CHAPTER 2 – SAWYER
Sawyer Alburn was furious.
The first wrong turn had cost her eleven minutes.
The second cost her a tire pressure warning and the last of whatever remained of her patience after four a.m., which—following a board call with a CFO in Tokyo who had apparently never encountered the phrase “final decision” before—had not been substantial.
The GPS had performed flawlessly through forty minutes of city skyrises and dwindling suburbs and then, in a development Sawyer chose to regard as a personal betrayal, delivered a calm and entirely useless recalculating while she idled at the intersection of two unmarked dirt roads.
Both of them led into trees. She had a graduate degree from Wharton, a company valued at eight-point-four billion dollars, and no way of determining, by looking at trees, which were the correct trees.
She had turned left. This had been wrong.
She reversed, turned right, drove four miles, and called Gina, who did not answer because she was asleep, because Gina was not the one who had to drive out to a wilderness border at six in the morning because her development team had failed to manage a single activist before she became a viral livestream.
Sawyer ended the call without leaving a message. Gina would understand the implication.
The access road eventually appeared in her headlights—properly marked, as it turned out, at an angle visible from the intersection if she’d turned right the first time—and she pulled down it slowly, because the rental’s suspension was making a sound that suggested the road’s ambitions exceeded its maintenance budget by several years.
She saw the construction vehicles first. Then the patrol car. Then, through the tree line, the chain.
Sawyer parked, cut the engine, and sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel.
She’d pulled up the livestream at a red light shortly after she’d left her building—Martha had sent the link at five forty-five with a message that read simply “you’ll want to see this.
”. Sawyer had watched forty-five seconds: a woman chained to a very large tree, talking cheerfully about fungus while wearing an expression of complete and bewildering contentment.
Seventeen thousand viewers. The chat moved too fast to read.
The tree looked, she had to admit, genuinely enormous.
After taking a deep, bracing, not-at-all-seething breath, she got out of the car.
The chill in the forest was different from the city, denser and damper, the kind that settled against you rather than passing through. Her coat, adequate in every other context she’d worn it, was too thin here, but she kept her face neutral anyway.
She did a quick inventory: the foreman frozen mid-pace, the deputy sheriff scrambling out of her patrol car and hurriedly straightening her hat, two crew members on a flatbed with their arms folded as they watched. And, at the base of the tree—
The woman was smaller than she’d appeared on the stream.
Dark hair, damp and partly escaped from whatever chaotic arrangement it had started the morning in.
One hand cuffed by a chain to the trunk.
One hand holding a sign that read ELEANOR IS NOT A BOARD FOOT and a thermos resting in the dirt beside her boot.
She was looking at Sawyer.
Not with fear—fear was familiar, and fear had a shape Sawyer recognized on sight because it tended to produce a reliable set of behaviors: stiffened posture, recalibrated tone, the particular vigilance of someone deciding how much they could afford to say.
Not with defiance either, which was its own performance and had its own structures. This was something else entirely. It was pure, unguarded curiosity, the look of someone who had expected one thing and gotten another.
Sawyer walked toward the tree line.
The deputy materialized at her left, slightly breathless. “Sorry, Ms… um?”
“Ms. Alburn. Has she been cited?”
“Yes, ma’am. Trespassing and obstruction. She has a chain, though, so removal would require—”
“What’s her name?”
“Fuller. Nellie Fuller. She’s done this before, apparently. Eight times, she said.”
She’d spent the drive up listening to the stream on the car’s speakers.
Twelve minutes of mycorrhizal networks, followed by a detailed explanation of the public comment resubmission process, followed by what she could only describe as an extremely charming interaction with a foreman named Dave.
The chat had been delirious. “Stand down for now, Deputy.”
She stopped ten feet from the base of the tree.
Nellie Fuller tilted her head slightly and smiled, warm and open and wholly unperturbed, and it produced, somewhere in the region of Sawyer’s stomach, a sensation she declined to examine further.
“Good morning,” Nellie said. “I’d offer you coffee, but I already warned Dave, and I don’t want it on my conscience twice. Full disclosure: it’s genuinely terrible.”
A muffled laugh from the flatbed. Sawyer did not look around.
“Ms. Fuller,” she said through her teeth. “I assume you know who I am.”
“Sawyer Alburn.” The answer was immediate and easy, like she’d expected the question.
“Founder and CEO of Alburn Systems. Net worth approximately four-point-two billion, depending on the quarter. You took the company from a shared office in Seattle in 2002—seventeen thousand in seed funding, a regional hospital contract—to where it is now through twenty-eight acquisitions, none of which, I believe, has ever required you to navigate a dirt road before sunrise.” A beat.
Her gaze dropped, briefly and pointedly, to Sawyer’s shoes. “Until today.”
That smile again. Blinding but somehow also soft. Like the brilliance of the sun but the calm of a clear sky.
“The trespassing citation carries jail time,” she said simply.
