Anjali had heard the moose more than once. It sounded huge, and in her imagination it was as tall as a forklift and as wide as the tree feller. It had to be, if it made noises like that.

Isaac insisted there couldn’t be a moose.

“How would it have gotten in? The whole forest is fenced.”

“Maybe the moose was born in there,” Anjali insisted, gnawing on some caribou jerky with her good hand and holding her bloodied one upright in the air, above her heart like the forester told her to do. Dried blood dripped down her arm, but Anjali didn’t care. Everyone had scars.

Isaac dug his boot into the weathered linoleum and rolled his eyes like he thought she was stupid, but he stayed with her anyway.

“The rangers would have found it and killed it,” Isaac said, a note of definiteness in his voice, licking his fingers from the oil left by his jerky. The infirmary had bright, buzzing fluorescent lights that made him look washed out and sick. Anjali hoped she didn’t look like that.

She was about to reply, but at that moment Nan bustled into the infirmary, dressed in her heavy canvas vest and carrying her medic bag with her usual air of long-suffering patience.

“Well, children, what do we do with unattended lumber saws?”

“We wear gloves before picking them up,” Anjali droned, holding out her palm as the older woman uncapped the hydrogen peroxide.

Isaac snorted, so Anjali took special care not to hiss when the stingy liquid pooled over her hand, fizzing and rust-colored.

“Will you tell the Meister?” Isaac asked Nan, a little too eager for Anjali’s mistake to be shared with the higher powers. But Nan ignored Isaac, bending down to wrap a clean white bandage around Anjali’s hissing palm.

“Your mother would want you to be careful,” Nan said, and it was as much a scold as it was a comforting gesture. Something about it set Anjali’s teeth on edge. Everyone got scars from the equipment here. Everyone.

“Mom has scars on her hands,” Anjali mumbled, watching as the gauze covered the broken skin of her palm.

Nobody said anything to that, not even Isaac.

—

 

Isaac and Anjali were running outside with fly swatters, hunting bugs with the viciousness of trained assassins. Well, Anjali was killing flies. Isaac was doing it all wrong, as per usual, leaping and running with his swatter like he thought he could be faster than a fly.

Never underestimate bugs, was what the Meister told them both once. He’d been talking about Brown Recluse Spiders, not horseflies, but Anjali liked to sermonize about this fact to Isaac anyway.

The late afternoon sun bounced off the brick wall surrounding the courtyard where the compound kept supply drops that needed to be stored. Palettes of cans of soup, oil drums, gallons of bleach, tarps wrapped over misshapen objects waiting to be sorted and organized into the great store room at the center of the compound.

“You have to hold really still so that they don’t get scared and fly off,” Anjali explained, gesturing the exact frozen, stiff motion that it took to kill horseflies.

Kate and Dave would be out here with their forklift later tonight, once the worst of the heat had passed and the store room wasn’t so hot, but for now it was a miniaturized city of unattended valuables that would end up feeding, clothing, and supplying them in their work tending and felling the forest of birch trees beyond.

Isaac, sweaty and green-eyed, looked at her with his eyes narrowed, his own flyswatter clutched in his clenched and freckled fist. But he was listening to her. He always listened.

“Hold still,” Anjali grunted, grabbing Isaac by the wrist, yanking him back until he made a keening noise in the back of his throat as she wrestled him into a crouched position in front of one of the big oil drums laying around the courtyard.

“Knock it off,” Isaac snarled. He did what she said though, and after she was sure he wouldn’t jump up again, she let go of his hand as they stayed like that, perfectly still and waiting for their next victim.

Dappled light fell across them, shade thrown by the branches of a nearby birch tree.

Not just any kind of birch. Their kind of birch.

Betula pendula Smithus.

The most fantastic birch tree in the world. The most valuable genetic mutation in the world. The only reason any of them had a living out here. The reason the Meister was rich.

Isaac was from Boston, and she heard that before the Crash, his family was very wealthy.

Once, when he’d been bragging about that, Anjali had said, “Fat lot of good it did you.” The Meister had made her say sorry for that one.

Like all children of rangers, they spent their time after lessons practicing for the day they’d be given their first detail out in the enclosure. Forestry, horticulture, marksmanship, construction, food safety. Everything they’d need to know. Sometimes they did jump rope or foot races into the woods, to see who could reach the first outpost and climb up into the trees the fastest. Anjali always won, unless Ethan was playing.

