The Other Tree

by D. K. Mok

“Stay calm and no one gets hurt,” said a muscular brunette toting a rifle.

  “Too late,” said Luke, rubbing a bruise rising on his forehead.

  “I think you go to hell for that,” said Chris darkly to the soldiers.

  “Perhaps you should worry about where you’re going,” said a tanned soldier in his thirties.

  “Tomas!” snapped the brunette, glaring sharply at her colleague.

  Tomas leaned back with an unfriendly smile, his pistol resting on his thigh. The truck lurched into motion, and the brunette unclipped a two-way radio from her belt.

  “Brielle to base camp. We are secure. Over.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Chris, assessing the likelihood of an academic and a priest overpowering three armed soldiers.

  “No more questions,” said Brielle curtly.

  “We didn’t get any answers!” protested Chris. “Are you SinaCorp?”

  “Any more questions, and I’ll hit the priest again,” said Brielle.

  “Hey!” said Luke, feeling that this was rather unjust, and possibly ineffective as a threat.

  Chris glowered at Brielle, Tomas, and the third unidentified soldier, who looked as though he’d had a late night. Chris sat stiffly on the searing floor, her shoulder throbbing from where it had been twisted roughly. Under the heavy black canvas of the caged tray, she felt like she was being slowly baked alive. She tried not to look at the guns the soldiers held with such menacing ease.

  Emir had tried to warn her about the dangers ahead, but she hadn’t wanted to listen. She had already decided it would be an adventure, it would be revenge, it would be redemption. The worst she could imagine was losing to SinaCorp, or letting an exciting opportunity pass her by while she pottered about in the library, getting old and tired. She hadn’t seriously considered the possibility of being run off the road, or burned alive, or abducted and executed in the desert. That happened to other people, doing other things.

  She could still remember Emir’s face, the hurt in his eyes. His eyes were colder now, less hopeful, perhaps a little less kind, but there was still something in them she recognised. Emir had changed, but perhaps she should have made an effort to understand why. She had been so focused on herself, on her own pain, on her own righteousness, that it hadn’t even occurred to her that maybe he was waiting for her to ask the right question. He had been worried about her, and she had brushed him off like a burr. It was funny how, at times like this, you thought about all the people you wished you could say sorry to.

  Luke sat on the floor with his eyes closed, a meditative expression on his face. He was not, however, thinking about people he wanted to apologise to. It would, in any case, have been a very short list. Luke was trying to gauge the speed of the vehicle as it hummed over the broken road, taking note of changes in direction. It felt like a long ride, and he noticed the terrain changing several times, hitting a rough off-road track before finally slowing to a stop.

  The soldiers rose to their feet, and Brielle listened for familiar voices before she slipped carefully from the covered tray. Tomas grabbed Chris by the arm and shoved her through the sacking cover, pitching her onto the ground outside. The shock of fresh air felt almost cool against her soaked skin, and Chris staggered to her feet, still groggy from the suffocating heat. She wiped the sweat from her eyes and quickly surveyed the scene.

  In the middle of the rocky plain, a dilapidated concrete warehouse stood draped in bleached yellow camouflage awning. Several military pavilions were clustered close by, and half a dozen battered green Jeeps were parked in loose rows.

  Luke landed heavily on the ground beside Chris, struggling to stay on his feet as Tomas and Brielle began shoving them towards the warehouse.

  “Where—” Chris began.

  She stopped quickly as Brielle raised her rifle butt towards Luke.

  “Hey, do you hit her if I ask a question?” said Luke.

  Brielle looked at Luke, and something in the intensity of his expression seemed to make her uneasy.

  “You’ll get your answers,” said Brielle brusquely.

  Chris and Luke were jostled through the steel doors of the warehouse, the green paint deeply scoured by the sand. It was a little cooler inside, and the high ceilings were crisscrossed with metal girders and wooden rafters. The concrete floor was scuffed and stained, and the narrow hallways were dimly illuminated. A low chugging noise rattled in the background, as makeshift solar generators powered the queasily pulsing fluorescent lights. Chris and Luke were marched into a large, bare, concrete room, the ceiling and corners dipped in shadow.

