten building strewn on the ground, the tops of some fallen columns sunken into the earth. Chunks of marble—the remains of statuary and other decorations—were scattered on the ground.

  “Vera.” Pretia was panting as she tried to talk. “Are you okay?”

  Vera took a deep breath. “What do you think? I’m going to be disowned by my family. My brother is sick. And the school is lying to me about what’s going on.” She placed her hands on her knees and leaned against the stubby remains of an old column. “I need to sit down.”

  “Me too,” Pretia said. Together they collapsed onto the ground. Only Rovi remained standing. Pretia leaned her head on the flat top of one of the columns that had sunk into the earth. “What is this place?” she asked, looking around. “I’ve never seen it before.”

  “Some old pile of rocks,” Vera said. “A ruin, or whatever.”

  “It looks like the remains of an old building,” Pretia said.

  “So it’s an old building,” Vera said.

  “You know you can’t really run away, right?” Pretia asked.

  Vera bit her lip. In the moon’s silvery glow, Pretia could see the defiant look in her eyes.

  “Vera,” Pretia began again.

  “I know,” Vera muttered. “But I don’t want to stay.”

  “Me neither,” Pretia said. And the minute the words were out of her mouth, she realized they were true. She had no interest in staying at Ecrof if she couldn’t use her grana. She wanted to go home, be with people she felt safe around, like Anara and her parents.

  Suddenly Vera bolted up. “Where’s Rovi?”

  Pretia looked around. She didn’t see him.

  “Rovi?” Pretia called. “Rovi,” she called again. She leaped to her feet.

  “There he is,” Vera said, pointing toward the far side of the clearing from where they’d entered.

  “Rovi!” Pretia called. “Rovi!”

  Rovi seemed too entranced by whatever had caught his attention to turn. “Come here,” he said. His voice was odd, as if it were coming from very far away.

  When Pretia and Vera joined him, he was staring openmouthed at the strangest-looking tree Pretia had ever seen. It wasn’t much taller than she was. And it didn’t have a trunk. Instead, it was an odd tangle of dozens—or maybe even hundreds—of vines that were wound around each other in an extremely thick braid. The top of the tree was strange, too. Instead of reaching for the sky as most tree branches did, the branches on the tree in front of Rovi all flattened out and grew parallel to the ground, almost as if they were forming a tabletop.

  “Well, that’s a weird tree,” Pretia said.

  “It’s a strangler fig,” Vera said.

  Rovi turned away from the tree for the first time. The expression on his face was something between panic and recognition. “A what?”

  “A strangler fig,” Vera repeated. “You see them in southern Alkebulan.”

  “Is that its real name?” Rovi gasped.

  “Yeah, it’s a tree that devours other trees. They mostly grow in the tropics, but I guess they can pop up anywhere.”

  “So it strangles trees?” Rovi asked.

  “Yeah,” Vera said. “What’s the big deal?”

  Rovi was shaking his head from side to side as if what Vera had just said couldn’t have been further from the truth. “No,” he said, “no. It’s not just a tree. It’s not. I’ve seen this tree before. Except that I didn’t think it was a tree. I thought it was one of my dad’s wild inventions.”

  “You’ve been here before?” Pretia asked.

  “No. I saw it in my father’s lab. In his notebooks. He drew this tree hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. I thought—I thought it was a machine that he was designing to kill the Tree of Ecrof. But it wasn’t. It’s an actual tree. This very tree.”

  “Why would he draw this tree?” Pretia asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rovi said. “But he did. In the days before we left Ecrof, he filled notebooks with endless drawings of it.” He paused. “He must have seen it right before we left. He must have seen
it when—” His breath caught on a gasp. “He must have seen it when he used the Self-Splitter.”

  “What’s a Self-Splitter?” Vera asked.

  Quickly, Rovi filled her in on his father’s disastrous experiment. “He figured out a way to step outside himself, and afterward he was never the same. His two halves never rejoined. That’s what made him a Somnium addict.” He paused. “And that’s how he lost his grana,” he added in a quiet voice. Rovi looked at the tree once more, then shook his head from side to side as if he couldn’t process what he was seeing. “It’s incredible,” he said. “It’s exactly like all of my father’s drawings. Exactly. Except . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Except what?” Pretia said.