Anjali can’t remember anything about when she and her mom came up from the city, and mom never talked about it. A thought hit her then, one of those nagging ones like a mosquito bite or a poison-oak burn that grab and nag at the brain no matter how hard you try to ice them.

What if mom didn’t come back? What if they don’t find her? Would the Meister let her stay? What if he didn’t?

A horsefly landed in front of her, fat and rubbing its legs together like it was trying to make an instrument of its spindly legs, and Anjali Harris killed her eighteenth horsefly of the day.

—

 

It was just past sundown when Ethan came back from his detail in the woods.

Anjali was bunked up in her cot in her and mom’s room, turning the memory of her mother leaving over and over in her mind, like somehow she could find some clue in it. She’d looked just the same, her long hair in a braid down her back, her hatchet and lamp strapped to her hip, her gun holstered at her side.

When she heard the sound of the gate grinding open and the flood lights flicking on with their buzz of electric current, she rose to her feet and walked into the cantine.

Ethan’s face as he set his pack on the ground and locked eyes with her across the room told her everything she needed to know. It took a great deal of Anjali’s considerable strength not to burst into tears right then and there.

But Nan was standing next to her, stiff-lipped and resolute in the way of a woman who had seen her entire life broken down under faulty cinder blocks, and Anjali made the decision not to cry.

“The forest is large,” Nan said, very calmly. “Your mother is strong. She could still be out there.”

Nan used to say that her mother was still out there. Anjali didn’t say anything, just nodded at Ethan in his old army fatigues and sun-stained face, and left the room.

 

—

 

The job of a Ranger was to protect the perimeter of the forest, walking in circles with a hatchet and a semi-automatic rifle like a caged tiger protecting its den.

In her hour of darkness, Anjali picked up the job her mother had been lost to, and walked circles around the fenced compound they lived in.

Under her secondhand boots, Anjali tread a solemn vigil, her mind trained on the day two weeks ago that her mother had left. It wasn’t uncommon for Rangers to go out and stay gone. A typical deployment had the staff camping in the woods for a week or more at a time, cooking food on an electric burner so as not to risk a fire that might damage the wood.

Everything was wood, here. The fence surrounding the trees, the compound they lived in, the path under her feet. Wood and stone, and Anjali dragged a loose stick behind her, leaving a thin score line in the flattened earth and occasionally banging it in sullen anger against the 10 foot fence separating her from the deep, shadowy birchlands beyond.

Someone told her once that the total value of the woods was upwards of a million dollars. A single felling season produced enough income to house and feed the whole community, which was more than many people had.

Someone stuck their head out a window, the sound of the sill squeaking as it opened tearing through the stillness.

“Anj! Dinner!”

Then the window was shut again.

Anjali turned her head to the direction of the forest, listening hard for any sound, any hint that her mother was still out there, that she was alive and not, as she’d heard the adults speculate when they thought she couldn’t hear, dead at the bottom of a ravine somewhere.

“Mom?” Anjali whispered into the woods.

There was no answering voice. Just a low, keening sound. An animal groan in the darkness, rumbling but strangely high-pitched.

Anj walked to the fence, tall as it was, and got her boot in between two of the boards, shimmying up slowly and with much cursing until she was holding herself up on top of it, the strength of her scrawny arms holding her up, as there was nowhere to sit at the top. Just sharpened stakes driven into the earth, parched by the sun. The bandaged cut on her palm ached under the pain of holding her up, but Anjali wasn’t a kid anymore. She was twelve now, and that meant she could hold her own weight up. The Meister said that once.

Beyond the fence, the birchlands spread out before her, dense and monolithic, all the trees the exact same shade of dark, even green, the leaves silvery underneath.

She heard that faint moaning sound again. The animal sound that could not possibly be real. A great beast, keening into the darkness.

Once, when she was eight and she started her apprenticeship, they’d sent her into the woods with the forester for a lesson on horticulture.

The forester had hefted her on his shoulders, walking her along one of the edges, telling her that the trees were clones, genetic copies of each other made from cuttings planted in rows 5 feet apart, with each tree 3 feet away on either side from the next one in the row.

“That’s a lot of trees in the whole forest,” he said. “And it’s all done through science for the good of the world. We have to cut the strain back at the edges, so it doesn’t try and grow past the fence and reproduce itself organically.”

“Like people?”

