Mayberry’s lips tasted like strawberries. Marshall felt his head spin and cheeks tingle when he felt her kissing him back. A current of pleasure rushed from his head to his toes. Was this love? He didn’t know, but what he did know was that he had never felt happier.
He took a moment to hug Mirrt and bid him farewell, as did Mayberry with Co-Co. The comfortable buzz in his head told him that Mirrt understood why Marshall had to leave. Purring, Co-Co climbed onto Mirrt’s back, then scampered onto his right head, gripping his ear with her front paws. Mirrt rested serenely on his haunches, watching as the duo turned away and walked across the grassy meadow to the aspen forest.
Marshall removed the stick he’d been using to keep track of time from his backpack. He counted them silently, then said, “Sixteen cuts, so we’ve been here a little more than sixteen days. Seems like longer, doesn’t it?” he said, handing it to Mayberry.
“It sure does,” she replied, breaking the stick in half and tossing it away. “We won’t be needing that anymore.”
The GPS in Marshall’s gut navigated them straight back to the Tree.
And there it was, just as shining, beautiful, and imposing as before. It was a world unto itself, a unique ecosystem of life and leaves and branches. They collapsed together into a happy bundle under the Tree. They didn’t have to practice their wish, since they’d talked about it so often.
“I hope this works. We don’t have a backup plan.” Mayberry sounded a bit concerned.
“Wishing Tree, please take us back to the same place where we left Earth. Now. Together,” Marshall and Mayberry said.
As his eyes slowly closed, Marshall thought, Nith healed our spirits. Being here is the hardest thing we’ve ever done, but neither of us will ever be the same again.
He glimpsed leaves beginning to whirl around them, and then he fell sound asleep and couldn’t see or hear anything at all.
The Tree granted their wish.
CHAPTER 44
MAYBERRY FELT like she’d just closed her eyes, but now was a bit groggy. She remembered lying down by the Wishing Tree and wishing, and that vivid, bizarre images had started floating in her mind. She became conscious of the warm arm wrapped around her waist, and then the arm withdrew, leaving her feeling slightly chilled.
She blinked her eyes open to inky darkness. Why had she slept for so long? Leaves rustled in the breeze, and birds trilled in the distance. She saw Marshall getting to his feet, adjusting his glasses on his nose. Her mind wrestled with an emotional conundrum she couldn’t begin to explain. She’d felt so comfortable in his arms. What had happened? In her dream, Marshall had lost his glasses, but now he was wearing them. Marshall reached down and took Mayberry’s hand, pulling her to her feet.
“I guess we fell asleep. No other world with magic, after all. I had some weird dreams, though,” Mayberry said quietly in a sleepy voice.
“Okay,” he responded curtly, his shoulders drooping a bit. Maybe waking up with his arms wrapped around her had mortified him. Without meeting her eyes, he used his pocketknife to saw a long branch from the giant tree.
Marshall clicked the button on his flashlight, but it didn’t work. He shook his head and gingerly handed Mayberry the branch he’d cut for her to use as a walking stick. She felt a strange tingle as her hand touched the branch.
“Marshall, I had an amazing dream. I want to tell you—”
“Can we please talk about your dreams another time?” Marshall said, interrupting her. “We’re actually lost in the woods—the woods where people who get lost are never found again?”
Even though Mayberry agreed that bumbling around the woods at night wasn’t the best idea, she wasn’t sure why Marshall was taking their situation so personally. His attitude was especially annoying, because her last clear memory was . . . well . . . of kissing him. She remembered that the kissing part was good, but the dream hadn’t been all good—there’d also been flashes of fighting, and running from something that wanted to hurt them, and good and bad magic.
She pushed up the sleeves of her jacket and examined her arms for bruises or scrapes. But her skin was unblemished. Bits of leaves and debris from sleeping on the ground clung to her clothing, but . . . Nothing happened. Nothing changed. Nothing at all. But why do I feel so strongly that it had?
Marshall occasionally glanced her way while they hiked out of the forest. It was dark, but it seemed like Marshall was mad, or maybe sad. Mayberry didn’t think she’d done anything to make him angry, but it didn’t seem like the right time to ask.
After almost an hour, they exited the forest, crossed the bridge and meadow, and reached the bushes where they’d stashed their bikes. Mayberry whipped out her cell phone, which was finally working. It was nearly three thirty in the morning, and it was Sunday. Over eighteen hours had passed since they’d left home Saturday morning, and they’d slept for sixteen of them. How was that even possible? Mayberry responded to her parents’ frantic late-night texts asking where she was and told them she’d been having phone trouble but everything was okay and she would call them in the morning.
Marshall silently handed her the aspen samples he’d cut while hiking to the big tree, and she crammed them into her pockets. After strapping the walking stick onto her bike as a souvenir, they mounted up and began to pedal home together.
When they reached the junction, Marshall peeled his bike toward his house, waving a hand in her direction but not even saying good-bye. It had started as a good day—Mayberry wasn’t sure where it had gone wrong. At the very least they could claim a victory: they’d made it to the middle of the Mystery Forest, and even though it hadn’t worked, they’d actually found the Wishing Tree.