  Chris’s stomach flipped at the sight of two empty wooden chairs in the middle of the room. Brielle and Tomas stood with their weapons meaningfully drawn, while two soldiers tied Chris and Luke to the chairs. After a final check of the knots, Brielle left the room, followed by the other soldiers.

  “I don’t suppose you have a flick knife up your sleeve?” asked Chris.

  “I have a lighter in my coat pocket,” said Luke.

  “I’ll keep that in mind if I want to set myself on fire.”

  “Do you have a flick knife?”

  “They’re illegal back home.”

  “Then why would I have one?”

  “Who’s going to search a priest?”

  “I think you overestimate the amount of respect clergy are afforded,” said Luke.

  The current situation is a case in point, thought Luke.

  In fact, there were places where displaying a clerical collar was akin to running around telling the locals that you ate babies. Which was often ironic since the priests in those areas were often running around saying the same thing about the locals. Ah, the perils of cultural misunderstandings.

  “Can you reach your phone?” asked Chris.

  “I’m tied to a chair,” said Luke. “Anything you are incapable of doing, because you’re tied to a chair, I am also incapable of doing, being tied to a chair.”

  Chris cast a searching gaze around the dim room and suddenly noticed something rather large near the back of the room.

  “Uh, Luke, what do you think that is?”

  Luke craned his neck, almost popping a joint as he looked over at the far wall. A long box covered in burlap, the size of two stretch limousines, was wedged against the back wall. At times like this, Luke was inclined to weigh up the seeping ennui of his deadening office existence against the draining horror of what he was currently going through. It was a hard call.

  The door to the room suddenly swung open with a clang, and Tate strode in, followed by about a dozen men and women. They were dressed casually in T-shirts and jeans, and Tate had exchanged his military uniform for a black T-shirt and cargo pants. With some surprise, Luke noticed Thena standing beside Brielle and Tomas. She avoided his gaze.

  Tate stepped to the front of the group, staring down at Chris and Luke.

  “Welcome to the end of your journey.”

  * * *

  It was silent in the jet. Not silent like a field of bluebells in the Alps was silent. More silent like all the noise in the room was being sucked from your brain kind of silent.

  Emir was used to it. It was almost comforting because it meant he was on the move, he was busy, he was useful.

  He cleaned his climbing gear again, double-checking every link, every join. Stace had never quite grasped the concept of maintenance, but Emir found it soothing. It allowed his mind to wander, and that had been happening a lot lately.

  Emir wasn’t brooding by nature, although he had been told he always struck a particular pose while thinking, as though he were standing on a ruined castle wall, casting his gaze across the desolate moors. At uni, Chris had taken to snapping a photo of him on her mobile every time he lapsed into what she called his “Heathcliff” pose. She had threatened to make a 365-day calendar with them, and earn her fortune selling them alongside the “Kitten-A-Day” desk calendars.

  The fact was that concentration didn’t come easily to Emir. It wasn’t t
hat he was slow, but he found it far easier to do something than to think about it. He was in his element when active, letting his body react to the environment, rather than analysing intangible concepts and speculating on the nature of humanity.

  He found that, the more you thought about people, the more complicated they became. He could see the appeal of Docker’s view of the world, which Emir privately called the “Schrödinger’s Cat approach”: if you didn’t pay attention to people, they didn’t exist except in the most theoretical of considerations. Life became a case of maths and algorithms, simple cause and effect, rather than a cacophony of disastrously subjective nuances and misinterpreted, half-imagined insinuations. Admittedly, Emir had never quite understood the whole Schrödinger’s Cat concept.

  Emir had met a mathematician once, on one of his early assignments to recover some ancient Mayan calendar pottery thing, and the way she had described the beauty of numbers reminded him strangely of parkour. The irrepressible order of pi, an endless stream of perfect numbers that continued through the universe. It seemed to echo the freedom of running—unstoppable, fluid through the world like a phantom.

