And then the chain saws roar up again.
The dragons are useless; the trucks already got past. We just have to block their access to as much of the forest as we can. Nutmeg and Sage and I are going to jerry-rig a rope blockade between where the loggers are and Legacy. Sage has a Swiss Army knife; Nutmeg takes a big length of rope. “Grab that other one,” he tells me, and I’m wrapping up the heavy rope when Jeff reaches into the gear pile and grabs a bike chain.
“Here.” Jeff hands the chain to Goat, and then another one to Dirtrat. “They’re good and heavy.”
“What are you doing?” Nutmeg asks him.
Jeff doesn’t answer. A chain saw ramps up into a roar, close to us. My eardrums throb.
“What are you doing?” I yell at Jeff. He doesn’t answer.
And then there’s a thunderous crack, the loudest noise I’ve ever heard, and then a creak, and a tree crashes onto the forest floor. It’s not close enough to see, but it’s huge, and it’s ancient, something that shouldn’t be cut down. The ground shakes beneath my feet like an earthquake.
“Doesn’t sound like they’re gonna stop on their own,” Jeff shouts. “So we’re going to stop them.”
“That’s crazy,” Sage yells as a chain saw ramps up again. “You’re gonna go try to stop them? That puts all of us in danger. Do you even know how many loggers there are? Or if there are rangers? You wanna get arrested?”
“Dirtrat climbed a tree and checked it out while you were talking.” Jeff spits the word, like talking is a bad thing. “It’s just the loggers. And yeah, we’re gonna stop them.” He wraps the chain around his hand. The saws quiet for a moment.
Jeff takes a step toward me. “Last chance, Alison,” he says. “You wanna stand up?” He says it mean, like if I don’t go with him, I’m a coward.
Sage looks straight at me. “We need you here, Alison.”
We need you. Nobody’s ever said that to me before.
The saws ramp up again and Jeff moves closer to the noise, still watching me.
“Don’t do it,” Nutmeg yells at him over the grinding, angrier and more urgent than I’ve heard him. “It’s stupid. And it’s dangerous. You could get killed.” And then another thundering crack, and another tree falls. Closer this time. I feel the crash through my whole body.
“Might be dangerous,” Jeff says, “but at least it’s fucking brave.” Then he, Goat, and Dirtrat head off.
My chest is tied in knots, but there’s no time to think about it. I can’t stop him. I can’t go after him. He’s gone. I turn back to Nutmeg and Sage. “What do we do?”
Sage cranes her neck. “Goddamn it,” she says as they turn into tiny dots, then disappear behind tree trunks. “They just screwed us.”
“Look, we don’t know yet,” Nutmeg says. “We don’t know how the loggers will react. Maybe they’ll stay calm. That can happen—”
“Are they gonna get hurt? Or arrested?” I interrupt, my heart pounding in my throat. It’s bizarre: I’m so pissed at Jeff. It’s his own fault, but I still want to make sure he’s okay.
“Maybe,” Nutmeg says. “But there’s nothing we can do. They left. Following them won’t do any good. We’d just put ourselves in the line of fire.”
A big branch crashes through the leaves and hits the ground, echoing, and a logger yells.
“Okay,” I finally say, my heart twisting in my chest. “You guys have the rope? Let’s go.”
We find the widest part of the trail, the two strongest trees flanking the path. Nutmeg knows a million kinds of knots, ones Andy learned for Eagle Scouts but a lot of others, too: clove hitch, bowline, Bachmann, stevedore. Sage cuts the ropes and Nutmeg ties them fast, making a kind of web to stretch across the trail. The top line is eight feet off the ground; when it’s finished, he says, we can tie ourselves in up there. If the loggers try to cut the web, the whole thing won't unravel.
Even working fast, even with three of us, it takes a long time to build an eight-by-ten-foot net. My hands are raw from rope burn when we hear yelling up the trail, and then a crash. We all stop moving instantly. I can make out Jeff’s voice, and Dirtrat’s, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. Then another male voice, angry; it isn’t Goat. And another crash—it sounds like branches breaking—and then running, toward us, and the voices getting louder.