CHAPTER 45
MAYBERRY BRUSHED HER TEETH, scrunched into her plaid flannel PJs, and flopped into bed, feeling way more tired than she should, given the marathon nap she’d just taken.
She fell asleep, then woke up in a cold sweat a few hours later. She’d been dreaming about the strangest creatures—a four-armed green troll, Bigfoots, and a river monster with deadly tentacles and a huge maw. Must be anxiety dreams. She rolled out of bed and wandered restlessly around the house, looking through piles of magazines and watching bad late-night TV. Before long, she headed back to bed, pushed her head into the soft pillow, and after some fitful tossing and turning, trying to quell the strange images floating up from her subconscious, drifted off again.
She woke up around noon with her fingers squeezing her blanket so tightly she nearly had to pry them off. More incredibly vivid dreams had swum to the surface of her muddled brain.
She tossed the covers aside and jumped out of bed. She was hungry—famished, actually. When she’d gotten back she’d been way too tired to put something together for herself. She hadn’t eaten since the snacks Marshall had given her on their way into the aspen grove. Thank God her mother wasn’t home. She would have served Mayberry fresh fruit and mint tea instead of the bacon and egg fiesta that she craved. She slogged into the kitchen and went to work, then ate the results like eating was her job. She topped off the meal by gulping down a few mugs of black coffee to juice her brain.
She needed something to distract her from the crazy dreams and her now-tenuous relationship with Marshall, so she carried the tree samples Marshall had taken from the grove—along with another full mug of coffee—up to her mom’s lab. Then she remembered the walking stick strapped to her bike, and went back downstairs to collect that, too.
With a sharp blade, Mayberry cut slices from all the perimeter trees’ branches, then fired up the electron microscope. This microscope would scan each slice and transfer all the data it gathered, including DNA, into her mom’s computer. Another program would analyze the DNA from the individual slices while simultaneously comparing that data with every other sample that had been inputted. This resulted in an overlapping graphic that displayed all the chosen samples’ similarities and differences.
Mayberry began inputting the slices and running the programs. The repetitive work was soothing, and soon she’d forgotten all about her dreams. Now she was just another lab drone, inputting data and waiting patiently for the results to be calculated. She was taking another sip of coffee from her mug when she looked up and saw the results displayed on the computer monitor. Her hand trembled, and she sloshed coffee on her lab coat.
The samples taken by Marshall from various points around the grove—even the trees farthest away from each other—were exact matches, which meant that all the samples came from the same aspen tree. She may have found a quaking aspen colony!
Another piece of the puzzle was her hiking stick. If a sample taken from the Wishing Tree in the center of the grove matched, perhaps after taking more samples around the perimeter of the whole aspen grove she could confirm that the whole grove was actually one gigantic organism. This could change her mother’s life—and her life—forever.
She cut a slice from the walking stick and tested it.
Uh-oh. So maybe her life hadn’t changed after all, except for being the proud owner of a coffee-stained lab coat. The Wishing Tree’s sample didn’t match the perimeter samples at all, which meant that only part of the grove was one interlaced tree, and so she had no idea how big it really was without further research.
She inputted the data from the samples into her mom’s database to compare them with DNA from other quaking aspens. Her eyebrows arched with astonishment.
Very strange. The DNA templates from the perimeter trees didn’t match those of any similar quaking aspen species. Mayberry’s brain snapped to attention. She expanded her search from quaking aspens to the DNA templates common to all trees. None of them even approximated a match, which theoretically indicated that this grove was a totally unique organism.
Maybe the data had been corrupted—the samples could have been contaminated in Marshall’s pack. Mayberry widened the search, but only turned up DNA markers that were common to all carbon-based life forms. The grove’s DNA apparently had as much in common with humans, birds, and other animals as it did with trees. It made no sense.
There was one more set of tests to run. She used her mom’s sterile core borer on the walking stick this time, to be sure she got a clean sample, then mounted and scanned it. She labeled the walking stick MF CENTER 1, then walked over to her bedroom and tossed it in the closet so it wouldn’t get mixed up with the other samples.
When she got back to the office, she examined the conclusion. The results from her prior test samples had been shocking, but this one was even more outlandish. The DNA strands from the stick didn’t have an identifiable relationship to any other organism on Earth.
She reran all the tests, using every instrument at her disposal, and kept getting the same results. A low-grade headache began to crawl between her eyes.
Reluctantly, she took a break, going into the kitchen to fix a “mom meal”: an organic salad with all the trimmings. As she chewed, she reviewed what she knew. The only organisms on Earth that were so distinctive they weren’t directly related to anything else in nature and sometimes not even to each other were one of the most diverse groups on Earth: simple slime molds. Slime molds typically existed as single-celled individuals. However, under certain conditions, one cell could combine with another, becoming a mobile slug and actually altering its DNA in the process—changing from a plant to an animal. Geneticists believed that a species being able to alter its own DNA was impossible, but in the case of slime molds, it wasn’t.