  Maths and running. They made everything so much simpler. They stopped you from dwelling on pointless, petty questions.

  Like why she hadn’t called.

  Emir snapped open his harpoon gun and began to check the components with precise familiarity, his hands racing quickly across the mechanisms.

  Not that he had expected things to stay the same after he’d left uni—after all, people grew apart, and he had travelled a lot over the past few years. But when he had seen her again, after such a long separation, she had barely seemed to care whether he was there or not. Not that he had expected her to languish in his absence, and he was genuinely glad to see her happy and healthy, but he had expected perhaps a little more—

  Thunk.

  Emir jolted to attention, looking up to see a harpoon sticking out of the couch, next to Roman’s leg.

  Roman didn’t look up from her screen.

  “That’s why you shouldn’t clean your harpoon gun when distracted,” said Roman.

  The jet-lounge intercom beeped.

  “Descent in five,” came Docker’s voice.

  Emir quickly pulled the harpoon free from the couch with an apologetic grimace, which Roman ignored. Emir packed away his gear and secured the loose baggage as the jet began its landing approach to Massari airport. Through the cabin window, Emir could see the long, dusty airstrip carved from the rocky plain, like a Nazcan line. The desert spread out below them in an endless pan of baked yellow earth, scattered with half-buried boulders and patches of exposed rock.

  Touchdown was barely perceptible, and the passing landscape slowed to a standstill. Emir glanced out at the unwelcoming desert—the only sign of life was a solitary black truck pulling away from the airport, trailing a plume of dust.

  “Best behaviour,” said Docker, emerging from a side room. “We’re meeting with a valued associate.”

  As opposed to the associates we don’t value, thought Emir. Lord knew there were enough of those.

  He missed having Stace around to say these things, but he couldn’t help feeling that Stace would later count his blessings for his early, if ungracious, departure from the mission.

  Thank God he never showed me a picture of his fiancée, thought Emir.

  * * *

  Hoo boy, thought Chris. One of those.

  Tate had a diver’s build and an orator’s voice, with short, messy, chestnut hair that gave the impression he had just galloped across the dunes on the back of a wild Arabian mare before probably dismounting with an acrobatic leap. He looked to be in his late thirties, and there was something about his face that suggested it would still be compelling at eighty. His teeth were slightly crooked, and his canines exceptionally sharp, but his smile seemed to fill the room with an almost physical force.

  Don’t let this be a cult, thought Luke, his head throbbing. Not today.

  Tate swivelled on his heel to face Chris.

  “Ms. Arlin.”

  He turned smartly to Luke.

  “Father Estasse.”

  Tate leaned towards them, placing a hand on each chair companionably.

  “Which part of ‘Stay Away’ was unclear?” asked Tate, his voice a purring baritone.

  Chris was bursting with a hundred comebacks, some of which she thought were quite witty, but she grudgingly acknowledged that being tied to a chair in a room full of armed lunatics in the middle of the desert was not the best place to be sassy unless you secretly had a bazooka in your boot. Chris had a pebble in her boot, which she now wished she had removed earlier.

  “I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” said Chris. “We’re just going to head home now.”

  Luke’s gaze stayed on Thena, who seemed to be engrossed in a pock mark on the wall. She wasn’t carrying any visible weapons, but she didn’t appear afraid or distressed in the surrounding company.

  “So,” said Tate, his voice soft and friendly as he leaned closer. “If we drove you back to the airport, you would get on a plane, fly home, and never come back?”

  “Absolutely,” said Chris, looking into Tate’s intense, tawny brown eyes.

  “Do you give your word, Ms. Arlin?”

  Chris struggled with this one.

  “Well…”

  Chris was an excellent liar when it came to polite deceptions regarding the size of rear ends, or the taste of inedible but lovingly cooked food, and even the perceived talent of someone’s offspring. But her word—that was a whole different phylum of vertebrates.

  “Well, then,” said Tate, in a conspiratorial whisper. “I think we have a problem.”

  “Who are you people?” said Luke abruptly, his gaze still fixed on Thena.

