The Overstory: Part 2: Trunk Summary & Analysis

An unnamed man sits at a desk in a cell. He is in prison because of trees—“trees and too much love of them.” He examines the wood of the desk, tracing its grain with his fingers and wishing that he could interpret the lines’ meanings. He feels “illiterate,” like he could learn everything about the tree that this wood came from if only he could properly understand its language.

The narrative returns to Olivia Vandergriff. She is dead for 70 seconds, and then she falls off the bed, and her heart starts beating again. Davy finds her there—he had come over hoping to have breakup sex—and rushes her to the university hospital. There she revives, and she soon escapes from the hospital while the doctors are busy. She immediately returns to her house and shuts herself in her room for two full days, refusing to let anyone in. In her solitude, she sleeps and tries to remember what happened while she was dead. She can recall large, mysterious shapes calling her and pleading with her, but no more details. She tries to speak to them, asking what they want her to do, and she realizes that she is praying.

Olivia skips her final exams and calls her parents to say that she isn’t coming home for Christmas. Confused and offended, they try to convince her to come home. Olivia tries to explain to them what happened to her when she died, and they have the longest conversation they have in years without fighting with each other. Over Christmas break, Olivia gets rid of all the drugs she owns, barely eats, and continues to wait for the mysterious voices to return. When her housemates come back, they seem afraid of her because of how much she’s changed.

The semester begins, and at her very first lecture, Olivia senses the mysterious presences again. She follows their signals and heads outside, soon realizing that she’s being led to her car. She realizes that she’ll need to drive for a long time, so she stops at her house to get supplies, then gets on the highway and heads west. She has no plan and sometimes feels crazy and aimless, but then the presences return to reassure her, and she keeps going. Now in Indiana, she sleeps in her car that night.

The narrator notes that Olivia is following the same path that Johnny Appleseed did centuries before, and that he once even owned the plot of land that is now the parking lot where she’s sleeping. When Olivia wakes up, she senses “beings of light” filling her car, just as they appeared when she was dead. They pass through her body and seem to speak to her. She asks what they want, but then the noise of a truck passing seems to drive them away.

Olivia goes into a box store to use the bathroom and walks through a row of TVs, all playing the same news station at once. Suddenly, they show footage of people chained around a giant tree, in front of a bulldozer. One of the people talks to the camera, begging to save these trees that are older than Jesus. Olivia freezes, and the beings of light seem to say “this, this, this.” Then the program changes and the beings vanish.

Olivia wanders back to her car in a daze, feeling like she must keep going west and find these trees and these people. At the Illinois border, she gets stuck behind a train, all of its cars filled to the brim with lumber. Soon, she loses count of how many train cars there are and starts to think about the endless flow of logged wood across the country at all times. After the train passes, Olivia sits in her car and seems to hear the message: “The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.” Finally, she starts her car and keeps driving, now knowing what her purpose is.

The narrative shifts to years before Olivia’s trip, following Ray and Dorothy as they come home from a play that they’ve been performing in. They park in their driveway, Dorothy venting her dissatisfaction with her life. She is about to turn 42 years old, and over the past several years the couple has spent tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments trying to have a child, but none of them have been successful. Dorothy lashes out at Ray in her anger, while he has learned to just stay quiet.

The couple enters the house, and Dorothy soon breaks down crying. Ray comforts her and suggests that they could adopt a child instead, though Dorothy won’t consider this option. Suddenly she remembers their anniversary custom of planting something every year, which they have forgotten about in recent years. She stands up quickly and accidentally strikes Ray’s face with her shoulder. As she apologizes and he flails, the narrator notes that outside the house all the things Ray and Dorothy have planted over the years are busy growing, quietly “making meaning” from nothing.

The narrative returns to Olivia, who is now specifically heading for Northern California. She crosses into Iowa and stops at a giant truck stop, where she falls asleep in a chair, is chastised for doing so, and returns to her car. The next morning, Olivia finds a pay phone and calls her father. He is shocked to hear that she is in Iowa and begs her to go back to school, but she tells him that she has been “recruited” for important volunteer work in California. Olivia’s father argues and then begs her to at least come home, but Olivia reassures him that she is doing what she needs to do.

Olivia drives through a bleak and beautiful landscape, feeling in love with everything, including humanity. Suddenly, the mysterious presences alert her to a sign on the side of the road, hanging from an enormous, ancient tree: “FREE TREE ART.” Olivia pulls off at the next exit and finds her way to the giant tree. Near it is an old barn, its side painted with an enormous mural of flowering trees. Olivia pulls up and sees a man a few years older than she is, with long hair and a beard. He seems nervous and tells her that she’s the first person to stop because of the sign. He invites her into the barn to see his gallery.

Upstairs in the barn, Olivia is surprised to see an artist’s studio filled to the brim with paintings and sculptures of trees. She asks the man if he’s really giving these all away for free and suggests that he should be selling them in New York or Chicago instead. Olivia keeps looking at the art and then at the man, wondering how he fits into her new mission. The two introduce themselves to each other: the man is Nicholas Hoel. Nick then shows her the flipbook with the 76 years of pictures of the family chestnut tree. Olivia recognizes it as the tree she saw from the highway.

Olivia asks Nick why he is giving all his work away, and he explains that he is leaving his family’s farm within two months. He says that giving the art away feels like another piece of art in itself, or as if he’s acting like trees do, since they “give it all away” too. Nick then leads Olivia out to the chestnut tree. He explains about the chestnut blight on the East Coast, which is why she’s never seen a tree like this before, and about his family’s project of photographing the tree. She wonders why he’s leaving the tree now, and he shows her its bark—the blight has finally found it, and it is slowly dying.

Now, in the house where his family died 10 years ago, Nick makes tea for Olivia as she tells him all about her recent experience with death and the mysterious beings of light. They discuss the redwoods being logged, and as they talk, they seem to understand each other immediately. Olivia suggests that they were meant to meet each other, and that Nick should come with her to California. As Nick looks at Olivia, he realizes that he wants to follow her wherever she might go, but out loud he says that he’ll need to sleep on it first. That night, Olivia sleeps in his grandparents’ old room. The next morning, Nick agrees to go with her, saying only that he’ll need to clear out the house and dispose of his art first.

The narrative now shifts to follow Mimi Ma in the aftermath of her father Winston’s death. She throws herself into her work, traveling around the world and taking up many hobbies. She has love affairs with both men and women, and at one point she almost gets married. Eventually, she is moved to her company’s headquarters in Portland. Her new office has floor-length windows overlooking a stand of pine trees, and the sight feels to Mimi like the national parks where her family used to go on vacation. Mimi hangs her father’s arhat scroll on her wall, though it constantly reminds her of him and sometimes causes her to panic in the middle of the day. She calms herself by looking out over the pine grove.