  “The tree he drew was much bigger. This was just the top. It had huge roots. Like a whole forest of roots.”

  “I still don’t get what’s so special about this tree,” Vera said.

  Rovi turned away from Pretia and Vera and stared at the strange tree and the flat treetop. “Kill the tree,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” Pretia said.

  “Kill the tree!” Rovi was shouting now.

  “Is he okay?” Vera whispered.

  Rovi wheeled around and grabbed both girls by the arms. “Don’t you get it? Kill the tree? This tree. Not the Tree of Ecrof. This is the tree my dad was talking about.”

  “I don’t understand,” Vera said.

  Pretia put her hands on Rovi’s shoulders. “Start from the beginning.”

  “Okay,” Rovi said. “Okay.” He took a deep breath. “So, you know how everyone thinks I’m doing something to the Tree of Ecrof because there was a rumor that my dad tried to kill the tree?”

  “And that’s why he was fired, right?” Vera said.

  “Sort of,” Rovi said. “I’m not sure exactly why he was fired. No one told me. I was just a little kid. All I know is that he lost his mind after a failed visualization experiment. And he started saying Kill the tree. Over and over. Of course everyone who heard him must have thought he was talking about the Tree of Ecrof. But—”

  “But what if it was this tree?” Pretia said.

  “Why would he want to kill this tree?” Vera asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rovi said. “But I know he became obsessed with it. He filled notebooks with thousands of drawings of it.”

  “How do you kill a tree?” Vera wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Rovi said.

  “You destroy its roots,” Pretia suggested.

  Rovi spun around. “Where are the roots?”

  “Probably underground like on any other tree,” Pretia said.

  “My dad saw them,” Rovi said. “He drew them as often as he drew the top of the tree. We need to find them.”

  “So we’re going to kill the tree?” Vera said. “Why?”

  “I’m not killing anything,” Rovi snapped. “I just want to see what my dad saw.”

  He left the flat treetop and moved toward the cliff’s edge.

  “No way,” Vera said. “I’m not going down there. I don’t want to ruin my Epic Elite career by, you know, plunging into the sea.”

  “Pretia, are you coming?” Rovi asked.

  “Coming where?” Something was nagging at the back of Pretia’s mind, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what.

  “I think I see a path,” Rovi said.

  “A path down the side of a cliff?” Vera asked.

  “It’s no worse than what we climbed up to get to Ecrof that first day,” Rovi said. Then he paused. “Well, maybe it’s a little worse.”

  Pretia followed him to the edge of the cliff. Rovi had already started down the treacherous path. It was only a sneaker-width wide.

  Rovi was darting down the cliffside, nimble as a cat.

  “You’re really just going to let him go alone?” Vera said.

  “Aren’t you going?” Pretia asked.

  Vera hesitated. She peeked over the edge. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I am. What if something bad happens to him?” Vera took a step down the path. And then another. Soon the angle from the top made it impossible for Pretia to see her or Rovi on their descent.

  “You guys okay?” Pretia called.

  “Are you coming or not?” Vera called from the darkness below.

  “I’m coming,” Pretia said. But still, she didn’t move. She felt stuck, like her grana had frozen her in place. It was almost as if it was telling her not to go, as if it was keeping her away from the tree roots or whatever else Rovi and Vera were about to encounter.

  Then it hit her: The trees in her Grana Book! The healthy above­ground trees and the scary underwater ones. The image she’d been puzzling over for months. What if it wasn’t the trees that were hurting the students? What if it was a single tree? This tree? If she closed her eyes and thought about the image, the trees in the picture blended into a single tree, especially the ones reflected in the water. In fact, the first time she’d seen the picture, she’d been unsure whether she was looking at a large tree or a group of smaller ones. Now she was sure.

  The tree that had poisoned the Tree of Ecrof and done so much other damage was this very strangler fig? Even the name was perfect. And Rovi and Vera were heading right for it.

