Chapter 2

By morning there was nothing to find.

Noah went out to the north tree line at first light, when the rain had thinned to a drizzle and the grove was filling with a pearl-colored haze. He walked the ground in widening arcs, as he had been taught to track deer by a grandfather he barely remembered. He found a fern crushed flat in the shape of a knee. He found a scuff in the duff beneath a hemlock, as though someone had sat there a long while and risen carefully. He found no boot prints, no blood, no fungal webbing, and no scrap of cloth snagged on the cedar. Whatever had stood at the edge of his clearing had been small, light, and patient, and it had left only what it could not help leaving.

He stood over the scuffed ground for a long time. Then he turned and went back, and he did not mention it to Willow. Telling her would have meant admitting that something had come close enough to be seen, and she would have taken that as one more argument in her favor.

That was the way of the thing between them. Neither of them lied, exactly. They simply kept their separate fires, and fed them privately, and called the arrangement peace.

It had settled into a pattern by the second year, as even strange things will.

Noah rose before the light and walked the perimeter. He checked the tripwires and the spike boards, reset the cans, and burned what needed burning. By seven he had circled to the western boundary, where the grove ended and the gray forest began, and he stood there a while with his rifle and his thermos of boiled pine needle tea. By eight he was at the outpost, inspecting the fence, the shed, the generator, the drainage ditches he had dug to keep the module from flooding. He did it without being asked and without being thanked, and he would have been embarrassed by either.

Willow rose later, but her mornings were no less fixed. She started in the greenhouses, moving down the rows with a clipboard clamped under one arm, checking leaf color, soil moisture, the thin pale lines of root growth against the glass of her observation jars. She noted the temperature, the humidity, the angle of the light. At ten she went to the solar array and wiped the panels with a rag and a bucket of rainwater. At noon she ate whatever she had, usually something green, and read through her notes on the immune trees until the words ran together. In the afternoons she took samples.

They crossed paths twice a day, and the crossings had the quality of two people passing in a narrow hall. A nod. A remark about the weather. Sometimes a complaint. Once, in the spring, she had left a jar of pickled ramps on the fence post by his cabin with no note, and the following day he had left a brace of trout on her step, and neither of them had spoken of it.

The trout had come, as the trout always did, from the river.

He had never met the man who caught them. That was one of the rules Noah had made, and he had broken only the smallest part of it. Years back, in the first winter, he had found a cairn of river stones on the east bank of the Sol Duc where a game trail met the water. Atop it lay two smoked fish wrapped in waxed paper. Beside it was a note scrawled in a heavy, blocky hand: Nails? Fishhooks? Anything sharp. Noah had stood and looked at that for most of an hour. Then he had gone home and come back with a coffee can of galvanized nails and a whetstone. The next week there had been four fish.

They had traded that way ever since, over a gap of miles, through stones and paper, without ever seeing each other’s faces. Once, across a bend of the river at dusk, Noah had glimpsed a man in a faded canvas coat standing very still on the far bank, and the man had raised a hand, and Noah had not raised his. It was the nearest thing to a friendship he had permitted himself in six years, and it still felt like a risk.

The argument that day began, as most of their arguments did, over something small.

Willow found him in the shed in the middle of the morning, sorting hardware into coffee cans, and stood in the doorway until he noticed her. He did not stop what he was doing. A thin gray light fell through the open door, and a drip from the eave beat a slow tempo on the step.

“I need materials,” she said.

“What kind?”

“Glassware. Sterile containers, preferably borosilicate. Some reagent-grade ethanol, if there’s any left in the world. A new set of filters for the incubator.” She counted on her fingers. “And a heating element. The old one is failing.”

“We don’t have those.”

“I know we don’t. That’s why I’m asking you.” She said it quietly, which was worse than if she had shouted. “There’s a clinic in Forks. There was a veterinary supply store in the plaza. There are places where these things still exist.”