Mimi’s colleagues usually use her office to gather during lunch breaks, eating and playing cards together. One day, they are discussing the pines outside her window, and they start debating what their bark smells like. Mimi leaves their card game to go outside and collect some “data.” She enters the pine grove and feels like she is returning to her “childhood’s only untouched days.” She stands for a while, breathing in the smell of the pines and remembering her trips to the national parks with Winston. Mimi turns toward the trunk of a pine and then sees a poster inviting her to a town hall to protest what’s about to happen—the city is going to cut down this pine grove and replace it with “cleaner, safer” trees. Mimi turns again and sees her colleagues looking at her and laughing from her office window.

The narrative now turns to Douglas Pavlicek, who is at a bar in Damascus, Oregon, buying drinks for strangers to celebrate planting his fifty-thousandth tree after almost four years of work. He plays pool with the random men at the bar, losing badly but enjoying the company and his own sense of having completed something worthwhile. Several people praise his accomplishment, but then one man says that the logging companies use his work of planting seedlings to raise their own allowable cuts. He is “putting in babies so they can kill grandfathers,” the man says. This kills Douggie’s good mood, and he ends the festivities.

The day after seeing the poster in the pines, Mimi skips her usual lunch card game and instead returns to her pine grove. There she sees a woman nearby and tells her that the city is planning to cut these trees down. Though Mimi herself hates activists, she can now hear herself sounding like one.

Douggie awakens in a motel room, despairing not because of the money he lost the previous night but because of what the stranger said—that all his hard work has only helped the logging companies he was trying to fight. He goes to the local library to look up information and finds that the stranger was indeed right.

Hopeless and depressed, Douggie goes for a walk that continues on for miles, trying to think of what to do next. On a bulletin board at a grocery store, he sees the same poster that Mimi did, advertising the town hall to protect the pine trees. Douggie asks the grocery’s cashier for directions and then walks the extra miles to the pine grove itself. The town hall meeting is supposed to be in four days. Still among the pine trees, Douggie lies down on the ground and sleeps, dreaming again of his plane crash in Thailand.

Douggie is awakened by the sound of machinery. It is still the middle of the night, but men have come with chain saws to cut down the pine trees. Douggie tries to stop them, saying that the town hall hearing isn’t for several days, but the men insist that he leave. Panicking, Douggie starts climbing a tree until someone pulls him down and strikes him. Soon, the police arrive and handcuff him. Douggie gives his name as “Prisoner 571” as they take him away.

Later that same morning Mimi arrives at work, looks out the window, and howls in despair. All her pine trees are gone. She rushes outside and stands among the wreckage, smelling all the fresh-cut wood and raging within herself over “the old loss that will never, ever be answered.”

The narrative returns to Neelay, who finishes his space opera game and now needs to invent a company to sell it. He thinks of redwoods and decides to name his one-man company “Sempervirens.” The first game he releases is called The Sylvan Prophecies. Soon, he sells out of discs and needs to hire employees and rent an office, and then he has to actually incorporate his company. At night, though, Neelay still dreams of “branching and spreading,” thinking of his work’s “unlimited growth curve.”

Neelay continues working, both learning how to run a company and coding new worlds. His game’s sequel, The New Sylvan Prophecies, is an even bigger hit with the public. Everyone loves the game’s open-ended world, interacting with its environment, plants, and animals as much as following its plotline. After releasing a third game, The Sylvan Revelation, a large publishing company offers to purchase Neelay’s brand.

Neelay plans to agree to the deal. He can’t sleep that night, however, and eventually goes through the ordeal of getting out of bed, dressing himself, and mechanically hoisting himself into his (now joystick-operated) wheelchair. He then makes his way down to his van, which has a hydraulic floor that he can roll onto and pedals that his hands can operate. He drives to Stanford’s inner quad, to the wild terrarium where he first experienced his inspiration for his life’s goal six years earlier. Tonight, the trees are silent, though he waits in complete silence and isolation for a long time.

After a while, the waving of the branches towards the south makes Neelay think of finding a particular gigantic redwood with his father as a child. He feels that this is the tree that he must have subconsciously named his company after, and that he must now consult it. Neelay then drives the van back and forth up a steep road into the Santa Cruz Mountains, finally finding a spot that he recognizes and stopping. He gets out and maneuvers his chair down the trail, but after a hundred yards, the wheels get stuck. Neelay yells aloud, but no one is around to hear.

As his eyes adjust to the dark, Neelay realizes that the redwood tree he was seeking is just in front of him—he missed it because it was too large for his eyes to even conceive of in the darkness. Suddenly Neelay feels like a child again, standing under the tree with his Pita, who reminds him of the banyan fig and all the “code that made this gigantic thing.” Neelay is then struck by inspiration again, recognizing that “the branch wants only to go on branching. The point of the game is to keep playing.” He realizes that he can’t sell his company but must continue to pursue his own dream. He throws his cloak under the wheel of his stuck tire and is able to free his chair, and then slowly makes his way back to his office.

The next day Neelay breaks off the deal to sell Sempervirens. He gathers his staff together and describes what the company’s new project will be: a game in which players will enter into a “freshly assembled Earth,” where they will explore, gather resources, cut down trees, build towns, and construct anything they can imagine. At the same time, players all over the world will be playing in the same game, interacting with each other and competing for the same resources. Nine months later, an early copy of the game makes even the staff at Sempervirens stop working—and even stop eating and sleeping—because they are so obsessed with playing it. This new game is called Mastery.

Back at the Hoel farm, Nick and Olivia spend two weeks cleaning out and selling the property. Nick still finds the whole situation extremely strange—that he is upending his life to go along with this stranger who randomly appeared just days ago. But he also feels like “their obsessions interlock” and this is the right thing for him to do. At night, Nick reads about the redwoods, and also about mental disorders. He notes a section on schizophrenia that says, “Beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are in keeping with societal norms.”

Nick and Olivia have now spent two weeks together in the house. Nothing romantic has happened between them, though Nick is distracted by Olivia’s presence, especially when she walks around half-dressed. She teases that she’s seen evidence of another woman in the house, and Nick admits that there was someone recently, but she left because of his single-minded obsession with the chestnut tree.

Olivia comes up with the idea to bury Nick’s art in the yard bound up in bubble wrap, and they do so. The next morning, they leave, heading west and hoping to find the people protesting the logging of the redwoods. As they drive, Nick tells Olivia about coming home to find his family dead, years before. Later they discuss how comfortable Nick is with silence, and how Olivia seems to Nick like she’s atoning for her past life—“for the attentive person I wasn’t,” she says.

Nick and Olivia stop at a motel that night and sleep in separate beds. The next day, they cross through Nevada, awed by its wide emptiness. A snowstorm hits, and at one point they almost crash. Nick is shaken, but Olivia seems sure that they’re not meant to die yet. At last, they cross the border into California.

