“How long?” I whispered.
“The construction crews will arrive to start the clear-cutting today at eleven,” said Kathy. “I’m so, so sorry.”
I stared at her for a moment. Then I whirled, turning to Benet and jabbing a finger at his chest. “Get on the com and call everybody. I don’t care if they’re ass-deep in pine martens; they get here now. We have four square miles to clear, and we have four hours to do it.”
“We’re not going to make it,” said Benet, and he was right, and I didn’t care.
“We’ll get the owl, and we’ll get whatever else we can find, and we’ll save them, do you hear me? We’re going to save them. Now move.” I moved. So did he.
We had a world to save.
* * * *
I grew up in northern California, at the foot of Mount Diablo, which teemed with tarantulas and rattlesnakes. It wasn’t uncommon to look out the window in the early morning and see coyotes in the yard, moving like pale ghosts through the fog. I was lucky. I was born in the last of the good decades, when it still rained, when the puddles still iced over in the winter months. Maybe I never saw snow on the ground, but I knew the sound of my feet crunching through frozen grass, and I knew all the cycles and seasons of the natural world.
I know the exact day the frogs stopped singing for the last time in the dry creekbed that ran behind my childhood home. I could remember the hour and minute, quote it like scripture. It had been years since I’d actually seen a bullfrog by that point, and I was a grad student in environmental science, marching in climate awareness parades on the weekends, writing impassioned op-eds about recycling and ecological sustainability. I preached the gospel of the carrier bag and the compost heap, and it all amounted to nothing, because the rain stopped, and the frogs stopped, and one night the mountain burned and swallowed my parents and the house where I’d grown up in a single brilliant gulp. They were killed by climate change, even if no murder charges were ever going to be brought against a human agency.
We’d known by then that our last stand would be the Pacific Northwest. It was mountainous enough that the change in sea level wasn’t projected to be completely disastrous for human life. All we had to do was keep human life from being completely disastrous for everything else. And we had failed. Maybe we’d been doomed to fail from the very beginning. It was honestly hard to know one way or the other, and the burning was upon us.
Our camp was one of fifteen scattered through the Olympic Peninsula. Two hundred and fifty people were distributed between them, each fighting the same hopeless fight. Some of those people were fighting it for good reasons and some were fighting it for bad ones, and in the end, it didn’t matter. You don’t question the motives of the firebreak. You’re just grateful when it gives you a little bit longer before you go up in flames.
Benet was by my side as I plunged back into the forest, a carrier in my arms and a pair of falconer’s gloves clipped to my waist. The people who had decided my time was up only looked at numbers. They had a bunch of columns on a page that said “owls normally nest in pairs” and “an even number of owls has been extracted from this territory.” They had paid biologists who would look at the samples we’d sent in and claim that we’d preserved sufficient genetic diversity, even if we hadn’t, because bringing back the owls was a problem for another time, another generation—another world. We were up against people who had shown time and again that they were happy to destroy whatever they needed to in order to line their own pockets just a little more. They were always “saving for a rainy day.”
Well, the world was out of rainy days, and still those assholes kept on saving, while we were out here in the trenches, saving everything that really mattered. We deserved what we’d brought down on our heads. Humanity was the architect of its own destruction—and I don’t give a shit if that sounds callous. There were the ones who lied and the ones who died, and we made this mess for ourselves. The frogs didn’t. The beetles and the turtles and the lizards didn’t. And right now, most of all, the owls didn’t. We deserved damnation. They deserved a second chance.
The remains of a large fallen tree—now just trunk and major bearing branches—lay off to one side of our makeshift path, decaying gently back into the forest floor. Benet shot it a longing look. I smiled, just a little. Just enough to let him know I understood.
“Grab three people and take it apart,” I said. “There’s no telling what you’ll find.”
“I can see three species of moss, two lichens, and signs of burrower beetles,” he said. “We’re going to find a world.” Then he was gone, waving for the nearest members of the team to join him as he dropped to his knees next to the log and started digging.
The rest of us kept moving, although I knew full well that this was a scenario that would be playing out over and over again now that I had given permission for it to happen once. We each had our own areas of focus and obsession, scattered across the natural world like Legos on a bedroom floor at midnight. If we stepped on one of them—a fallen log, a frog calling from a hidden stream, even a rare or threatened mushroom—we would have to stop and deal with the pain, because there just wasn’t another option. All of us were what we were. We had to save what we could. Otherwise, there’d be nothing to distinguish us from the ones who’d sent us there, scrambling to put our toys away before the house went up in flames.
The trees were dense there, barely touched by human hands. I’d always come through carefully before, picking my way between the saplings, doing as little damage as I could. It was an old, useless habit; I could have cut each tree down and thrown it away as soon as I was sure it didn’t contain something worth saving. But the part of my soul that had been involved in conservation since I was in my teens chafed at the idea that anything wasn’t worth saving; that we couldn’t find a way to somehow remove every tree from this soil and carry it away to a place where it could keep on growing, safe and sheltered in the welcoming earth. I had listened to that part of my soul. I shouldn’t have, because now I was crashing through the forest like an intruder, and the forest was responding by crashing back.