“Shit,” Sage says. “What the hell is going on?” She folds up the knife and jams it into her pocket. Boots crash through branches fifty yards away.
“What should I do?” I turn to Sage and Nutmeg, praying that they know.
“Duck down,” Nutmeg says, pointing to a boulder. “Behind that rock. I’ll be over here. Don’t move—no sound.”
I nod and crouch behind the boulder. Nutmeg gets behind a tree, and Sage behind another, farther up. We leave the rope web hanging there, half finished; there’s no time to hide it. The voices get louder. They’re not on the path. They’re running through the woods, stepping on the underbrush, bushwhacking through brambles, and a logger’s chasing after them.
“You little shit!” the logger yells; it’s the first thing I can make out. “You give me that!” And then, squinting, I see Jeff hurtling through the branches, Goat and Dirtrat right behind him, a blue bag gripped tight under his arm. It says “Cascade.” He’s got the logger’s gear.
My thighs are burning, but I know I can’t move. I grit my teeth and lean against the rough side of the rock, trying to lessen the pressure.
They run past, then the logger. The logger is fat and fortyish, but also mad and strong, so he’s gaining on the guys. Jeff yells, “Ha ha, fucker!” and I think, What the fuck are you doing? as hard as I can, straining my brain to yell at him telepathically.
The guys pass us, running to another part of the forest, outside Cascade’s permit range. That’s what they’re doing: they’re trying to lure the loggers away from the cut.
As they get farther away, their words blur from the distance. We can’t see what’s happening, and there’s no way of finding out. I feel helpless, and it’s crazy that people lived like this for hundreds of thousands of years, without being able to communicate unless they were face-to-face. It’s like we’re animals.
After a few minutes, it seems safe to come out. Sage crawls over to Nutmeg, motions for me to come too. We’re about to start work on the rope barricade again when we hear another yell. But this time it’s coming from over by Legacy.
CHAPTER 19
We stop and listen for a second, unsure whether we actually heard what we thought we did. Then it comes again. “SAGE!”
It’s Aaron’s voice.
Sage freezes; then she turns and runs. I zigzag behind her through the woods, trying not to lose sight of her as she darts through the forest. She’s quick as a fox. “SAGE!” It gets louder as we get closer, and then we’re near enough to see: someone’s up there with Aaron in the tree.
“Fuck.” Sage stares at the platform, her mouth open. “Holy Christ.”
There’s a climber in the platform, roped into his own harness. He’s got a yellow vest and a hard hat and fancy climbing lanyards. And he’s big.
He’s wrestling Aaron down.
“They’re trying to get me out!” Aaron yells, his voice ragged with fear. “This is Cascade! They’re trying to unhook me!”
His body looks limp. “Is he hurt?” I ask Sage, panicked.
“You go limp to make it harder for them to move you. But I don’t know if he’s hurt. He could be.” She wrings her hands, terrified. “Fuck.” She looks up again. “Are you hurt, Aaron?” she yells.
“He’s trying to untie me!” Aaron says. “Get a camera from camp—this needs to be filmed! It’s evidence!”
“I’m not going back there!” Sage shouts up. “I’m not leaving you!”
We hear thuds from high up in the tree; knocked-off bark hits the forest floor.
“Who’s there with you?” Aaron calls.
“Just me and Alison,” she screams, her voice raw.
“Send Allie—” he grunts, and then there’s another thud.
I look at Sage: Is he serious? I’m supposed to leave them out here, Sage alone and Aaron getting wrestled out of his ropes two hundred feet above the forest floor?
“There’s nothing we can do from down here,” she says to me. “There’s a video camera in my backpack, in my tent. You’re helping him by getting it. Just go.”
I stand there, frozen. “Run,” she says. “GO,” and finally I do.
* * *
• • •
I run faster than I have my whole entire life; I don’t even feel my body working, I just feel like wind. I rip Sage’s bag apart, throwing her stuff everywhere; her camera’s at the bottom. I pocket it and run out, leaving her tent flap open behind me. Exile’s at the fire circle; other people too; they’re all a blur. “What’s going on?” Exile asks.
“Cascade’s in the tree with Aaron,” I shout as I run past them, my eyes pinned forward as I race out of camp and skid down the trail.