Meanwhile, Douglas is in court after being arrested. He tells the judge his own story—how he is an injured veteran who has planted 50,000 trees in an attempt to undo the logging company’s damage and simply thought that what the city was doing in the middle of the night was wrong. He is given options for his sentence, and he chooses a fine and three days of labor, planting ash trees for the Portland city arborist. Douggie talks with the arborist about the logged pines, and he considers aloud that the environmental activists might be right about everything.

His sentence complete, Douggie returns to the devastated pine grove. He grows enraged at the sight of the sawn stumps and starts counting the rings of the trees, comparing them to the years of his own life and then years and even centuries before that. With a marker he writes the dates onto the rings of the stump itself, and on the outer ring he writes, “CUT DOWN WHILE YOU SLEPT.”

Douggie is still writing when Mimi Ma finds him on her lunch break. At first, she thinks that he is with the logging company, and she rants at him furiously. For his part, the first sight of Mimi reminds Douggie of a woman he loved back in Thailand. When she stops berating him, Douggie tells Mimi that he was there the night the trees came down and that he was arrested trying to protect them, and the two commiserate over the injustice of it all. Struck by an idea, Douggie asks Mimi if she has some money or a car he can borrow.

The narrative returns to Dorothy and Ray Brinkman again, in the years after their last play. They stop acting and instead take up reading and collecting books. Ray reads hopeful nonfiction books about the rise of technology and civilization, while Dorothy enjoys dramatic novels and old works. Slowly they convert their house into a library, even the room they had once reserved for the child they hoped to have.

At Christmas, Ray and Dorothy give each other books, and at New Year’s they make a resolution to take adventures together. They already have books “full of previous resolutions” about cooking, hiking, birdwatching, or traveling. As they read together at night, Dorothy weeps over the trials of fictional characters and wonders why she does so. Ray and Dorothy’s anniversary passes, and they once more forget to plant something.

Nick and Olivia enter California and arrive at the redwoods, where they are awed into silence at the majesty of the trees. Olivia asks Nick to pull over. She wanders among the trees and soon starts crying, feeling that she is finally where she is supposed to be. They keep driving and eventually reach a group of environmental activists, and from there they make their way to Humboldt County and a ragtag group called the “Life Defense Force.” Nick and Olivia eat with a man named Moses, and the next day they meet a woman named Mother N, whom Olivia recognizes as the person she saw on the TV screens at the store in Indiana.

That night Mother N speaks to the assembled group, encouraging those still volunteering and asking for nonviolent protesting tactics. She then explains about what they’re up against: Humboldt Timber, which used to be a family business who cut trees responsibly, but now has been bought out. The new owner is trying to cash in on every bit of lumber they can cut, trying to log all the old growth before environmental legislation can stop them. As Mother N speaks, Nick looks over at Olivia and sees that she is crying.

Afterward, a group prepares to sabotage some logging equipment, despite Mother N’s discouragement. Before they go, Nick paints everyone’s faces in fantastical designs. Olivia takes his arm and praises his work, saying that she has it “on good authority” that he has done well. Other members of the group have aliases, and that night, Nick and Olivia give names to each other as well. Olivia christens Nick as “Watchman,” and Nick gives Olivia the name “Maidenhair.” Later that night, Nick and Olivia sleep side by side, and Nick can see the tattoo on her shoulder reading, “A change is gonna come.”

The narrative returns to Patricia Westerford, who sits at her table writing. All winter, she has been working on a book about how trees communicate with each other, and how all aspects of a forest are necessary parts of its complex and interdependent system. She writes about mycorrhizal systems—how networks of fungi disperse nutrients between trees and other organisms—and claims that “there are no individuals in a forest, no separable events,” and that forests themselves are like “enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.”

Patricia’s husband Dennis lives 14 miles away, and they see each other every day for lunch. Otherwise, Patricia is surrounded only by trees, and she spends her days working on writing her book or articles for scientific journals. This particular night she finds it hard to write and goes for her usual walk, breathing in all the compounds that the trees release and thinking about their many meanings.

Patricia sits down in her usual spot on a fallen log and then realizes what she needs to write next: how when Douglas-firs are about to die, they will send all their nutrients out into their roots, giving their “riches to the community pool in a last will and testament.” She decides to call these trees “giving trees.” This is the phrase that the public will latch onto later when they read her book, because “people see better what looks like them.”

The next morning Patricia rereads what she has written, and then tries to start on her book’s final chapter. She wants to seem hopeful about the future, but she also recognizes that “the truth is somewhat more brutal.” She decides to end her book with the Buddha’s words about a tree’s generosity: how it “even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.”

Dennis arrives for lunch that day, bringing his latest offering of delicious, foraged cooking. Patricia thinks again how lucky she is to have a relationship like this, with a patient and generous man who lets her spend most of her time alone. At lunch, Patricia reads him her latest chapter. He claps and tells her that he thinks she’s finished with her book. Patricia knows that he’s right, but she’s anxious about what she needs to do next. She can’t decide on a title and is still traumatized from her last time publishing something. Dennis tries to comfort her, but Patricia still can’t tell him about how she almost committed suicide because of her experience.

Patricia finally types up a draft of her book and mails it off to her publisher. Six weeks later, she gets a call from her editor praising the book and all that it taught him about trees. He claims that she’ll become rich from it. But Patricia feels melancholy hearing this. What she really wants is to have her solitude back, though she feels that it is now lost forever.

Meanwhile, Neelay’s game Mastery comes out, and Sempervirens explodes in popularity. Neelay has a new office overlooking the redwoods, high above the rest of the company. He works day and night, usually sleeping in his chair, constantly tormented by new ideas. On this particular day he logs into Mastery and assumes a new identity. Though he recognizes the game’s many flaws, he still can’t help being drawn into its world of potential. At last, he recognizes that back in “Real Life” he is hungry, but he only takes time for an energy drink and a cold chicken puff.

Neelay is still absorbed in the game when a reporter calls to interview him. The man, who sounds not much older than Neelay, introduces himself as Chris and is clearly starstruck to be talking to Neelay. He asks Neelay about the success of Mastery and admits that he himself is addicted to the game. Neelay answers his questions while thinking to himself about how the appeal of the game is the simple sense of meaning that it offers: its lack of ambiguity and “human-on-human darkness.”

The interviewer Chris asks about the future of Neelay’s company, and Neelay promises even bigger and richer worlds to come. Chris then tries to ask Neelay about himself and his immigrant family, but Neelay deflects these questions. The sound of Chris’s confident laughter fills Neelay with desire, but he also feels that anyone who sees him would be disgusted by his appearance. Neelay must instead be content to know that the code he wrote “is changing this other man’s brain.” Neelay ends the interview musing about the future and how he thinks that soon “Real life” will essentially become a game on a screen.