“I guess. Our strain is hardy and strong. The best birch you can get. There’s Smithus birch in damn near every new construction in the Midwest, these days. That’s why we’ve got to protect it. That’s why we need people like your mom to go out and protect it. Stop outsiders from taking cuttings.”

She didn’t know at the time that it was a lesson, but she learned it all the same. Reaching up to yank on a low hanging birch tree, Anjali asked him, “How many trees are there?”

“In the world? Or here?”

“Here,” Anjali said, because really, here was all there was as far as she was concerned.

“About 290,400 trees in total. That’s only if you count the saplings, though,” he’d said.

“The saplings count,” Anjali said to him. “They count.”

 

—

 

At dinner, Anjali stared at her metal camp mug and the soup inside it. Vegetable something or other. They didn’t have meat, mostly. Around her, people talked.

The older boys had been out on a scouting mission, and Ethan was the first one back. He sat next to Anjali, silent as ever. Beyond their table, the Meister talked loud enough that Anjali could easily hear him.

“—the Eastern ridge in the rain, gotta be. But we can’t keep sinking these hours in, and with the perimeter sapling burn coming up—”

Anjali turned to Ethan.

“Did you see a moose out there? I heard it again tonight.”

Ethan didn’t meet her gaze, but Isaac, sitting across from her, scoffed. “You’re losing it, Anjali. You’re going crazy. Ethan, tell Anjali there’s no moose in the forest.”

Ethan was in his twenties, so he was old enough to remember the cities the way they were before the foundations gave out and the skyscrapers started falling. Ethan told her that people used to move around all over the place, even across the oceans, even places where no trees grew at all. 

Once he finished his apprenticeship, he’d become a full fledged ranger, and then he didn’t talk to her much anymore. Even still, he was one of the nice ones.

“Sorry, kid, but there’s no way an animal that size could survive in there. We don’t even let squirrels live in there, let alone a huge destructive herbivore like that.”

“We’re herbivores,” Anjali countered, gesturing at their beet stew.

“But we don’t eat birch trees. If there was a moose living out there, there’s no way the Rangers wouldn’t have found it and killed it by now.”

“Things get lost in the forest all the time. Maybe they missed it.”

Ethan took a bite of his baked carrot, his expression distracted as across the room someone called his name in greeting. “Well, if there is a moose out there, I’ll shoot it for you and make you some tasty jerky, how about that?”

Tears pricked Anjali’s eyes, hot and stinging. “I don’t want jerky.”

“Well, that’s good, because there’s no moose out there,” Ethan said, nodding distractedly as one of the older rangers walked by and patted him on the back, congratulating him on his first solo run.

Anjali squirmed in her seat, agitated and suddenly very angry at Ethan. At everyone.

“You don’t know anything about moose. Maybe she’s out there, alone someplace, eating birch trees, and nobody can find her because she’s hiding, and—”

She cut off, realizing that she’d been raising her voice. Her shame was a hot, stifling pressure in her throat, like swallowing a half-cooked potato, and suddenly Ethan was looking directly at her, all his wayward concentration focused back on her again, and this time she didn’t want it. Didn’t want him to look at her, didn’t want anyone to see her at all. 

“I’m going to bed,” Anjali said, pushing her soup away from her, pressing the bandage on her hand until the sting of her wound made the pain in her throat lessen.

“Anjali,” said Ethan, his voice laced with emotion. Maybe he was sorry. She hoped he was. She was already tearing out of the room.

 

—

 

The path through the woods was thick, a pressing mass of white birch trunks pressing in on her against a textured background of moss greens and downy browns. The sun was below the horizon, but the sense of lightness clung in the air, even here in the woods.

Anjali, armed with a hatchet for mowing through brush and felling saplings, pressed through the woods, imagining that she was older, striding confidently on her route. A familiar game to her, but tonight it didn’t feel fun. There was no ranger ten feet behind, watching her route, preventing a catastrophe.

Tonight it was Anjali and the woods alone.

Coming to a halt about two kilometers from the base, Anjali leaned against a birch and pulled out her flask of water.

The outpost wasn’t far from here, the route marked with deep score marks on the birch trees, and Anjali knew that she had to make it to the outpost before it got really dark, or she’d end up sleeping alone on the forest floor.

Setting her jaw, Anjali pushed her thoughts away, imagining they were gnats she could swat out of the air.