  “Rovi! Vera! Come back,” Pretia called. “Come back!”

  She waited, her heart thumping in her ears.

  “Rovi! Vera!” she tried again.

  But they didn’t reply. Either they couldn’t hear her or— Pretia didn’t want to think about this possibility. She had to go after them. She had no choice. The image was in her Grana Book. It was destined for her. She paused, thinking for a moment about those moons in the picture. The one above the trees and its weak reflection in the water. What did they mean? But there was no time to worry about that now. She had to stop Rovi and Vera.

  She rushed down the path, hoping her feet would guide her. She willed her mind not to think about the sheer drop down to the crashing ocean and rocks below. She could feel the path crumbling beneath her sneakers. She heard the gravel and rocks clattering against the cliffs as they fell.

  Pretia slipped and caught herself. Her hands scraped the cliff face. She continued down. Down. Down. The path grew steeper and narrower. Soon she had to turn her back to the cliff and edge down, facing out over the terrifying drop.

  And then—her left foot went over. The path ended. There was only the treacherous drop in front of her and the sheer cliff to her side.

  Pretia’s heart began to race. She was stuck. It would be nearly impossible to climb back up in the dark. But she would have to unless—

  Then she heard voices: Rovi’s and Vera’s. They seemed to be coming from inside the cliff. She reached out with her left hand and fumbled for an opening. And there it was—a space just big enough for her to crawl through.

  In one swift motion, Pretia turned and dove into the interior of the cliff. She tumbled head over heels, falling ten feet to the ground.

  “Nice entrance!” Rovi said.

  She picked herself up and dusted herself off.

  She and her friends were standing in a cavernous room—sort of like a cave but more structured. There were columns running along all four sides as if it was actually some sort of underground building. At the front was a tree—the strangest and scariest tree Pretia had ever seen before. The trunk, if you could even call it a trunk, was made up of hundreds of vines wrapping around each other in an impossible tangle. They looked like the limbs of skeletons, like the Tree of Ecrof’s branches had looked earlier. The vines spread from the core of the tree up and out, pushing through the roof of the cave where Pretia knew they emerged in the shape of the strange tabletop they’d seen above. In the center of the tree, something was glowing with a creepy, eerie light, like oil burning on water.

  “It looks like a temple or someth
ing,” Pretia said. She looked at the columns and now understood that what she had assumed were ruins aboveground were their tops. “Has it fallen through the ground somehow?” she asked.

  “But whose temple is it?” Rovi asked. “And what is that glowing in the middle of the tree?”

  They all stared over the wide expanse of the temple—about the length of two tennis courts—to the tree.

  “Exactly where on the island are we?” Pretia asked.

  “We’re down by the beach,” Vera said. “Look. You can see the harbor and the stone archway we saw on our first day.” She pointed through a dark opening that Pretia hadn’t noticed before. Outside it, Pretia could make out the dark water lapping at the shore and beyond it, the towering gate that greeted ships arriving at the island.

  “Hold on,” Pretia said.

  “Where are you going?” Rovi asked.

  But Pretia had already dashed out of the cave.

  She was standing on a beach, of course, about half a mile farther down from where the ship had left them when they’d arrived at the academy. She’d never been here before—not exactly. But for some reason, it was familiar. She glanced back over her shoulder at the cave, then back at the water.

  Pretia closed her eyes. She knew this place—this exact place. She was certain.

  And then she understood.

  The mural in the Gods’ Eye. She was standing exactly where the goddess Cora stood as she took her one last backward glance at her island.

  Pretia opened her eyes. She followed the path of Cora’s gaze from memory. Her eyes landed right in the center of the tree—right at the glowing object.

  When she’d stared at the mural, she’d always thought Cora was taking a final, longing backward glance at her island, her gaze landing on a tree root that had broken through the roof of the cave. But now she could tell that the object in Cora’s sight line was too straight, too uniform. Like something man-made. But how could it be man-made when only the gods had ever been on the island?

  Pretia squinted. She put herself in Cora’s place, staring back into the cave. She knew her eyes were traveling the exact path of the goddess’s. But what was she looking at? What was that object?