Chapter 3 #2
He steadies himself, laughs shakily, and reaches the trap, clinging there one-armed while he pulls the SD card free and tucks a new one in place. He pats the camera casing as if it can feel gratitude. Then he slowly makes his way back down, boots finding holds by instinct.
Only when both his feet are on the ground again do I let out the breath I’ve been holding.
Ridiculous. He does this all the time. This is what he came here for. It’s what I watch him do, season after season.
He has no idea someone’s quietly catastrophizing on his behalf.
“Okay,” he says, pocketing the used SD card like a prize. “One down. Two more to check before I admit my knees don’t bend like they used to.”
He moves to the edge of the rock outcrop, gazing out over the valley. From where I’m hidden back in the tree line, I see him silhouetted against the pale sky—hat pulled off, curls ripped free by the wind, eyes half lidded as he takes it all in.
Down below, the forest stretches in endless shades of green and brown and shadow. Rivers glint like silver threads where the light catches them. Snow lingers in broken patches on the higher peaks, stubborn and glittering.
This is what my kind has spent centuries protecting.
Not in the way humans protect things—with fences and paperwork and slogans—but by existing quietly, by nudging, by scaring off poachers with “ghost stories” and pushing hiking trails away from fragile spots.
We are the rumor that keeps a few feet of distance between human greed and the heart of the forest.
And yet, for all their mess, humans have made me care about individual trees more than once. About species. About futures. Elias especially, with his notebooks and his careful hands and his stupid, earnest desire to understand and repair.
A deep ache settles beneath my ribs: a conflict of loyalties I don’t like examining.
Humans are the reason summers are hotter, winters are stranger, storms are more violent.
They’re the reason salmon runs have thinned, glaciers have shrunk, and entire sections of forest have gone quiet.
And yet here stands this one—soft around the middle, curls wild, shirt untucked—doing everything he can to measure the damage and imagine solutions.
Attraction is bad enough. Respect is worse.
He hums again, some tuneless little song under his breath, and I swear the ridge feels different with him on it. Brighter somehow, a little looser, and less tired.
He fishes a granola bar from his pocket, tears it open with his teeth, and immediately gets a smear of chocolate on his thumb. He licks it off absently, eyes still fixed on the valley.
My brain short-circuits.
Absolutely not.
Nope.
“We do not find that sexy,” I tell myself under my breath. “We absolutely do not—”
My pocket vibrates.
The sound is muffled but startling in the quiet—like a trapped hornet.
For a split second, my heart jumps, thinking Elias somehow heard me or sensed me as he paused and seemed to listen hard before shrugging it off.
I fumble my phone out of my apron pocket and glance at the screen. The Monster Network admin panel glares back at me, angry and red.
ALERT: US-WEST NODE LATENCY SPIKE – POSSIBLE PARTIAL OUTAGE
Source: Regional Cluster – Yellowstone / Upper Geyser Basin
Of course.
Of course the servers choose now to melt down.
A new message pops up over the alert, from our beloved secretary.
MothAkai: Hey, Boone!
MothAkai: The Western board is lagging like a drunk snail.
MothAkai: Please fix it before everyone logs on tonight to thirst post about spring hormones.
Behind his text, another pings from Ozark in the admin channel.
Howl4U [admin]: Getting 504s on event sign-up page.
Howl4U [admin]: Is this a sign?
Howl4U [admin]: Like an omen sign?
Howl4U [admin]: Because I do NOT have the energy for another cursed Solstice.
I close my eyes and let my head thunk softly against the tree trunk. Of course it’s the Yellowstone node. It always is. Too much geothermal interference, too much demand, too many monsters trying to stream human dramas and live-blog their crushes at the same time.
Another buzz follows.
SYSTEM: Automated restart FAILED. Manual intervention required.
“Fern forbid,” I mutter.
If I don’t handle this, half the US cryptid population is going to descend into chaos before lunch.
The last time we had a significant outage, three thunderbirds started a rumor that the Network had been discovered by humans, two chupacabras tried to “liberate” a server from an actual data center, and someone in New Jersey accidentally took down the power grid for a block trying to “piggyback” on a transformer.
I look back at Elias.
He’s sitting cross-legged on the rock now, notebook open on his knee, pen flying across the page.
The wind ruffles his hair. His nose is pink with cold.
He’s talking quietly as he writes, some rambling commentary about soil moisture patterns and snowpack anomalies and how he will “absolutely cry” if his north slope station is gone.
I want to stay.
I want to watch him pack up and move on, see how he reacts when he finds the microclimate station I braced with extra stones last fall. I want to count how many times he trips, how many times he laughs, how many times he talks to himself like the forest is listening.
But the phone buzzes again, insistent.
Duty snarls with desire, and duty wins. It always does. That’s the curse of being in charge of things: You don’t get to ignore the alarms.
I take one more long look at him. “This is your fault,” I tell him quietly, even though he’ll never hear it. “You’re the one who made me weird about humans.”
He tips his head back, eyes closed, face turned to the sun like he’s soaking it in. For a heartbeat, I let myself imagine he’s sensing me. That some part of him knows he’s not alone. Then I turn away.
The forest closes around me as I slip back into deeper shade, feet moving faster now, mind already flipping through the mental map of our server relays and hidden access points.
There’s a maintenance node two ridges over, nested under an old root system where we run part of the fiber through protected ground.
I’ll reroute traffic. Kick the Yellowstone node remotely. Talk Akai down from whatever dramatic ledge he’s on. Remind Rex, the Ozark Howler, that not every glitch is a conspiracy. Again.
Behind me, Elias hums to himself and starts packing up his gear, unaware that his quiet human trek has just been rudely interrupted in my head by monster-scale tech support.
“The Network isn’t going to fix itself,” I grumble, thumbing over to the admin console.
The screen lights my face as I vanish deeper into the shadows, leaving one very oblivious human alone on the ridge.
I tell myself I’ll come back before the sun sets. Just to ensure he doesn’t twist an ankle on the descent.
Purely practical.
Absolutely nothing else.