Sawyer Alburn was furious.
The first wrong turn had cost her eleven minutes. The second cost her a tire pressure warning and the last of whatever remained of her patience after four a.m., which—following a board call with a CFO in Tokyo who had apparently never encountered the phrase “final decision” before—had not been substantial.
The GPS had performed flawlessly through forty minutes of city skyrises and dwindling suburbs and then, in a development Sawyer chose to regard as a personal betrayal, delivered a calm and entirely uselessrecalculatingwhile she idled at the intersection of two unmarked dirt roads. Both of them led into trees. She had a graduate degree from Wharton, a company valued at eight-point-four billion dollars, and no way of determining, by looking at trees, which were the correct trees.
She had turned left. This had been wrong. She reversed, turned right, drove four miles, and called Gina, who did not answer because she was asleep, because Gina was not the onewho had to drive out to a wilderness border at six in the morning because her development team had failed to manage a single activist before she became a viral livestream. Sawyer ended the call without leaving a message. Gina would understand the implication.
The access road eventually appeared in her headlights—properly marked, as it turned out, at an angle visible from the intersection if she’d turned right the first time—and she pulled down it slowly, because the rental’s suspension was making a sound that suggested the road’s ambitions exceeded its maintenance budget by several years.
She saw the construction vehicles first. Then the patrol car. Then, through the tree line, the chain.
Sawyer parked, cut the engine, and sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel.
She’d pulled up the livestream at a red light shortly after she’d left her building—Martha had sent the link at five forty-five with a message that read simply “you’ll want to see this.”. Sawyer had watched forty-five seconds: a woman chained to a very large tree, talking cheerfully about fungus while wearing an expression of complete and bewildering contentment. Seventeen thousand viewers. The chat moved too fast to read. The tree looked, she had to admit, genuinely enormous.
After taking a deep, bracing, not-at-all-seething breath, she got out of the car.
The chill in the forest was different from the city, denser and damper, the kind that settled against you rather than passing through. Her coat, adequate in every other context she’d worn it, was too thin here, but she kept her face neutral anyway.
She did a quick inventory: the foreman frozen mid-pace, the deputy sheriff scrambling out of her patrol car and hurriedly straightening her hat, two crew members on a flatbed with their arms folded as they watched. And, at the base of the tree?—
The woman was smaller than she’d appeared on the stream. Dark hair, damp and partly escaped from whatever chaotic arrangement it had started the morning in. One hand cuffed by a chain to the trunk. One hand holding a sign that read ELEANOR IS NOT A BOARD FOOT and a thermos resting in the dirt beside her boot.
She was looking at Sawyer.
Not with fear—fear was familiar, and fear had a shape Sawyer recognized on sight because it tended to produce a reliable set of behaviors: stiffened posture, recalibrated tone, the particular vigilance of someone deciding how much they could afford to say.
Not with defiance either, which was its own performance and had its own structures. This was something else entirely. It was pure, unguarded curiosity, the look of someone who had expected one thing and gotten another.
Sawyer walked toward the tree line.
The deputy materialized at her left, slightly breathless. “Sorry, Ms… um?”
“Ms. Alburn. Has she been cited?”
“Yes, ma’am. Trespassing and obstruction. She has a chain, though, so removal would require?—”
“What’s her name?”
“Fuller. Nellie Fuller. She’s done this before, apparently. Eight times, she said.”
She’d spent the drive up listening to the stream on the car’s speakers. Twelve minutes of mycorrhizal networks, followed by a detailed explanation of the public comment resubmission process, followed by what she could only describe as anextremely charming interaction with a foreman named Dave. The chat had been delirious. “Stand down for now, Deputy.”
She stopped ten feet from the base of the tree.
Nellie Fuller tilted her head slightly and smiled, warm and open and wholly unperturbed, and it produced, somewhere in the region of Sawyer’s stomach, a sensation she declined to examine further.
“Good morning,” Nellie said. “I’d offer you coffee, but I already warned Dave, and I don’t want it on my conscience twice. Full disclosure: it’s genuinely terrible.”
A muffled laugh from the flatbed. Sawyer did not look around.
“Ms. Fuller,” she said through her teeth. “I assume you know who I am.”
“Sawyer Alburn.” The answer was immediate and easy, like she’d expected the question. “Founder and CEO of Alburn Systems. Net worth approximately four-point-two billion, depending on the quarter. You took the company from a shared office in Seattle in 2002—seventeen thousand in seed funding, a regional hospital contract—to where it is now through twenty-eight acquisitions, none of which, I believe, has ever required you to navigate a dirt road before sunrise.” A beat. Her gaze dropped, briefly and pointedly, to Sawyer’s shoes. “Until today.”
That smile again. Blinding but somehow also soft. Like the brilliance of the sun but the calm of a clear sky.
“The trespassing citation carries jail time,” she said simply.