The DNA from the aspens in the grove was infinitely more complex than that of slime molds, and yet wasn’t even close to matching any other organism in her mom’s database. But the fact was, she was just a high school kid trained to slog through routine samplings. She wasn’t supposed to be using her mom’s cutting-edge lab equipment on her own—for entertainment or her own scientific investigation. Mayberry decided not to tell her mom about her trip into the Mystery Forest or about any of the bizarre test results until she came up with a rational explanation, but how could she solve this scientific dilemma by herself?
CHAPTER 46
THE REST OF Mayberry’s Sunday activities were inconsequential. If she’d been home in New York, she would have been hanging out with her friends, but here, without Marshall, all she had to do was watch TV or listen to music. She missed him.
Even though things had been inexplicably weird the last time they saw each other, she decided to call him anyway.
“Finally,” she said when he picked up. “It feels like I’ve been waiting to talk to you for days.”
There was a pause, and then she heard the sound of Marshall tapping his fingers on something. “Yeah,” he grumbled. “I’ve just been here working on some freelance stuff. What are you doing?”
“Nothing much,” Mayberry said. “Well, some stuff in my mom’s lab, but we can talk about that later. You know . . . I still want to tell you about that dream I had. It was so strange.”
“Mayberry, I really don’t want to talk about the dreams we had while we were passed out in the woods,” he said abruptly. “That giant tree stoked our imaginations. I had a weird dream too, but I think we should just let it go.”
Mayberry sighed. She knew her dream couldn’t be real, but why wouldn’t he talk about it?
“Okay, then,” Marshall said. “See you tomorrow.”
He hung up.
Mayberry lowered her cell phone, shaking her head in dismay. She couldn’t stop thinking about her dreams, her lab test results were crazy, and on top of everything, Marshall was growing distant just when she felt like they should be closer than ever. She knew that in real life he wasn’t the heroic savior he’d been in her fantasy dream, even if her heart kept insisting otherwise.
Mayberry drifted to the TV console and pawed through her father’s old DVD collection until she found one she hadn’t seen before—a goofy seventies movie called Animal House. Hopefully watching a vintage frat-boy comedy would take her mind off of how weird everything was feeling.
• • •
The sound of Mayberry’s sweet voice had bitten into Marshall like an iron claw squeezing his heart. His eyeballs felt like they were drooping out of his head, and he had a fierce headache no pill could relieve. He had to stop talking to her before he confessed something he couldn’t take back—like how he couldn’t stop thinking about her—or blurted out how he imagined them being really . . . a couple in love.
Marshall’s parents hadn’t noticed he’d been out last night way after midnight, and now he was fixing himself a box of macaroni and cheese in the kitchen while they sat in their chairs. He’d been having some pretty vivid dreams, too, and they felt even more real than their bike ride to the forest. In his dream, he’d been brave, and tough, and resourceful, and so was Mayberry. Together, they’d been unstoppable.
But back in the real world, life was exactly the same. He was the same dork he’d always been. Still, there was one thing really messing with his head: after his morning shower, he’d noticed a swirling red mark between his shoulder blades—
exactly like the one that monster named Monga had put on him in his dream. Logic told him his back was probably inflamed because he’d been eaten alive by bugs while sleeping under the tree, which would explain why he had dreamed about the mark. He was good with that.
Now if only he could think of a way to put his shattered spirit back together . . .
CHAPTER 47
ON MONDAY MORNING, the high school’s scuffed black-and-white-checked floors, smudged yellow walls, and cork bulletin boards made Marshall uneasy. He preferred to imagine himself holding hands with Mayberry as they walked through fragrant forests and grassy fields.
His mind didn’t accept being back on Earth at school until right after lunch in chemistry class, when a switch in his head flipped on and his brain landed in his body so that both were finally occupying the
same space. The chemistry teacher was helping a few students near the rear wall, with his back to the rest of the class. Marshall fidgeted by a metal work counter, trying to concentrate on his experiment. It was hard because Jim was amusing his comrades by tossing a cork-topped test tube full of acid from hand to hand.
Exasperated, Marshall put his test tube in its rack and stepped around the counter. “You need to stop doing that.”
“Are you kidding?” Jim said with a smirk and another toss of the test tube. “Why are you even talking to me, creep?”
“I’m talking to you because you’re going to hurt someone with that acid,” Marshall replied, his nostrils flaring, nodding his head to indicate India Hankie, who was working at the bench behind Jim.
Jim’s jaw tightened. “Did you hear that? Jackson’s trying to tell me what to do.” He glanced over his shoulder to confirm that the teacher was still busy. “Are you going to make me stop, Jackson?”
Marshall paused and stared into Jim’s dull eyes for a moment. Jim had made his life miserable for as long as he could remember. He’d been pushed, punched, and generally humiliated. But this encounter felt different. He just . . . wasn’t intimidated anymore. Jim wasn’t even as scary as an average housecat.
Marshall raised his eyebrows. “If you don’t decide to stop right now, I will make you stop.”
Jim’s face flushed pink. “Is this a new you, Jackson?” he said, waggling the test tube near Marshall’s face. “I can’t wait to see you make me.”
Then he tossed the test tube into the air with his right hand, intending to catch it behind his back with his left—but it flew off course. It was about to shatter on India’s table when, lightning fast, Marshall vaulted over the counter and snatched it out of the air.
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