Back in the redwood forest, members of the Life Defense Force block Highway 36 with a row of black coffins. Olivia, dressed as a mountain lion, climbs out along a line strung above the coffins and unfurls a banner that reads “Stop Sacrificing Virgins.” Cars stop and people get out, some laughing but most of them angry. Then the coffins open, and more people dressed as woodland creatures emerge, all of them beautifully painted. They start into a wild dance until the police appear, and then all the animals flee into the forest. Two days later, footage of the stunt is shown on the national news. Some people think the activists are heroes, and some think they should be locked up.

Adam Appich is now in his last year at Fortuna College. At his last lecture with Professor Rabinowski, the professor discusses surveys that the current and previous classes took and shows how their answers present consistent patterns that basically show that humans are inherently illogical and operating “in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement.”

Rabinowski prepares to make another point but then suddenly excuses himself from the class, grimacing. He steps out of the room and the students can hear him collapse in the hallway. Adam scans the room—no one does anything. He then leans in to talk to a woman next to him, whispering that he thinks Rabinowski is demonstrating the “bystander effect.” The woman looks concerned and asks if they should go and get help. Finally, someone in the hallway finds Rabinowski and calls for help, but by the time the ambulance arrives, he has died of a heart attack.

Afterwards, Adam gets coffee with the woman from the lecture, and she asks why he didn’t help Rabinowski. Adam defends himself, saying that he thought Rabinowski was just demonstrating the bystander effect and Adam was playing along. Adam gets angry when the woman presses him, but then he deflates and realizes that this really was Rabinowski’s last lesson: that “learning psychology is, indeed, pretty much useless.”

Adam goes on to graduate school in Santa Cruz, where he becomes known as “Bias Boy” because of his tendency to bring up how humans’ cognitive blindness keeps them from acting in their own best interests. Adam is also very attracted to his advisor, Professor Mieke Van Dijk. He meets with her to discuss his thesis, as he hasn’t decided on a topic yet. Van Dijk presses him to figure out what truly interests him, and eventually she narrows it down to a study about “people who support a position that any reasonable person in our society thinks is crazy.” As an example, she lists the people currently risking their lives to defend trees. Adam is skeptical, but something also draws him to the subject of studying trees rights activists.

Mimi and Douglas arrive at the Life Defense Force camp, which has the feel of a party more than a protest. Douggie is delighted, but Mimi is still surprised that she has made it all this way when she never liked activism or activists before. The camp is full of people of all ages and from all walks of life. They gather together for a march that day, and Mimi recognizes that she is now going against everything her parents taught her—she is making trouble and making herself be seen by the world. As the group walks, they sing and chant, passing devastated areas that have already been logged and then entering a grove of enormous redwoods.

As Mimi walks beside Douggie, she thinks about their relationship. She knows that he is in love with her, and though she feels very close to him and trusts him, she also considers him “a little wacked,” more like a child than a romantic interest. The group reaches the edge of the logging area, and a woman with a megaphone (who is part of the group) warns them that they are about to trespass, so anyone unwilling to be arrested should stop. Some stay back, but the rest continue on, Mimi and Douggie among them. They can hear the roar of logging equipment nearby.

Now in the logging zone, the protesters quickly lock arms and chain themselves together to block the road. Two loggers approach and argue with them, and one of them kicks mud into Douggie’s face. Soon police arrive, cut the chain, and handcuff everyone, leaving them to sit in the muddy road. Mimi has to urinate and can’t hold it, and she starts crying as Douggie tries to comfort her. Finally, the protesters are arrested and booked.

The narrative returns to Ray and Dorothy. Dorothy, now 44, has taken up singing in a local choir as her latest hobby and distraction. She kisses Ray on the top of his head before she leaves for rehearsal, which she never misses. She asks Ray about what he’s working on, and he says he’s reading a case claiming that trees should have their own rights to intellectual property—that the law is wrong to only recognize “human victims.” On her way out, Ray tells Dorothy to bring a coat because it’s cold out, and the comment makes her freeze up. “I’m not your property, Ray,” she says, and leaves. Ray is left alone, knowing that Dorothy is actually off having an affair.

 Dorothy parks her car at the auditorium where her rehearsal will be. She knows that she’s about to do a bad thing, but it also feels exhilarating. She gets into a black car that drives her to her destination, where she has wild sex that she can barely remember. Then the nameless man drops her off at rehearsal, and she sneaks in and joins the choir.

At home, Ray tries to distract himself with his reading. He is intrigued by the idea that other beings on Earth could have rights, rather than just humans. Soon he returns to thoughts of Dorothy, though. She doesn’t know that he knows about her affair, and he wants to keep it that way. Ray feels like his whole life is dissolving as he continues to read the essay’s arguments.

Later, Dorothy returns home, feeling disgusted with herself but also very free. She enters and makes her usual small talk with Ray, and then she gets in the shower—though she also showered before she left for rehearsal, as Ray notices. In bed that night, Dorothy asks Ray more about the essay he’s reading. He says that the essay’s author “wants to give rights to everything alive.” As Ray wrestles aloud with this idea and what it would mean for his career, Dorothy drifts off to sleep.

Nick and Olivia, now referred to as Watchman and Maidenhair, are now camping out with the other activists among the redwoods. Nick asks Olivia if she’s scared of what the multi-billion-dollar logging companies might do to them, but Olivia says that she is sure everything will turn out okay—she has it “on the highest authority.” The next day, the two walk among the redwoods until they find a grove spray-painted with numbers, ready to be logged. Olivia starts filming as Nick removes his own set of spray cans and starts painting over the numbers.

Soon Nick has transformed all of the logging numbers into beautiful paintings of butterflies. He and Olivia know that this will only slow down the logging companies, but they will also edit and release the footage to the public and hope that it will spread their message. After the filming is over, Nick and Olivia have sex for the first time there on the forest floor.

Patricia and Dennis still have their usual routine: Patricia lives and works alone, and Dennis brings her lunch every day. Today he arrives with mail from the outside world, including a packet from Patricia’s agent. Patricia is nervous to open it, but Dennis encourages her. Inside among other papers is a check for far more money than Patricia was expecting. She feels like there must be some kind of mistake, and there’s no way that her book has made so much money. Along with the check are also reviews of the book and letters from fans, all of them praising her. Dennis reads them aloud, and next finds an invitation to speak on the largest public radio program in the country. He’s clearly excited and proud, but Patricia worries about losing her solitude and being dragged back into the world of other people.

Back in the redwood camp, Moses asks if anyone feels like doing “a brief stint up top”—continuing the group’s sit-in atop a redwood tree set to be logged. Maidenhair (Olivia) immediately volunteers, and Watchman (Nick) agrees to go with her, knowing that he has no real choice but to keep following this woman who has upended his life. Moses assures them that they’ll only be in the tree for a few days.

Maidenhair, Watchman, and a man named Loki arrive at the tree, which is called Mimas. Its size and majesty overwhelm Nick and make him think of Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse mythology. Olivia approaches it and embraces its vast trunk. High above them, two people are camped out, excited to come down. They lower a rope down, and Loki explains how they will climb up the tree using a harness and carabiners. Nick is anxious about what seems to be a very unsafe process, but Olivia starts climbing confidently upward. She makes it to the top in 20 minutes, and then it’s Nick’s turn.