By the time I get back there, two guys are in the tree with him. The other one’s taller, with the same hard hat, same vest. “The other one came from behind,” Sage says, her gaze not moving off Aaron. “They must have another trail cut. I didn’t see him till he was halfway up the trunk.” Tears and sweat cut clean swaths through the dirt on her cheeks.
More grunts come from above, more falling bark. I have to squint to see Aaron. His blue T-shirt is barely visible through the thicket of branches, behind the hulking vested bodies of the Cascade climbers, working hard to pin him down. The platform and branches block our view; we can only get glimpses.
“Set the camera on video and zoom the lens as close in as you can,” Sage barks at me. “We’ll need everything.”
I do what she says, but it feels sick. Aaron is up there, getting beat up, and I’m standing here filming it? I need to help him, not just watch.
“Sage,” I say. “I have to do something. Can we get up there?”
She shakes her head. “There’s nothing we can do but stay here and talk to him, do what he asks. We’re witnesses. Get a record. That’s a job.”
I hear running in the woods behind us, and then people from camp burst into the clearing, everyone’s shouts a jumble. I don’t even look at them, trying to keep my camera arm steady. It’s shaking, like the rest of me.
“What’s going on?” “Who’s up there with him?” “Is he hurt?” Everybody yells at once, peppering us with questions till Sage yells, “QUIET!” and everyone shuts up.
“Two climbers from Cascade,” she says. “They’re trying to get him down. He’s resisting. Now, everyone shut up so we can hear what’s happening up there.”
People do what she says, even Dirtrat, even Jeff.
There’s another crash from the branches, and then a thunk that sounds like something hitting the platform. Maybe someone’s head. “You okay?” Sage shouts up, urgent.
“I’m all right,” Aaron yells. “That was my boot.”
“What’s going on?” Sage pleads. “You have to let us know what’s happening!”
“Okay,” Aaron yells down. Then some more sounds of struggling, then, “Okay. They’re trying to get me out of here. The shorter guy says his name is Dan, the other one is Ox. Ox has his boot on my chest right now—”
“We’re trying to keep him safe, ma’am,” a different voice shouts down from the tree, cutting Aaron off. “This is a rescue operation.”
“Rescue?!” Sage rages back. “That’s bullshit! He’s two hundred feet off the ground and you’ve got your boot on his chest!”
“This is a safety issue,” the guy repeats. “He’s endangered himself by putting himself up here on company property. Now he’s endangering us by resisting.”
“Don’t listen to them, Sage!” Aaron yells. “They’re doing all kinds of dangerous shit up here; the one guy shoved me, and they’ve got my feet hog-tied.”
“You fuckers!” Sage screams at them. “Let him go!”
“We can’t let him go, ma’am. He’s putting himself in danger—”
“They’re putting me in danger, Sage! They’re doing it!”
I look to Sage, panicking. Every muscle in my body wants to move, wants to run to that tree and claw my way up it. Blood is pounding through my veins.
She doesn’t take her eyes off Aaron. “Keep filming.”
“I’ve got a lockbox up here,” Aaron yells.
“Don’t talk about that!” Sage interrupts.
“They already saw it; I’m not giving anything away,” Aaron yells back. “They made it up here before I could lock in to the box properly, but I’m still working on it. They’ve got a lotta my ropes undone, but if I can get my harness hooked in good enough, they won’t be able to get me down.”
“No! He can’t do that—” Nutmeg blurts, but Sage cuts him off.
“Shh, let him finish. He’s got a plan.”
Above us, Aaron thrashes in the grip of the climbers. His shoulders come off the platform, hanging over thin air. I can see his red hair through the branches. “Shit! Hang on,” he yells. Then he squirms back onto the wood.
One of the climbers yells, “Young man, you are putting yourself in danger. Stop moving.” Then: “STOP MOVING!” The businesslike tone leaves the climber’s voice and suddenly he sounds like a guy in a bar brawl.
“Okay,” Aaron pants. “I’m close. If I can hook in to the lockbox, we’ll be good. I just have to unhook my harness for a second—”
“NO! DON’T DO THAT!” Sage screams, eyes bulging.
