Nellie listed them. At the northern sector restriction, Paloma made a sound.
“Something’s up there,” Paloma said.
“That would be my guess too.”
“Nellie—”
“I know. I’m being careful.” She sat on the porch and looked out at the tree line, the last light moving through the canopy in long, slow diagonals. “I found a stream today that wasn’t inthe survey. The mycorrhizal network around Eleanor is almost certainly an artifact of something running through this whole valley. I need a couple weeks of sampling, but I know I’m right about this one. I can feel it.”
“You can feel it.” Paloma hummed, nine years of friendship compressed into four words, which somehow managed to mean both ‘that’s not evidence’ and ‘you’re probably right.’
“I’ll get the data. I always do.” A woodpecker hammered at a dead snag forty feet into the trees—one fast, deliberate knock, then another, then silence. “The deal is real. They’re hiding something in the northern section, fine. But Sawyer Alburn made that offer in front of nineteen thousand people on a livestream. I won’t let either of them get away with any tricks.”
“Just don’t let your confidence make you comfortable. Comfortable people miss things.”
“This cottage has a woodstove and a window directly into the canopy. I’m going to be extremely comfortable, and I’m going to miss absolutely nothing.”
“Be careful.” Paloma chuckled.
“Always.”
Nellie sat on the porch until the light was fully gone and the forest settled into its night sounds—the steady note of the stream, a barred owl calling somewhere to the south, the scuffling of critters going about their nocturnal business. She wrote notes until she couldn’t see her own handwriting, then went inside and lit the woodstove, sat at the kitchen table, and felt, not for the first time and not for the last, like the land was already talking and she just needed to be quiet enough to hear it.
She heard footsteps at nine forty-seven. Not deer—Nellie knew deer, knew the soft, drifting irregularity of them, the way they paused and tested and drifted again. Not raccoons either. Nellie set down her notebook and opened the cottage door.
Sawyer Alburn was standing ten feet away in front of the generator, examining it with the close and studious attention of someone with no other pressing concerns. The generator hummed on, unbothered, in excellent health. Sawyer had both hands in her pockets and was peering at the unit.
Their eyes met.
“I wasn’t expecting a visit so late.” Nellie smirked.
Sawyer pursed her lips like she’d just been caught in a compromising position. “Yes, well… Martha informed me that you would be staying here. I thought I would check if the generator is in working order.”
Nellie nodded slowly. She couldn’t help the teasing smile. Sawyer Alburn looked so out of her element but clearly had a reason for snooping around after sunset. Nellie had nothing but theories for what that reason might have been. “Works just fine, thanks.”
“Good… Well… Yes. Do you, uh… need anything?” Sawyer asked.
Nellie bit back a laugh so hard she felt it in her back teeth. “Nope.”
The silence that followed grew somewhat awkward. The owl called again, further south now, moving through the dark.
“Okay then,” Sawyer said curtly.
She turned and walked back into the trees. The forest closed around her in about four steps.
Nellie stood in the doorway for a long time, looking out at the dark tree line, turning the exchange over—what it was, what it wasn’t, whether the two were the same thing or meaningfully different and whether it mattered.
She didn’t land on a conclusion. She went inside and made tea instead, which was a perfectly reasonable response to an unreasonable evening, and she did not think about thegenerator, or the flatness of a voice working very hard not to be anything at all.
She almost managed it.
She did notice, however, that Sawyer’s boots—chunky and practical and seemingly brand new—had been considerably more sensible than this morning’s heels.
4
CHAPTER 4 – SAWYER
Sawyer had three veryvalidreasons for making another visit to the cottage currently inhabited by one Nellie Fuller.