A hundred feet up, Nick starts to panic, but then he can hear Olivia’s voice in his ear encouraging him, though she is actually far above. He eventually makes his way up. Buzzard and Sparks, the two people they are replacing, are eager to get back on the ground. They climb down the rope to Loki, who assures Nick and Olivia that he’ll be back in a few days.

Now alone, Olivia takes Nick’s hand and expresses her gratitude to have finally made it to the end of their journey: here, to Mimas. Their living situation consists of two wooden platforms (which Buzzard and Sparks called “the Grand Ballroom”), a hammock, and some supplies. Darkness falls, and they light their kerosene lamp. Olivia calls Nick to her, and they have sex. Nick is then awakened in the middle of the night by flying squirrels scratching at his face. He bolts up and screams, and the creatures scatter. Nick realizes that these squirrels had never had to learn to fear humans, but that he has now taught them to.

At dawn, Nick and Olivia are awed by the view that greets them. They are surrounded by other giant trees, all swaddled in fog. Nick remembers reading about how the trees even help create the fog, while also absorbing its water through their needles. As the fog clears, the whole forested valley is revealed below them. Nick and Olivia then use the bathroom with the bucket available, and they don’t look away or try to be private at all. The raw humanness of this feels very intimate.

After a breakfast of nuts and dried fruit, Nick and Olivia go off in different directions to explore Mimas, both of them wearing the safety ropes that they are now tied to at all times. They are amazed by what they find: huckleberries, a tiny pool with a salamander in it, insects they’ve never seen before, and a hemlock sapling growing out of soil on a branch. Afterward, Olivia writes, and Nick sketches her. He can tell that she is adjusting from a life of constant stimulation and human contact, though he himself has grown used to solitude and silence.

Later, the two can hear the sound of distant logging, and the crashes of falling redwoods. In the camp’s library, Olivia finds a book called The Secret Forest. She reads some of it aloud to Nick, starting with Patricia’s opening passage about humans and trees sharing a common ancestor. When the sun goes down, they just sit and talk, and they zip their bags together when they sleep. Olivia remarks that if one of them falls the other will be dragged down too, and Nick says, “I’ll follow you anywhere.”

Meanwhile, Mimi is out of jail with a $300 fine. Though her job hears about her arrest, they don’t seem to mind as long as she gets her work done on time. Mimi and Douggie continue to attend protests, one morning driving to an “action” in the California Coast Range. When they arrive, they are frustrated to see that no TV trucks are there—without media coverage, the protest will have no real effect. 

Mimi and Douggie join the group already gathered there, surrounding a crane and facing off against a group of loggers. The loggers start up their chainsaws and threaten the protesters and then threaten to cut down trees so that they fall on them. Douggie and a few others start climbing into the trees. Mimi joins until someone grabs her leg and pulls her down, and then sits on the back of her legs. Mimi begs the man to get off of her, and he says he will if she promises to stay down.

The loggers gather together, trying to figure out what to do next. Then, they start up their saws and make a cut in a tree near to the one where a protester is squatting. Most of the protesters then drop down from their trees, knowing that the loggers mean to knock them down with other falling trees, but Mimi stays on the ground, and Douggie stays in his tree. The police arrive, and all the protesters come down—except for Douggie, who climbs higher and handcuffs himself to a branch.

Despite Douggie’s best efforts, the police eventually climb logging ladders and reach him, but he positions himself so that they can’t cut off his handcuffs without injuring him. Then, an officer starts to slice off Douggie’s pants. Mimi watches in horror as the police expose his genitals to the air and then spray them with pepper spray. Even the loggers call up for the police to stop. Douggie can barely stay conscious, and finally the police cut the handcuffs off of him and carry him down from the tree. After another ordeal of being arrested and processed, Mimi drives Douggie home. His skin is raw and orange, but he won’t let Mimi see. She checks in on him every evening for a week.

The narrative returns to Neelay, whose successive games Mastery 2, Mastery 3, and Mastery 4 grow ever more successful, profitable, and technologically advanced. Meanwhile the Internet grows alongside it, just as Neelay had predicted years before. Mastery 5 is as complex as anything yet coded. Neelay is now a multi-millionaire, and he still lives above his company’s headquarters, surrounded by screens and constantly working on new ideas. He often visits the Stanford trees that first inspired him, but their voices are silent.

While his digital empire grows, Neelay’s physical body decays: he often breaks bones performing simple tasks, and his skin is plagued by bedsores. He has now completed Mastery 6, in which players can create entire self-operating civilizations within the world of the game. He constantly sends memos to his team with ideas for how to improve their next game, as employees come and go in his office.

Feeling suddenly depressed one day, Neelay does what he usually does and calls his parents. His mother answers, delighted to hear from him. She quickly brings up the subject of finding a wife for him. Neelay tries to deflect by lying and saying that he is dating one of his caregivers—this elates Ritu. He names his imaginary girlfriend “Rupal.” Ritu immediately wants to tell everyone she knows and even plan for a wedding. After hanging up, Neelay strikes the desk in anger, and can tell that he has broken another bone. He wheels himself to the receptionist and says that he needs to go to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Patricia has been invited to Portland to act as an expert educating witness in a hearing regarding “an injunction to halt logging on sensitive federal land.” She is reluctant to go, but Dennis encourages her, implying that the forests need all the defense they can get. Later, Dennis drives her the hundred miles to the courthouse.

In her preliminary statement before the court, Patricia describes how trees in a forest all depend on one another. She is nervous, and her old speech disorder of slurring her words comes back. The opposition argues that her findings might be temporary and soon overturned, just as she herself overturned previous science. They claim that a young and managed forest is better than an “old, anarchic forest.” Patricia answers with her own knowledge, and the judge seems genuinely interested in learning about what she has to say—Patricia feels like she’s teaching again.

Patricia goes on to describe how everything in a forest is interdependent, and no single part can be removed without affecting everything else. The opposition argues that preserving old growth is not worth the millions of dollars that can be made logging it, but Patricia retorts that “rot adds value to a forest.” She also has the data to back this up: old-growth forests provide more resources, even when speaking in strictly monetary terms. The only reason the market doesn’t accept this is because it demands immediate growth and specialization, not diversity and patience.

The judge says that he has read Patricia’s book, and he questions her further about the nature of forests and how trees communicate with each other. Patricia claims that tree plantations are the opposite of forests, and that “a suburban backyard has more diversity than a tree farm.” She concludes with a market-based argument, knowing her audience. The judge asks one last question about what forests might “know,” and for a moment he seems to Patricia to look like her own father Bill, questioning her about her knowledge of trees all those decades ago.