My owl’s tree was just ahead. I shoved a branch out of my way, hearing the crack as it was bent too far, and took a hasty count of my remaining assistants. There were only six of them, and only one was someone I recognized as working with birds, although his specialization was in corvids, not owls. “I’m heading up,” I shouted, indicating the tree. “You start searching down here, look for anything else that needs extraction.”
“What if you fall?” asked one of the women. I didn’t recognize her.
“Then I fall,” I said. There was no time to set up a proper rig; I pulled the climbing clamps from my belt, jammed them into the tree, and started my ascent.
The higher I got, the more I understood what we were about to lose. Mount Rainier gleamed in the far distance, Grandfather coming out from behind the increasingly uncommon clouds to watch solemnly as we stripped the world around him. Everywhere I looked, there were trees. Sometimes they surrounded islands of steel and glass, or were split by the black ribbons of the highway system, but they were alive, and they were there, and they deserved this land as much as we did. Maybe more.
I pulled myself higher, feeling the clamps flex beneath my hands as the servos adjusted, recalibrated, and locked in. They were designed to handle my weight plus or minus forty pounds—more than that and I would have needed a second set of hands to safely make the descent. There’s not an owl in this world that weighs that much, thankfully.
Every inch of my ascent brought another strip of forest into view, until finally I could see where it ended. The land there had already been clear-cut and prepared for development, centuries of growth stripped away in favor of concrete foundations and—eventually—perfectly manicured, perfectly controlled little lawns, one strip to a home, so that people could pretend that they hadn’t destroyed the natural world for their own benefit. Some of them would plant wildflowers that used to grow there naturall
y. I was sure of it. They’d fill their tiny yards with color and pat themselves on the back when bees or butterflies appeared, pretending that those sightings weren’t rarer than they used to be, pretending that they’d never done anything wrong.
And in a generation, when their kids had grown up thinking “the great outdoors” meant a paved cul-de-sac and a few sad cabbage butterflies, all those mistakes and misdemeanors would be forgotten, swept under the rug of history and never discussed in polite company. The Arks would be up and running by then. It would be easy to say “oh, it’s better like this” and “oh, they would never have survived in the wild.” There would be the gene banks to fall back on once the live displays were out of favor—and they would be. Zoos had been viewed as the best form of conservation once, and look where that ended.
I wasn’t saving these animals. I was buying them a stay of execution; that was all. They would die in cages, never seeing the open sky or feeling the warm, welcoming soil beneath their claws. I was turning them into artifacts, and they’d never been given a choice in the matter. Even now, it wasn’t like we were asking them whether they wanted to be saved, when “safe” meant captive and confined. We’d taken gene samples from every individual we could find. We could have released them back into the world, letting them die with the habitats that had sustained them for so long. Was it mercy or arrogance that led us to stay our hands and keep them caged? Did we have the right?
The owl’s hole loomed dark in the trunk above me. It was a good location, sheltered from the wind and rain, sufficiently concealed by the nearby branches that no competing predators were likely to find it by mistake. I wondered what had happened to her mate. She was a mature female with a good nesting place, and we hadn’t caught a solo male in this territory; she had been widowed somehow, probably by human hands, and now I was coming to take away her freedom.
But I had to. I had to, or she was going to die. I could see the wood’s edge from where I hung suspended against the tree, see the great construction equipment rolling into place, ready to begin the burn. There was no future there.
Pulling on the falconer’s gloves, I eased myself closer to the hole, until I could see the silent lump of feathers that was my owl. She might be awake by now: I hadn’t been silent in my ascent, and birds of prey have excellent hearing. She wasn’t fleeing because I had blocked the exit, and because sometimes, stillness was the best defense something like her could have.
It wasn’t going to save her this time. I plunged my hands into the darkness, seizing the owl and pulling her out into the light.
She fought. She flapped and struggled and screamed her indignation into the air, glaring at me with her bright black eyes, gnashing her beak as she fought to reach me. When she cried, it was like her entire face opened, blossoming into a flower formed from terrible anger and betrayal. She screamed. I struggled to hold her, gathering her as close as I dared before switching my grip to let me open the carrier. I was careless. That was the only explanation. I was careless, and I was conflicted, and I took my eyes off the owl for a heartbeat.
That was long enough.
When she moved, it was like a storm: swift and unforgiving and inescapable. Her beak sliced into the flesh above my collarbone, opening it wide. It happened so fast that for a moment, there was no pain. There was only the shock of beak against bone, and the red smell of blood mixing with the green smell of the trees.
