“Okay, small wave energy. I’ll take it.”
dave nation rise up, the chat said.we love dave. And, from perpetually_offline again:I would die for dave.
Paloma: fifteen thousand people is not nothing
Nellie: Eleanor is trending
Paloma: DO NOT LET IT GO TO YOUR HEAD
Paloma: Also I’m ten minutes out and I have a breakfast burrito with your name on it
Nellie: I love you
Paloma: I know. Eat the burrito.
The crew settled into that loose, purposeless posture specific to people who’d been told to hold without being told for how long. Dave paced a slow rectangle. The younger guy sat onthe flatbed and gave up pretending to do anything other than watch the stream on his phone, which Nellie found delightful. Someone produced a thermos of what smelled, from forty feet away, like genuinely excellent coffee—the real kind, dark and properly hot—and Nellie watched longingly while she inhaled as much of the scent as she could drag through her nostrils.
She was walking the chat through the public comment resubmission process, which was less cinematic than chaining yourself to a tree but arguably more useful, when she heard another engine.
Not diesel. Something quieter. It snuck down the access road and pulled slowly to a stop behind the construction vehicles.
Nellie kept talking. She had learned, over years of this, not to react to every development like it was the one that mattered because you’d spend all your adrenaline on the seventeen that didn’t and have nothing left for the one that did.
A door opened.
A woman stepped out.
The coat registered first—charcoal, probably cashmere, full-length. A coat that probably cost more than Nellie’s chaotically converted van, which she affectionately called Dolores, that was also her home. City shoes. Dark hair pulled back. The clipped, economical steps of someone who had never once stood somewhere waiting for another person to tell her where to be or what to do with herself. At the edge of the tree line, she stopped, and she looked at the scene in front of her—the chain, the sign, Dave frozen mid-pace, Deputy Haines scrambling out of her patrol car for the first time all morning—with an expression that gave away absolutely nothing.
Deputy Haines straightened her hat.
Dave stood like someone had installed a new spine.
Nellie’s phone lit up on the branch:Paloma: Please tell me that’s not who I think it is.
Nellie reached up with her free hand and tilted the camera, carefully, just enough to widen the frame.
The woman turned and looked directly at her.
Not at Eleanor or the sign—though Nellie could tell from the brief downward flicker of those eyes that she had clocked BOARD FOOT and formed a private opinion about it. She looked at Nellie. A steely gaze that was conducting a thorough, unhurried, and deeply unimpressed inventory of the situation.
The chat erupted.
IS THAT SAWYER ALBURN?!
WAIT WAIT WAIT
THAT’S THE CEO
SHE CAME HERSELF???
omg omg omg omg
Nellie Fuller, chained to a four-hundred-year-old Douglas fir in the rain, smiled wider than she had all morning.
2
CHAPTER 2 – SAWYER