After the recess, the judge places a stay on the logging that was being contested. People congratulate Patricia, and she leaves the courthouse to face a mass of demonstrators, some supporting logging and some opposing it. The expert witness for the opposing side finds Patricia and tells her that she just made lumber more expensive, so every company that already owns land is going to “cut as fast as they can.”

Up in the branches of the redwood Mimas, Watchman and Maidenhair adjust to a wholly new pattern of living. Sometimes loggers and logging company executives show up at the tree’s base and argue with or threaten them. One logger is struck by Olivia’s beauty and says that she could have any man she wants—so why live in a tree? Sometimes Watchman folds up his sketches and drops them onto the men below, who are amazed to see what he has depicted. Days and weeks go by, and the tree-sitters who were supposed to relieve Watchman and Maidenhair never appear. One day, the loggers grow angrier in their arguments but also press a genuine debate. Maidenhair finally answers that she’s not saying people should end all logging—they should just “cut like it’s a gift.”

After three weeks, Loki and Sparks finally appear at the base of Mimas. They say that there’s been infighting at the camp, and that Buzzard is now in jail. They ask if Maidenhair and Watchman can stay another week, and Maidenhair eagerly agrees. Days pass, and neither the loggers nor the Life Defense Force returns. Maidenhair and Watchman develop a new rhythm of living, based only around nature, each other, and their own thoughts. Nick worries that Olivia’s beings of light have abandoned them, but she reassures him that the loggers “can’t beat nature.” The next day, Nick asks if Olivia’s parents know where she is, in case something bad happens. She says that she hasn’t spoken to them since she left Iowa, but she knows that the story of Mimas will have a happy ending.

Nick and Olivia spend hours reading, going through everything previous sitters have left behind. They re-read The Secret Forest, amazed by all the ways that trees communicate with each other and other species. One night a powerful storm strikes Mimas. Nick panics until Olivia tells him to stop fighting the wind, and together they ride out the gale along with Mimas, who has survived thousands of such storms. Surfing on the swaying branches, Nick and Olivia start laughing and yelling, feeling wild and free. The next morning, three loggers appear to check on them, saying that they were worried.

Mimi and Douggie are at a new protest at a logging company headquarters, an event that will be filmed and eventually leaked to the public. Mimi tries to convince Douggie to be more cautious this time, but he is easily distracted by the crowd of activists. The group passes onto corporate property, chanting and holding signs. Soon nine people, including Mimi and Douggie, have entered the corporate headquarters and chained themselves around a pillar in the building’s foyer. Their arms are inserted into steel tubes and then linked together, and the police can’t cut the tubes like they can a chain. Mimi and Douggie are separated, but they’re both part of the circle.

The protesters start to sing as a sheriff orders them to depart. He says that if they do not leave, the police will use pepper spray to force them to. Douggie tries to tell them that Mimi has asthma, and that pepper spray could kill her, but the officers only repeat their ultimatum. When the group refuses to unlock their arms, the police go to one of the protesters, dip a Q-tip in pepper spray, and wipe her eyes with it. The woman moans and screams, and the other protesters and many onlookers cry out for the officers to stop, but instead they move on to the next person, a burly man, wiping his eyes with pepper spray as well.

When the police come to Mimi, Douggie again begs them to stop because she is asthmatic. Mimi still won’t let go, and as they swab her, Douggie panics. He unlocks his arms and rushes at the police officer, but he is quickly subdued. The circle broken, the protest is over—but that night, the person filming the scene leaks the video to the press.

Soon afterward, Dennis tells Patricia about what has happened: the judge’s injunction was ruled to not apply to the Forest Service, and cutting is going to begin again. He describes the protests and said he saw footage of one where the police wiped pepper spray in the protesters’ eyes. Patricia can’t even believe it, but Dennis assures her that he saw it himself.

Dennis and Patricia eat their lunch in silence as Patricia despairs, wondering how the forests can survive humanity’s need for endless growth. At the same time, she finds the desperate protesters beautiful. She muses aloud to Dennis that humans only know how to “grow harder; grow faster,” and can’t seem to live any other way. What she doesn’t tell him is what she truly believes: that humans have disrupted the environment so drastically that the entire “Tree of Life” is slowly falling again. Meanwhile, Dennis admits that watching the protest scene made him want to hurt the cops involved.

After lunch, Patricia continues their discussion, saying that what people are doing now clearly isn’t working, and the extinction of nature is only speeding up. She has an idea, then, to at least preserve a few specimens of all the trees that will soon be gone: a seed vault. Dennis is intrigued by the idea. Patricia doesn’t have a plan for what the future might hold for the vault, but she says that “a seed can lie dormant for thousands of years.”

In the digital world of Neelay’s newest Mastery game, two avatars stand together looking out over the sea. One, a blue-skinned god, is being played by Neelay’s father Babul, who is 2,000 miles away from his son in real life. Neelay himself is in the character of an old beggar. Babul is amazed by what he sees and delighted to see his son. As Babul exclaims with delight, Neelay leads him through beaches and jungles, past fantastical trees that Neelay says are based on real species. Neelay explains that other players will be arriving in this world soon to start building and exploring, but he wanted to show it to his Pita first.

Neelay reminds Babul of their first computer kit, and how all the trees that now surround them came only from the banyan seed the size of his fingertip, as Babul had told him years before. Babul thanks his son, and Neelay promises to see him soon, though he knows that he won’t—Babul is dying. They bid farewell in the world of the game, and Babul promises that “We’ll be home soon.”

In the Brinkman home, Ray and Dorothy have just had an explosive fight. Dorothy is in the bathroom as Ray watches the news—much of it about trees being cut down—and thinks about their relationship. He remembers their first date auditioning for Macbeth, and then also thinks about the fight that just occurred. He finally confronted Dorothy about her infidelity, saying that he has known for more than a year but still wants to stick with her. She responded that she doesn’t belong to anyone, and that Ray needs to let her go.

Still watching the news, Ray has a sudden realization, one echoing the thoughts he had months before when reading the essay about intellectual property rights for trees. He realizes that humanity has always been stealing from its “neighbors” and must eventually repay all of it. As he thinks this, he falls to the ground. Dorothy emerges from the bathroom and screams his name as Ray’s brain floods with blood.

After her latest arrest, Mimi arrives at her job Monday morning to find a man waiting for her—he introduces himself as Brendan Smith and explains that he is there to help her leave the company. Mimi expected to be fired, but she is insulted by the presence of the “professional ejector.” She angrily packs up her belongings, including photographs of her sisters, her father, and her grandparents in China whom she has never met. At last, she leaves the office, but then she makes Brendan reopen it so she can get the arhat scroll. Mimi exits the building, and Brendan posts himself at the door, making sure she doesn’t come back.

