Chương 147: Judah, Part 1

Inside the titanic tree was practically a whole world in and of itself. Like a giant wooden cave. Most of the light was what could penetrate through the various cracks in the bark, and the loose glow of plant-life I couldn't recognize, dangling off of the walls and loose branches. Looking up, I could see it just endlessly climbed to an invisible zero point. Exhaustion was catching up with my body. There was no flinging myself up I could do.

If I wanted to preserve my strength, the best move I could make was just keep moving up and up and up by placing one foot in front of the other. Though there was no clear stairway or ladder or anything. But I was able to slowly make my way up by grabbing thick branches or stepping on wide and out-jutting knots of Wyrdwood that brought me up just a bit higher with every instance. Some were easier to climb than others. I thought about what surprised me most, which was that the tree itself didn't seem to attack me.

I expected some sort of retaliation given it was Wyrdwood. Everything made of Wyrdwood had a habit of trying to kill people it didn't like. That meant either the Wyrdwood liked me, or the tree had some other reason to not attack yet. It was so much bigger on the inside than I realized. Some spots opened up that really gave me a clear view on how large the tree itself was throughout its trunk. You could fit a small neighborhood inside.

That kind of distance, with the limited light sources, meant it was always kind of dark. Not too dark, but through the polarized lenses of my mask, it was harder to see. After probably half an hour of traversal and climbing, I finally took the mask off. I say probably half an hour, but I didn't really know for sure. It was impossible to know how much time was passing in here. That dim, hazy light outside didn't seem to move like the sun did. It was always the same "hour" of "day."

I could keep a decent track of days, but that's from outside reference. The passing of the sun and the moon. Without either of those, I was left guessing, and that was pretty hard without any hints. The other thing that baffled me was the sheer lack of people in here. The ADU had so many members, so many victims. Quite a few Fathers, and Mothers I guess. And those Knights and Hussars, and those tailed things with the people in them. The same kind as the person I killed.

I hadn't seen any of those last ones in a while. At least while I traveled, I could ponder on that. Realistically, why would there be less of those and more of the people-less stuff like the Hussars and the tree men, the Knights? So I had gathered that Wyrdwood takes human thoughts. Those tailed wooden creatures probably were running off of human thoughts. What was left was some kind of violent thoughts that weaponized people, as what happened with Assacu, Socratea, and Quercus.

Maybe beneficial thoughts specifically really fertilized Wyrdwood and kept it running. But to make a giant tree like this, if my theory was correct, that would take quite a few people. Too many to leave any behind to make the tailed Wyrdwood creatures. That was the only explanation I could put together. Otherwise, they'd be sending exclusively those as part of their attacks so that I would hesitate to kill again.

Alternatively, they may have figured if I could get one without killing them and figure out if the person inside was innocent or consciously trying to be a threat, that'd be the kind of closure. Something that would let me fight with everything in me still. So leaving me in the dark would be a good tactical move. Given they've done martyr attempts, hostages, and apparently several layers of distraction, it wouldn't be entirely outside of their wheelhouse to consider that.

Unfortunately there were too many variables. As I gripped another branch and yanked myself further up along the interior, I noticed the wide and cramped spaces starting to consistently blend more. Lower down it was always either hallways or entirely open spots. These now looked more like mixed groves, never too cramped but never open enough to see all sides of. That just raised my hackles. The plant-life continued to look unlike anything I'd ever seen. Made me consider if maybe this was an alien phenomenon.

Had no way of knowing that for sure, either. One of those times I wish had one of the eggheads with me to either confirm or deny my reasoning, give me some direction to start working in besides "Forward." While these thoughts felt short and scant to me, it seemed more apparent that I was going into some kind of autopilot, maybe burnt out hours already just navigating. I was able to go at a pace that didn't exhaust me, but for all I knew that was just my gravity making climbing easier.

Made me wish I could just jump straight up, but I couldn't really tell where ceilings were, and I didn't want to risk the Wyrdwood deciding now would be the perfect time to form a spike and impale me. Acknowledging that it could've been hours also put another consideration in me: Sustenance. I didn't bring food with me. Even though Tancred said it could take days or even a week, I didn't consider it. Was too caught up in my emotions and that meant I was in here unprepared and unsupplied.

