“I’m getting a picture of the whole day. Context is important.”
“A salad.” Sawyer rolled her eyes. “An extremely functional salad, eaten at my desk, after which I returned to a normal and orderly afternoon.” She looked at the ceiling again. “Or that was the plan.”
Nellie had gone quiet. Not the half-asleep quiet, but the full-attention quiet that Sawyer had learned to distinguish from allits cousins. Sawyer found, as she always did when Nellie went quiet like this, that she had more to say than she’d anticipated.
“I can’t quite make it compute,” she admitted. “That this is what three months looks like, from that starting point. You, chained to a tree. Me, furious about it. And now—” She let the gesture substitute for the sentence, tracing her fingertips down Nellie’s bare arm.
“It’s a crazy story.” Nellie nodded and chuckled. “I mean, objectively. If I were to tell it all to someone and hear it out loud, it would sound completely unhinged. Activist chains herself to tree, billionaire CEO shows up looking incredibly hot and incredibly furious?—”
“I wasn’t?—”
“—and the whole thing just snowballs from there in a direction that no one could have predicted.” Nellie’s voice had gone soft at the edges, the laugh in it settling into something more awed. “It’s a mad story. But I’m very glad about how it ended up. Extremely. Unreservedly glad.”
Sawyer pressed her mouth to the corner of Nellie’s lips.
“So am I.”
The forest creaked and shifted outside the thin walls of the van: small sounds, branches, the distant low commentary of whatever birds conducted business at this hour. Sawyer had not grown up with forests. She had grown up with parking lots and bus routes and the ambient noise of a city that was alive without being kind about it. She had spent a long time believing that the absence of that noise would be silence and silence would be unsettling. It wasn’t. The forest was not silent. It was just a completely different conversation, and she was beginning, with Nellie’s heartbeat as her guide, to pick out the words.
“I want to make another deal,” she said.
Nellie lifted her head, eyebrows raised. “Another deal?”
“It seems appropriate.” Sawyer grinned. “Now that we’ve thoroughly celebrated you winning the last one.”
Nellie blushed. They had, indeed, celebrated very thoroughly. “Alright, what are the terms?”
Sawyer shifted slightly, resettling their tangled arrangement until she had a clearer line of sight to Nellie’s face. “You stay with me and help me fight for a better future for our planet. And on my side, I will protect the forest. This forest and all the forests I can. Not just in the Alburn Systems corporate documentation sense, though the legal protections will be properly filed and you’ll have copies of everything. I mean, I promise that Eleanor will stay standing, always. Whatever I have to do to make that happen, whatever agreements need drafting and whatever conversations need having and whatever ungodly regulatory frameworks need navigating, Eleanor stands.” She held Nellie’s gaze. “She was here four hundred years before either of us. I’d like her to be here four hundred years after.”
“Four hundred years is a very long time,” Nellie argued, but gently, without the barb it might have had three months ago. “Threats we can’t predict. Disease, drought.” She glanced toward the back window, toward whatever patch of dark beyond it was Nellie’s personal compass point. “Wildfire season gets longer every year.” She looked back. “What if a wildfire takes the whole area? What if there’s nothing left? You can’t make a blanket promise for four centuries, that’s?—”
“All right.” Sawyer nodded. She thought about it for approximately two seconds. “Then we’ll add a wildfire clause.”
“A clause…?”
“Standard practice in any robust agreement. Force majeure provisions, unforeseen circumstances.”
“We’re doing this verbally. At midnight. In a van.”
“The venue doesn’t affect the enforceability.” Sawyer fought to keep her face entirely composed. “In the event ofcatastrophic wildfire—or comparable disaster of sufficient scale to compromise the standing of Eleanor and the surrounding protected area—I will invent a time machine.”
Nellie was shaking with laughter now.
“Or,” Sawyer continued, pantomiming the same register she used for amendments to quarterly reports, “discover the secret to immortality. I haven’t settled on the mechanism; there are trade-offs to both. But the objective in either case is this: I will take you to the moment, four hundred years from now, when the forest has grown back. Taller. Just as immovable.” She planted a gentle kiss on the tip of Nellie’s nose. “We will park Dolores. Right here. And we will lie here, exactly like this.”
Nellie gaped at her for a moment, then blushed, then ducked her head beneath Sawyer’s chin. Presumably to hide said blush.
“You are,” Nellie said, muffled and laughing, “absolutely ridiculous.”
“It’s a reasonable clause,” Sawyer maintained.
“It’s insane.” But Nellie pulled back slightly to look at her, still grinning. “You know that, right? You’re proposing a wildfire clause in a verbal contract that is contingent on either time travel or immortality, and you’re doing it completely seriously?”
“I do most things completely seriously. It’s a consistent personal characteristic.”
“You strange woman.” Nellie rolled her eyes, then announced, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