Nutmeg overlaps fast: “That’s what I thought he meant. He’ll have to unhook to get into the lockbox. Nothing will be holding him to the tree. DON’T DO IT!” Nutmeg yells up to Aaron. “IT ISN’T SAFE!”
I’m frozen, heartbeat like a drum in my ears. My arm is shaking so bad I can hardly hold the camera. I taste metal in my mouth.
“I’m close—” Aaron says. “Six inches—” and then more dirt and bark fall from above, more thuds and thunks and banging on the platform—and then a sickening CRACK.
Aaron’s body hits the branch below the platform, then bounces up like a rag doll.
“FUCK!” Nutmeg shouts. “Is he tied in? Can anybody see if he’s still got his harness on?!” Sage is hyperventilating.
Through the branches, Aaron keeps falling. He’s screaming, deep and ragged, a kind of sound I’ve never heard before, and then he hits the ground, and then it stops.
We all scramble to the base of Legacy. Everything is slow motion, like in a movie; my mind feels like it’s outside my body, like I’m seeing everything from above.
Sage gets there first. Ten feet away and she falls down, collapses limp onto the ground. Her wails echo through the forest, louder than any human cry I’ve ever heard. And I know. Nothing else could cause that sound. I know.
CHAPTER 20
I only looked for a second. I couldn’t stand any longer than that; I didn’t want it in my mind. The blood, the broken bones. I ran to the other side of Legacy, pressing my face against her, blacking everything out. From the other side of the tree I heard Sage, still wailing, and Nutmeg and Exile, picking Aaron up. Someone was shrieking, terrified: What do we do? What the fuck do we do? What do we do with him? and Exile said they had to get his body somewhere sheltered. His body. Five minutes earlier, he’d been Aaron, and just like that he was a body.
Then a blur, a tangle of chaos and screaming and mud, a million things, glass-sharp moments poking through the fog. When the climbers rappelled down, Jeff and Stone and Goat circled the base of Legacy: “Murderers!” When the climbers touched the ground, Stone’s fists were swinging, his limbs a blur of fight and fury, eyes red with rage. I think he would’ve tried to strangle them i
f someone hadn’t held him back.
I was staring at the climbers, thinking, That is what a killer looks like. They wouldn’t look at us: gazes off to the side, hard and flat as rocks. “Fatality,” I heard one of them say into his walkie-talkie; then, “Accidental. No injuries on this end.” The other voice came through, crackly: “Shame. Well, get yourself back to base. Accidents happen out in the woods.”
When we heard the engines later, we first thought cops. We scrambled to the dragons to lock down, braced to get arrested or worse. My heart throbbed, but I was numb: a night in jail almost felt like a relief. Escape. No choices, no decisions, no one to talk to, just flat concrete walls and a closed-off space and silence.
But then we saw: it was the coroner. They told us the death was being ruled an accident, so there wouldn’t be an investigation. Then they asked for Aaron’s parents’ phone number.
Then they took him away.
* * *
• • •
When the numb wears off, my whole body starts sweating. I feel like I might puke again, and Exile and Nutmeg are staring daggers at Jeff, Goat, and Dirtrat, saying they provoked this, that if they hadn’t gotten the other loggers so far away with their whole stunt, maybe the other loggers would’ve stopped those two from going up, and Jeff is arguing back that they didn’t do shit, that it took planning to go up in that tree, the other loggers wouldn’t have stopped anything, and Dirtrat’s saying, “Know your enemy, assholes,” and Cyn is hanging on to Jeff and calling Exile naïve, and Sage is yelling, “Shut up! Stop fucking arguing! Somebody’s dead!” I can’t be here. I have to be by myself. I have to get away.
I can’t go back on the main trail to Legacy, so I take the other one, the one that goes back to where Jeff and I saw the deer. It seems like another lifetime when that happened. I run down the trail as fast as I can, impact shoving the breath out of my body with each step. My feet hurt as they hit the ground; I push my body harder than it’s meant to go, trying to force this out of myself, like if I punish myself hard enough, I can get rid of this somehow. I’m flying down a hill, and suddenly I hit a root and wrench my ankle, pain shooting hot through my leg, and fall.
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