Food, I wasn't too worried about. You need to go three weeks without food to die. If I wasn't up there within a week we were dead anyway, probably. That problem could be put away without much concern, I could live without that for now. Back before I joined The New Sentinels, my longest stretch without eating was twelve days due to a mix of no time and a focus on hunting the drug dealers. I finally was compelled to steal ketchup packets just to get some sort of nourishment. Five days, I could handle.

My bigger concern was water. You can go up to three days without water. Then your organs start failing and you will die either that same day or not too long after, maybe another day at most. I'd have to find water. Recycle it if I had to. But that wouldn't get me new water, just slow down dehydration. On top of that, there was no weather here, probably, going by the lack of sun.

Stepping across what seemed to be almost a bridge of roots, I tried to figure out some alternatives to rain water if it wasn't going to rain here. It felt pretty muggy in here. Humid. Made me remember this ultimately still was a tree. Trees need water to survive too. If they took the county alongside the city, there were multiple reservoirs and the river it could pull from, going throughout the tree. Water likely pooled up in several spots.

Possibly even in all these weird plants I kept having to push past, which had various different smells, multiple ones I just couldn't trust. Drinking any water in here was a big risk. Could it result in being influenced by the Wyrdwood? Had to consider what I knew about Wyrdwood and my vulnerability to mental influence. I was vulnerable to my own, of course, but that's because I'm me, if I were immune to my own thoughts then I wouldn't be able to think. The narrative has been taken without permission.

Report any sightings. When Gleditsia put that flower in my head with the vision, I definitely remember forcing myself out of it, a lot of random details still struggle to clarify for me, but I remember getting out of that myself. And that was probably embedded right into my brain. When I first went to save Jairo from Mother Belladonna, I felt off for a little bit but nothing actually really changed. She herself said I was somehow resisting it, but I wasn't sure what that meant or entailed.

Foras put us in his weird funhouse memory nightmare place through mental influence involving the hypno-gogic-whatever I still wasn't really sure about. But Foras seemed to be on his own level compared to everything else I've been dealing with, even Gleditsia and Wyrdwood. Overall with that kind of track record, that made it seem most likely that Wyrdwood stuff wasn't going to have any success at influencing me just by drinking water in the Platanos. But that was just hopes.

And on top of that, that didn't suddenly put water in front of me. In fact, I wasn't entirely sure when I last drank water. If I assumed the morning, and I made it to the Platanos half an hour after I last saw the time, that would've been about nine hours since I last had water when I entered. Probably had been in here for another four hours, five maybe. Would have to round up for certainty's sake. Three days is seventy-two hours.

That meant I had fifty-nine hours left of hydration at best, and I didn't want to get below twenty-four hours left. Restarting fresh would be good. That meant I'd need to find water if I was going to keep climbing. I didn't have any way to store liquids. My mask wasn't concave enough to hold water as a container. I'd need to just get my fill and treat that as a reset clock. In theory maybe the plants had water in them, some definitely had what looked like fruits dangling from them.

Plucking one off, I took a sniff and immediately flinched away. It smelled like a mix of bleach and sulfur. Fighting off wretching, I threw the fruit away as I kept up my travels. I'd just need to scour every area for where water would collect. I wasn't sure of how to really do that, but the next open area I found, what I tried to consider is where the water would pile up and descend from. Places the air wouldn't move so latent humidity would bring the surface tension together and start forming puddles.

Some dripping from exposed parts of Wyrdwood or the local plant life. After maybe what I guessed was two more hours of scouring, my throat definitely beginning to feel dry, I found a puddle under a bent branch, barely high enough to fit my shoulders under so I could scoop it up. Before I did, I took a sniff just to make sure it was water. Odorless. The water wasn't completely clear, which I actually saw as a good sign. I remember being warned that perfectly transparent water usually had lethal microbes in it.

Recalling that made me notice that I didn't see a single bug the entire way up here. Frankly, there was no sign of life anywhere. Couldn't dwell on that for too long. Scooping two hands into the water, I began slurping away, and slurping. I felt like an animal, lapping and supping away at a puddle of water to rehydrate. But the alternative was too risky for me to ignore. It didn't taste good or bad. Just tasted like warm water. That was another positive sign for me.