  Tate pulled back, clapping his hands in mock delight.

  “I am so glad you asked,” said Tate with a grin that generated vastly more wattage than the ceiling lights.

  He unfurled his arms to encompass the room and possibly the world.

  “We are the invisible line,” said Tate, his voice resonant. “We are all that stand between the world’s greatest hidden masterpieces and their utter devastation and exploitation at the hands of the greedy, the ignorant, and the base.”

  Tate paused.

  “That would be you,” he smiled.

  Luke exchanged a quick glance with Chris, who shrugged defensively.

  “You plunder, you steal, you destroy, and you ravage,” said Tate, a growl growing in his voice. “You think only of yourselves, your lifetime, and your needs. You’re not worth the flesh you’re made of.”

  There was an almost audible clack as several pieces fell into place, images rolling like a slide show through Chris’s mind. The snake bite, the clown spiders, the burning plant, and the wasps.

  “You’re cryptozoologists,” said Chris.

  Crazy cryptozoologists, she added mentally.

  “Cryptoconservationists!” boomed Tate, flinging his arms wide in another theatrical gesture. “The yeti, the Loch Ness monsters, the Blue Mountains panthers. All creatures that are threatened with exposure and exploitation fall under our protection.”

  “Setting them on fire and throwing them through windows is protection?” said Chris.

  “It’s ironic,” said Tate. “Like the zookeeper devoured by the tiger. Or the ringmaster crushed by the elephant. Or the animal trainer whose bicycle is stolen by the trained bear.”

  Chris’s expression was unforgiving. The burning plant hadn’t been trying to hurt her. It had wanted her to save it.

  “You’re using animals and plants to attack people,” said Chris. “Some of them are getting hurt, getting killed, to achieve your objectives. You’re no better than a circus.”

  A gasp fluttered through the room.

  Chris could almost feel the frost cracking on her skin as Tate fixed her with an icy stare.

  “We give power to the voiceless,” said Tate. “We fac
ilitate their anger. And we use environmentally friendly, biodegradable solutions.”

  “Like cane toads?” said Chris flatly.

  A low “Oooo” hushed through the room.

  “I’ll bet not all your followers agree with your methods,” said Chris. “Maybe it started as conservation, but somewhere, it became…something else.”

  “Really,” said Tate, his voice soft and measured. “And you want to find the Tree of Life to set up a heritage park? Or to feed its lifeblood to the ravenous, squirming, endlessly multiplying hordes of humanity, who after only ten thousand years of civilisation have managed to reduce most of the world to a hollow crust? Several thousand years ago this—”

  “Yes, we know,” said Luke. “Was fertile. Now desert. We get it. Can we move on now?”

  Tate turned his attention to Luke. Tate hated dealing with the younger generation, with their attention spans as microscopic as their mobile phones. To them, nature was something you downloaded as wallpaper. The older generation had far greater respect for showmanship.

  “Since you insist,” said Tate. “Thena.”

  Luke turned to Thena, who seemed to be either undergoing an internal struggle, or suffering from a severe stomach cramp.

  “Thena!” said Tate sharply.

  Thena walked over to the covered box at the back of the room, crouching beside the burlap.

  Oh, don’t let it be bugs, thought Chris.

  Luke’s gaze was still on Thena, his eyes clear and steady.

  You have a choice.

  She wouldn’t look at him; her gaze focused on one end of the covered structure. Thena reached beneath the tatty fabric, her muscles straining as she made several complicated movements. There was a noise remarkably like an iron cage door falling open, and Thena quickly backed away towards the door. The other members of the cryptoconservation group were already rushing out with unmistakable anxiety. As the last of them hurried from the room, Tate paused in the doorway dramatically.

  “Eden must stay hidden,” said Tate. “Eden will stay buried. As will you.”

  The steel door swung shut.

  * * *

  It was an incongruous building on an uneven street lined with modest brick and clay dwellings. It was technically a mansion, but the word that came to mind was “palatial.” Most of the houses here had one or two bedrooms, with a cramped kitchen facing a dry plot of yard.