That night, Douggie gets drunk by himself at a bar, loudly bemoaning the state of humanity until the man next to him gets annoyed and punches him. Douggie falls and passes out, and when he comes to, he feels a “mushiness” in his head that wasn’t there before. He makes his way out to his car and decides to go visit Mimi, though he knows she probably won’t want him to. Once, when they were chained together for hours, she had told him about all her past love affairs with both men and women. Douggie doesn’t expect her to love him, but he does want to be her “trusted confidant” or even her “manservant.”

Douggie knows he’s too drunk to drive, but now his face is bleeding, and he feels that he has nowhere else to go. As he heads toward town, an empty logging truck starts to follow him—and then suddenly rear-ends him so that he swerves off the road. The truck strikes him again and keeps following until Douggie manages to skid away. Afterward, he idles his car in the middle of an intersection, panicking. The attack feels worse than the police torture, or even his plane crash in Thailand. Finally, Douggie starts driving again, and arrives at Mimi’s condo. When she answers the door, she is obviously drunk, her belongings strewn about and a scroll unrolled on the floor. Mimi pulls Douggie inside, and “the trees bring them home at last.”

Adam Appich is now climbing the same rope ladder that Nick and Olivia did many months before—he’s ascending Mimas. The height makes him panic, but he eventually makes his way to the top, where Maidenhair and Watchman greet him. Adam notes how easily they move about among the branches, to the point that just watching them makes him nauseous with vertigo. When he recovers enough, Adam surveys the view from Mimas’s height. Mimas is now the only redwood left in the area—everything else has been clear-cut and burned.

Watchman and Maidenhair have now been camped out for 10 months, and Adam considers them ideal subjects for his psych study. Watchman sees approaching logging vehicles and suggests that Adam ask his questions quickly and then get back down, but Maidenhair invites him to stay the night. As they talk, Adam’s nausea suddenly becomes too much, and he vomits off the edge of the platform.

When he recovers, Adam gives Watchman and Maidenhair his questionnaire. They ask him about his research, and Maidenhair notes that instead of studying environmental activists, he should be studying “everyone who thinks that only people matter.” That is what is really “pathological,” Watchman agrees. Maidenhair flips through the questionnaire and then suggests that Adam just talk to them instead. Adam knows he shouldn’t ruin his data, but he really does want to talk.

Adam explains that what he is really interested in is the idea that “group loyalty interferes with reason.” Watchman and Maidenhair look at him like this is obvious, and Adam is again intrigued by these people who have managed to resist “consensual reality.” Maidenhair then makes Adam affirm what they all know: that humans are using resources faster than they can be replaced, and that the rate of this growth is only rising, not falling. There is no way this trend can end except with total collapse. So what Adam is really studying, Maidenhair says, is the few people who are screaming to put out the fire, while the main group has decided that the fire isn’t happening at all.

Adam starts to wonder if Maidenhair is right, and if instead he should be studying “illness on an unimaginable scale.” Maidenhair then tells him that humanity is not alone, and that she can sense the voice of something else: the trees, or a life force, like a “Greek chorus” in her mind. Adam knows he should be skeptical, but then he admits that sometimes he talks out loud to his sister Leigh, who disappeared when he was a child. He feels as if he has been drugged by the tree and given a new perspective. As the three continue to talk, they can hear giant trees falling in the distance.

Late that afternoon, Loki returns to retrieve Adam. He climbs up to the platform and then delivers bad news: Mother N and Moses are dead. Someone bombed their office, but the police are saying that they blew themselves up in a terrorist attack. Maidenhair and Watchman mourn this loss and tell stories about their experiences with Moses and Mother N. Afterward, Loki gets ready to descend, but Adam says he would like to spend the night in the tree.

At night, the flying squirrels arrive to inspect Adam, as Watchman sketches them by candlelight. Adam is amazed by everything he can hear in the darkness. The next morning the three are awakened by the sounds of machinery. A logger yells up at them that “shit’s coming” and they need to get out, and then they hear the sound of an approaching helicopter. Adam, Watchman, and Maidenhair grab their possessions and cling to whatever they can as the enormous machine approaches, the wind from its blades slamming against them. Up close, Adam sees the helicopter as an evil thing and thinks about how many thousands of more there are all around the world.

A megaphone blares from the helicopter, demanding that the three come down from the tree. Meanwhile, bulldozers ram the base of Mimas’s trunk. The violence escalates, until finally Adam screams that they are done and will come down. Sobbing, Maidenhair lets go of her branch, and she and Watchman admit defeat. The helicopter leaves, and Adam, Watchman, and Maidenhair are taken down by harness and arrested. As they’re driven away in a police car, they can hear the deep crash of Mimas falling.

The narrative touches on what other characters are doing while Adam, Nick, and Olivia are in custody. Patricia gives talks about the seed vault she is starting, Neelay sends memos about adding even more complexity and beauty to the world of his game, and Dorothy starts a prison sentence of her own as the caretaker of a man who has just undergone brain surgery. All she can think of is how just before Ray’s aneurysm, she had told him that she wanted a divorce.

Adam, Watchman, and Maidenhair are held in a jail cell for several days—longer than they are legally allowed to be held. Watchman notes that the authorities don’t want the bad press of a trial, so they are instead just trying to hurt and intimidate them. On his fourth night in jail, Nick dreams of the Hoel chestnut tree. In the dream, the tree laughs at humanity for trying to save it, and “even the laugh takes years.” Meanwhile, Mimi and Douglas attend a protest condemning a new logging company practice: hiring an arsonist to “lightly damage” forests owned by the Forest Service so that they can then sell them off to be cut.

After five days, Adam, Nick, and Olivia are released from jail without charges. Olivia immediately says that she wants to go see Mimas, and they take Adam’s car along the logging road. The loggers are all gone, as there’s nothing left to cut. Olivia approaches the massive stump, touches it, and starts to weep. Later the three have breakfast, and Adam asks about their plans. Nick and Olivia are going to head north to Oregon where there is more resistance happening. They invite Adam to come with them, but he says that he has to finish his dissertation.

Adam returns to Santa Cruz, where Professor Van Dijk thinks he’s joking when he tells her that his fieldwork led him to spend five days in jail. He works on his data, but he finds that something drastic has changed within him, and his heart isn’t in it anymore. That night, he gets drunk and wanders the streets of town until he is struck in the head by a falling eucalyptus seed pod. He examines the strange object and then looks up at the tree itself, asking “What?”

Adam gets a year-long fellowship to work on his dissertation, and he immediately heads north to Oregon, awed by the forests that he drives through in the Pacific Northwest. At last, he reaches his destination: a community of around a hundred activists labeling themselves “The Free Bioregion of Cascadia.” Adam drives up and is met by a man who introduces himself as “Doug-fir” and a woman who calls herself “Mulberry.” Adam insists that he’s not a federal agent, and then he introduces himself as “Maple.” He asks if Maidenhair and Watchman are there. In response Mulberry says, “We don’t have leaders here. But we do have those two.”

