Page 129 of Under Story

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Four is the hinge. In some ways, Silas is still the child she’s known. She can reason with him. For the most part, his vocabulary remains. They have long conversations while walking the arboretum path near home. And he is still dexterous: he assembles puzzles at a speed that both impresses and comforts her.

But Laurel can’t deny that he is becoming a small child. He develops a rigidity that verges on hysteria, as though he knows that something is getting away from him.

Cut the crusts off!

Daddy didn’t wash his hands after the bus.

You have to listen to my rules.

Every time the doctor weighs him, he is lighter.

—

Gloria graduates in the fall. Her roommates scream as she walks across the stage to accept her diploma, and afterward, Laurel takes her picture below a tent of bright blue sky.

“Last night,” Gloria whispers, “the Ouija board said that I’m destined for great things.

“Well,” Laurel says, “I could have told you that.”

Gloria stays at the Rhizotron for her doctorate, waiting tables at a diner on the side. What they’ve found is promising: currents in the tree have steadily increased, and the rhizomorphs are shrinking.

Still, as they drive to Cedar that summer, Laurel says, “I can’t shake the sense that we’re missing something.”

This time, Gloria is driving. They sit in the used Chevy Cavalier she bought with her savings. The previous owner can’t have had it for long—stick shifts are new to the antiuniverse—but the car came with a dented fender and a duct-taped hole in the rear window.

“The spark is a transition point: the moment when composition ends and independent life begins,” Laurel continues, partly to herself. “To be independent, a human body needs two things: a working heart and a working brain. For each organ, electricity is key. The brain uses it to think, and the heart uses it to beat.”

“Uh-huh.” Gloria hasn’t had her license for long, and she keeps drifting toward the edges of her lane.

“But we’re only tracking physical composition in the tree. We haven’t addressed the mental piece.”

“Because a tree isn’t human. We don’t know whether there is a mental piece,” says Gloria. “And if there were, how would we measure it?”

“That’s it!” says Laurel. “That’s what we have to work on. If electricity is connected to sentience, the way it is in animals, then we need to prove that separately. The fact of electricity isn’t enough; we need to show what it means.”

“But what are our terms?” asks Gloria. “I mean, what does consciousness look like in a plant?”

Laurel flops back against her seat. “Exactly.”

For several minutes, they drive in silence. Then Gloria says, “Why do we even have to bring that in? If we can capture the surge that happens during the spark, that would still be a huge contribution. We could look at the sentience angle in the future.”

“Gloria, I won’t have time. The spark is still years away. By then, I could be in my early twenties.”

Laurel spoke more sharply than intended, but she feels a flash of desperation. When she thinks of aging down, it is almost always in relation to Silas. Deep down, though—beneath the floor of her everyday consciousness—Laurel knows that if she doesn’t leave this universe, she’ll be subject to the same process. In that case, her independence has an end date: at eighteen, an adult becomes a minor and must report to the care of a guardian.

“Is this about your maze experiment?” Gloria asks. “Unfinished business?”

“What do you mean?”

“The intelligence stuff—it sounds like what you were working on before.”

“It’s related, I guess. But this is a different project.”

“Are you sure?”

By now, Gloria feels less like a student than a brilliant little sister. And sometimes, like a sister, she pokes.