My clamps were designed to keep me from falling, but they couldn’t do much when they were disengaged. I fell. Twisting hard against the pain in my chest, I managed to wrap the clamps around a branch and hit the switch to auto-engage. They pulled me up hard, knocking the wind out of my lungs and leaving me dangling, helpless, as the owl I’d come to save took flight and winged away into the forest, white wings against black branches and blue, blue sky.
“Dammit,” I whispered—but maybe it was better this way. Maybe some things were never meant to be caged, nevermore to see the land to which they’d been born. The owl flew, and I hung suspended, granting myself a moment before I disengaged the clamps and went back to fighting to hold the fire back for just those few precious moments longer.
All we could do was save what little we could put our hands on, and remember the things we had to leave behind. We owed the world we had destroyed that, at least. We owed it so much more.
Maybe someday, our children would see owls in the world again.
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SEANAN MCGUIRE was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.
OUTER RIMS
TOIYA KRISTEN FINLEY
*out’er rims*, n. *1*. areas of continents flooded in 2014 by rising sea levels due to climate change; the resulting regions.
Why she brought the kids one last time would be the question always troubling her, never finding its reasonable answer. She told herself she wanted them to see the shore before the world changed again. After all, no one regretted last chances unless they weren’t taken. Six years earlier, she’d thought of visiting NYC, the bistro where she met her husband, to honor his memory. But she fussed over the budget. Her last chance passed her by, after half of New York City had eventually been submerged by the encroaching Atlantic.
She wouldn’t rob her children of one last stay at the place they spent summers with their father. Branden and Shannon were more excited about the world changing than losing the shoreline. Where will the land be next year? One day, the whole world’ll be underwater! they said, but they could imagine such things because they would be far from there when the storm’s eye came roaring up from the gulf.
Shannon’s head lolled against the door crushing her afro puffs, and her neck bent down on her shoulder. Yet she could sleep anywhere at any time, even during the biggest move of her life, and dozed in the back. Branden popped gum in the front passenger seat. He leaned his chin on his sharp knee and looked out the window at the highway. Normally, she would tell him to keep his shoes off the seat, but he was relaxed when he talked about things she thought should unnerve an eleven-year-old boy.
“Where’s everybody gonna live?”
“Good question. Maybe they’ll stay with family or friends like us before they find their own place.”
“Everything’s gonna get crowded real fast,” he said. “The country keeps getting smaller and smaller. One day, there won’t be room left.”
“Well, when that time comes, maybe we’ll live on the moon,” she said.
He twirled the bubble gum around his tongue and smiled and went back to the view outside. “All those trees’ll be gone.” No sadness. No longing. Just a fact.
They were minutes away from the shore when she saw a figure laboring with a sedan on the shoulder of the road. The car slowed and she pulled over. Branden spun away from the window. Under those long, straight lashes, his eyes bulged with disbelief. “But he’s a stranger!”
She violated every rule she’d given her children about people they didn’t know. “He’s having car trouble. I’m sure he’s trying to get out of here, too.”
She lowered the front passenger’s window. Branden slinked down in the seat. “You need help?”
A young man emerged from under the hood. In the humidity and car’s heat, sweat sealed his hair to his forehead. Trees shadowed him, but the redness around his pupils made the blue look like marbles protruding from his eyes. He glanced away from her and down the road, as if he couldn’t believe she’d pulled over, either. “There’s a parts place off exit si
x. If you could take me, I’d be much obliged.”
Branden pouted and rolled up the window.
“Act right,” she said.
“Ma’am, I really, really appreciate this,” the young man said from the backseat. “Especially with the flooding coming.”
“Where you headed?” she said.
“I don’t know. Midwest somewhere, I guess. I’m tired of hangin’ around the outer rims. Who knows when the next bad storm’s comin’.”
“I heard that.” Her son wouldn’t stop staring at the young man. “Turn around, Branden,” she said under her breath.
In the rearview mirror, the young man closed his eyes. He leaned back and angled his face toward the roof, maybe to pray. With eyes wide, his lips parted.
“Mom,” Branden said, “he’s shivering.”
The young man complained of a headache. He scratched his chest until his arms weakened and fell at his sides. But the guilt hadn’t come to her yet. She’d take him to a hospital. If she hadn’t picked him up, he’d be lying on the side of the highway. The worst that could happen, he’d be admitted; they’d make sure he was evacuated as a patient. But he could be discharged before then. It could be simple heat exhaustion. He’d walk out of the ER in a few hours and be on his way.
Guilt didn’t catch up with her until she saw the white tent in the hospital parking lot and the officers directing traffic. A policeman wearing a surgical mask stopped her. He grabbed his walkie-talkie when he saw the young man in the back.
“Can I get you to park over here, ma’am?” Park away from the ER, where doctors in blue suits and large square hoods waited with pens and clipboards.
She nodded at the policeman. Her son sat up. He put his feet on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
*2*. an area at the edges of a greater part or whole: He banished the thought to the outer rims of his mind.
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