 

—

 

From her position in the treehouse lookout, Anjali heard the sound of an animal moving below her. The sound of crunching brambles, of rumbling breathing, so close it felt like it was coming from directly underneath her.

For half a heartbeat she allowed herself to wish it was the sound of her mother in the brush, that this was it, she would find her and they would stumble back to the compound and be given beet stew and warm bread, and someone would throw a blanket around her shoulders, and her mother would kiss her on her forehead.

Eventually, though, she opened her eyes to the night that was above her. She grabbed for her knife, fumbling a little in the dark, but unwilling to turn her flashlight on.The sky was a black tarp with thousands of tiny holes pricked into it. She climbed to the edge of the platform in the tree as nimbly and as quietly as she could.

Part of her knew that this was as stupid as Isaac said it was. Chasing through the trees at night after an animal who existed in her mind only as noises. They would ask her why she bothered. It wasn’t like she had a camera. There would never be proof of this moment.

None of that appeared to matter to her. Her feet moved as if they belonged to someone else, carrying her down the ladder to the forest floor. Anjali looked at herself as if she no longer lived in her own body, like she had died out here in the woods only her body hadn’t gotten the message.

The moose was a steady walker, but easy to track, and Anjali pressed through the damp brush, never quite seeing the animal. The birch trees flashed like ghosts around her in the darkness as up ahead the sound of creaking wood guided her steps.

A hammering heartbeat in her chest kept her moving, heedless of anything else. There was the creak of wood, her labored breathing, and the ice-pick silence of the stars in the sky.

When she reached the fence, she stopped.

Something huge had broken it, pushed it away from its upright position as if an enormous weight had leaned sideways until the wood buckled and split, pushing a panel outwards into the beyond. The gap was wide enough for a human. Wide enough for an animal.

Beyond all that, though, something was breathing.

Fumbling at her belt, Anjali grabbed her flashlight and flicked it to life.

She saw scrubland that gave way in the distance to a ridge of low mountains. A smattering of thin, weak pine trees. Brushy scrub. Nothing usable. But even so, for a minute she just stared at the smudge of mountains in the distance, visible like old paint smeared with a clumsy hand against the sky.

She’d never seen the mountains so clearly. There were always trees in the way. It was kind of stunning, she thought, even though you couldn’t grow anything at that altitude. Maybe it was enough for them to be magnificent. 

Amid the dimness, the gleam of two reflective eyes caught her attention, pulling her focus lower, to the other trees that were not their trees. For a minute she thought she must be hallucinating, so ghostly and strange did they look, suspended in the darkness like that. Animal eyes. Something big. Anjali gripped her machete.

If she had heard the sound of this animal before, groaning like a person, the eyes were nothing less than animal. Old. Wild.

They stared at each other, paralyzed for a minute until Ajali’s body clambered up and over the fallen fencing, standing with the dignity of someone facing an amputation. A splintered piece of wood dragged across the skin of her leg, and she felt the warmth of her own blood pooling on her skin, dripping down the side of her leg.

Anjali thought of her mother, and of how proud she would be if she could see her now, brave and strong like a real ranger. The eyes blinking back felt like an accusation.

“I am not afraid,” Anjali said, trembling there on the broken fence at the edge of the world.

Silence. Two steps and then she was falling, jumping down from the creaking fence, her booted feet landing on untilled ground. Two more steps. She stumbled forward, choking on fear. 

“Mother?” Anjali called, her voice sounding so much smaller here in all this space. Behind her, the forest of birch trees swayed in a breeze, their branches dragging across the top of the fence. The sound made her feel foolish, a cub calling for her mother in a language it did not understand.

“I’m not a child,” Anjali called to the eyes, her voice louder, stronger, her fingers gripping the machete.

The eyes stared back as if taunting her, and she was burning up with anger, her throat was filled with starch, and if she had to stand here all night she would. She would.

There was no answer in the forest. Nothing happened. The eyes blinked in the beam of the light, and then disappeared, as incorporeal as air.

Anjali drew in a shuddering breath, squeezed her eyes shut, and howled into the night with all the force in her body. It shrieked out of her, hopeless and grief-stricken, and she did not feel afraid as the sound catapulted out of her, resolved that she would no longer be young.

And then it was over, and she was alone on the ground, wracked by silence and the ferocious threat of dawn. But for a few moments longer there would only be Anjali, and the trees, and the unbroken beam of her flashlight cutting like a scar through the palm of the night.