Took me a few minutes to empty it, which helped satiate me. It definitely felt like enough to reset my clock back to seventy-two hours. With that, I resumed my climb with a bit more vigor. My arms were starting to get a bit sore, and it made me realize I was likely going to have to sleep. At that point, I did remember that I had my phone, and while maybe it couldn't connect to the internet, it still had a clock that ticked forward and an alarm I could set.

Slipping it out from my belt, I noted a significant crack on the screen. Luck was on my side as it still illuminated, if duller than before. August 15th, 3: 11 AM. I'd been climbing for nearly twelve hours. My body wasn't too tired yet, at least. But I'd need to force rest on myself soon enough. If nothing else, it gave me time to reflect. Probably the first time I could do it without being interrupted by other people while I went on autopilot, let my body do all the work of going up, and up, and up.

And I had a lot to reflect on, how much has changed for me. And how much stayed the same. Last time I came this close to my birthday, I still had a place to live. I don't anymore. The base was compromised. The testing facility was destroyed. If I failed, I'd never get those back. Maybe if we succeeded right, they'd return. Or maybe something better would come back. Another thing around this time last year, I didn't have any friends. People kept their distance from me. At least, that's how I recalled it.

Maybe there were good memories to go with the bad ones, but none of them seemed to come up for me. All burnt away for powers that just make my brain worse and worse. Powers that could kill me if I use them wrong. Now, though, I did have friends. Chris, and May, and Jairo. I did see them as friends. Some other people were friends too. Like Tyson. I wondered if May and him were getting along again or not. She never really told me what happened after that mission. Maybe it just wasn't my business to know.

I could probably get an answer faster. Shivvy too. Shivvy was a friend. An odd friend. One that was technically used to try and kill me at first, but in the time I've had him, he's proven to be loyal and pretty damn useful. Could never really hear back from him, but he seemed to understand me. So maybe he understood that I saw him as a good, odd friend. And Sam… Part of me can't forgive her. Could never forgive her.

But the more and more I think about it, how much of it was her fault maliciously and how much of it was her just being too tangled up in her circumstances? How much of it was because just like me, her life was too messed up to keep things normal? I didn't think she was a bad person. But the stuff she did that upset me wasn't just incidental comments or something. She invaded my privacy, she let me be tortured with a shock collar. If she wasn't comfortable with it, why didn't she stop it when it happened?

Was it Tancred's decision? Tancred… His name came to me as I had passed by a large, glistening leaf that reflected my face in it. Let me see the dried blood pouring from my nose, my mask hanging from its strap around my neck, the bruising around my eyes. My eyes. I glared at myself the same goddamn way Tancred does. This is what he was looking at every time he was making those decisions. Those orders. Who he chose to give an offer instead of locking in the Firmament.

In that moment, he finally made a bit more sense. None of that really solved any of my thoughts, but things made a bit more sense with Tancred. With Sam… I just didn't know. The right move would not be to forgive her. At least part of me thought that. The rest of me kept thinking about the kids. The first time she was candid with me about them, she seemed to really lament the fact they weren't smart like her. That they were normal, could live normal lives. And when they were taken, she'd talked about accepting it.

She was the happiest I'd seen her in months just taking them to the movies. And she herself told me that she made all of those choices specifically to protect them. It was apparent that, just like me, she was lonely. Grew up lonely, because of how her situation made her so completely different from every single human being around her. And just like me, she chose to do something about it. What I did was try to protect the people who couldn't be protected. Be there for them when others couldn't be.

She went the opposite way. She brought others there, where they weren't. And in return she'd give them a life where they wouldn't have to feel lonely, ever. Was it really all that wrong to forgive someone so damn similar to me? Did I not want to be forgiven for the things I'd done? For killing someone I never knew the name or intentions of? For treating everyone around me like a potential threat even when they tried their best to help me, and let that feeling sink me deeper into places I didn't need to be?

I looked at my phone again. 6: 48 AM. So few thoughts in just three hours of climbing. Usually I thought fast. All of this travel was slowing me down. But I could start to feel real soreness in my muscles. My body doing its best muted screams for rest. I set up a timer and found a set of soft, fibrous leaves to curl up on. Three hours of sleep, frankly more than I gave myself during heavier patrols back in the day. It'd be sufficient rest. Deep in that slumber, a voice suddenly woke me up. An older man's.

A familiar one.

"Have you enjoyed the Platanos' hospitality, Leo Holt?"