Watchman and Maidenhair greet Adam excitedly and say that the group usually has a ceremony when someone new joins. That night, everyone dresses up and sings songs, as Adam tries to tamp down his natural cynicism regarding anything overly earnest. Still, he goes through with the ceremony, and as “Maple” he pledges to defend “the common cause of living things.” When he’s done, everyone applauds. Around a fire later, Maidenhair asks him what his advice is, as a psychologist, for changing people’s minds. Adam says, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” Afterward, Olivia tells her own story of dying, and a Native Klamath man chants and teaches everyone a few words of his language.

The next day, the group works hard digging trenches and securing the makeshift wall around their encampment. At night, Adam eats with Doug-fir, Mulberry, Watchman, and Maidenhair, observing to himself that together they seem like a “Jungian archetypal family.” He especially watches Maidenhair and notes that she is like the glue holding everyone together. That night, he joins their group as a “fifth wheel” and officially becomes “Professor Maple.”

The occupation of Free Cascadia lasts for many days, as sympathizers send supplies and journalists visit to interview them. Eventually, two men from a congressional representative’s office come by and promise to bring the group’s demands to Washington—this seems like a hopeful turn of events to everyone, even Adam. Yet someone also shoots at the group one night, and three days later, someone leaves deer entrails just outside the encampment as a threat.

One day, a truck pulls up with two men in hunting jackets. They argue with the activists, and the elder man says that he lost his arm cutting trees. Maidenhair talks to them, finally saying that people need to “stop being visitors here” on Earth and “become indigenous again.” One man shakes her hand, but as they drive off, the driver calls out insults.

The protest continues into its second month. There are even rumors that the President has heard about it and is ready to take action. One morning, however, a guard for the activists warns them that federal agents are on their way. Everyone takes action as they’ve trained to do, raising the drawbridge over their moat and manning their walls. A caravan of massive equipment arrives, and a Forest Service man gets out and demands that the protestors exit. Everyone shouts, and then Adam tries to tell the man that the President himself is going to make an executive order. The men ignore this, and Adam suddenly realizes that Washington isn’t going to help them—in fact, Washington is behind this sudden invasion.

When the protesters refuse to leave, an enormous excavator rolls up and smashes down the wall, taking seconds to destroy months of work. It then rolls into the camp, and the activists scatter. Douggie and Mimi try to stay, each having chained themselves down, but soon even Douggie admits that they’ve lost. Mimi has been locked atop a tall tripod of poles, and when she won’t leave, the excavator tears at the poles themselves. Mimi falls and impales her cheek on the end of a pole, then tumbles all the way to the ground. The driver of the excavator jerks the machine back and it strikes Douggie, who collapses to the ground. Suddenly the action ceases, and everyone rushes to Mimi and Douggie’s aid.

Adam finds Watchman and Maidenhair afterward. Maidenhair is convinced that they haven’t lost yet, and that Washington will soon take action. Adam doesn’t have the heart to tell her the extent of their failure. Mimi and Douglas are airlifted to a hospital and treated, and no one is charged except for four women who manage to remain locked down for another 36 hours. The rest of the Free Bioregion of Cascadia disbands, and “the extraction of wealth continues.” Yet despite this, the narrator notes, four weeks later a shed full of logging equipment is burned down.

The narrative follows only the aftermath of this event; the perpetrators are Olivia, Nick, Mimi, Douglas, and Adam. It feels unreal to them to see the damage on the news, but they all feel like they needed revenge against the equipment that has wounded them and the people who have tortured them.

This act of arson leads to more, as the group next targets a sawmill in California. They all work together, using their respective skills to burn down the building, with Nick leaving behind a painted message: “NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY; YES TO REAL GROWTH.”

Afterwards they sit together at Mulberry’s table, discussing how disillusioned they’ve all become. Adam knows that there are many psychological biases at play among them, but that he, too, has “thrown in his lot with the need to save what can be saved.” This, he realizes, is his ultimate thesis. Olivia, who still holds everyone else under her spell, says that they really have no choice—if they’re wrong, they only lose their lives, but if they’re right, they should be doing everything they can to help “the most wondrous products of four billion years of creation.” As she speaks, Adam realizes that the group will do one last job and then part ways.

Adam finds the subject of their last attack: thousands of acres of public forest across multiple states being sold to developers. In planning their mission, the group never writes anything down, talking only face-to-face and paying for everything with cash. Watchman and Maidenhair surveil the site they plan to hit: construction equipment at a patch of forest in Idaho that’s scheduled to be cleared for a four-star resort. Watchman sketches everything, and later the five work together in Mulberry’s garage, building explosives and finalizing their plans. They hope to at least plant a seed with their actions—“the kind that needs fire to open.”

On the night of their mission, everyone is prepared and dressed in black, their van loaded with explosives. As they drive, they talk, quiz each other, and listen to a tape of Native American myths and legends. They reach the Bitterroots of Idaho at night and pull up to the site. Mimi stays in the van with a police scanner, while the rest set to work setting up their devices and timers.

Watchman’s job is to paint messages that will hopefully soon be seen by millions of people. On a trailer’s wall he writes, “CONTROL KILLS; CONNECTION HEALS” and “COME HOME OR DIE.” Meanwhile, Adam accidentally spills fuel all over himself and suddenly panics, wondering what he’s doing—there’s no point to their actions, he thinks, as humanity’s need for “property and mastery” will always win, expanding until the last forest is gone.

Watchman keeps working, now painting a poem about five trees that he composes on the spot. Suddenly, something explodes at the detonation site, long before the timers should have gone off. Watchman and Douglas rush toward the blaze and see two figures on the ground. One of them is Adam, who gets up. Olivia is the other. Nick picks her up and sees that her whole torso is bleeding. Her voice slurs, and she can barely speak. Douglas panics, spinning around and cursing to himself. Adam pulls Olivia away from the approaching flames, and Nick bends down beside her again but then has to turn away and vomit. Mimi appears and gives Adam the keys to the van, urging him to go get help. Olivia protests, trying to say that they need to finish the job, while Adam weighs his options.

Mimi tries to snap Douglas out of his panic and then bends down to tend to Olivia. Olivia asks for water, and Nick and Douglas rush to find some. They gather up a bag full of water from a nearby stream, knowing that it’s probably toxic but that Olivia just needs the immediate comfort. Olivia drinks the water as Mimi cleans her face and cradles her. Olivia then locks eyes with Mimi and seems to share thoughts with her, saying that “I’ve been shown what happens, and this isn’t it.”

Two new explosions go off, and Olivia again seeks out Mimi’s gaze, staring desperately into her eyes. Adam reappears—too soon to have gone to get help and returned—and Nick attacks him in a rage until Olivia speaks Nick’s name. Nick goes to her side as she cries out, bleeding from her mouth. At last, she asks him, “This will never end—what we have. Right?” Nick cannot answer, and Olivia dies.