“It does,” /Nellie agreed pleasantly. “Deputy Haines and I have already discussed it. She’s very nice, actually. She gave me a thumbs-up earlier”
From across the access road, the deputy made a face that suggested she deeply regretted the thumbs-up.
Sawyer glanced at the phone on the branch.
The viewer counter was live, and the chat scrolled too fast to parse.
She’d clocked the number before she got out of the car: nineteen thousand now.
She understood, without needing to calculate, exactly what the press response would look like if she sent a deputy in with bolt cutters right now.
“Alburn Systems CEO Arrests Activist Live on Stream” wasn’t a headline anyone recovered from cleanly, and the county board—already skittish, three members of whom were up for re-election in November—would table the vote indefinitely on the basis of optics alone.
Gina’s timetable would collapse. The project would stall.
And Sawyer would spend six months in media remediation when she could be doing literally anything else.
She did not make decisions she’d have to undo.
She also, and she was being very clear with herself about this, was not standing here somewhat dumbfounded because Nellie Fuller’s eyes were so hazel they were almost gold in the gradually rising morning light or because the woman had memorized Sawyer’s acquisition history and quoted it back at her without a tremor in her voice.
Those were not factors. She was running a calculation about media fallout, same as she always did, and the calculation was coming out against arrest. That was the beginning and the end of it.
“I’ll make you an offer,” Sawyer suddenly said, hearing it as if someone outside of herself was speaking.
Nellie’s eyebrows rose. “Okay...”
“Sixty days.” Sawyer told herself she was doing exactly what she needed to do, what her lawyers were going to say about it was a separate and later problem.
“You want to prove this land qualifies for protected status? Prove it. State designation, federal designation, I don’t care which.
Bring me peer-reviewed science, a credible ecological survey, statutory grounds—anything that holds up to legal scrutiny.
Any avenue available under environmental law, you use it. ”
“And if I can demonstrate qualifying status?” Nellie was fully focused now, the gold in her eyes glinting as they narrowed. Sawyer recognized the look of making quick calculations.
“Alburn Systems withdraws the development proposal. Entirely. No litigation, no countersuits. We leave the project and we don’t revisit it.”
Silence. A jay called somewhere overhead in the canopy, loud and briefly absurd.
“And if I can’t?”
“You leave my land and you stay gone. No chain actions, no streams, no signs.” Sawyer paused a half-second. “Regardless if the font is legible.”
The laugh from the flatbed was louder this time. Nellie’s mouth did something that was not quite a snarl and not quite a grin—somewhere between the two, and unreasonably distracting. Sawyer redirected her attention to the middle distance.
“Your lawyers are going to hate this,” Nellie taunted her.
“My lawyers work for me.”
“That’s not actually a counterargument.”
No, Sawyer thought, it really wasn’t.
The offer was good sense. It was clean. It put a hard deadline on the activism, separated the question from the noise of public opinion, and if Nellie Fuller couldn’t meet the burden of proof—which was a high one, because the criteria for protected designation were specific and demanding, and this forest had already been surveyed by Sawyer’s team shortly before the acquisition—then the project proceeded on a timeline Alburn Systems controlled.
She was being tactical. That was what this was.
“Is there a catch?” Nellie’s gaze was steady, searching her face for something.
“The criteria are the criteria. I’m not narrowing them beyond what the law already specifies.” Sawyer held eye contact. “I’m not in the habit of offering things I intend to take back.”
Nellie was quiet for a long moment. Sawyer watched her think—watched the consideration move across her face without any apparent effort to conceal it.
“I’d need access,” she said finally. “The full four thousand acres. For surveys and sampling.”
“Coordinate with my office. You’ll have access within the parameters of standard survey protocols.”
“And the construction crew?”
Sawyer glanced at Dave, who had stopped pacing entirely and was watching with his arms folded. “On hold for sixty days.”Dave nodded.
Nellie’s eyes were still narrowed. “Sixty days,” she repeated.
“Starting today.”
“Make it tomorrow. On research days, I need to start the morning with better coffee.”
“Of course,” Sawyer said it without inflection. “Take all the time you need today to recover from your adventures. You appear to be quite worn out.”
Nellie laughed—full bellied and unashamed—and Sawyer had an acute and inconvenient awareness that she needed to be in her car now, on the road, several miles in any direction from this clearing. She turned without a closing remark and started back across the dirt.
She heard Nellie chattering away to her viewers immediately. She did not look back.
The deputy was hovering at the perimeter. “Ms. Alburn, should I—”
“You’re done here, Deputy. The matter’s been resolved.”
The seat was cold when Sawyer climbed back into her car.
She sat for a moment with the engine idling and processed what had just happened.
She was rigorous about taking an inventory of events.
They were how she’d survived a childhood that should have been a ceiling rather than a floor, how she’d built a company from a shared desk and a hospital contract in Tacoma, and how she’d made twenty-eight acquisitions without a single one going catastrophically sideways.
Inventory: Sawyer Alburn had just conditionally offered to abandon an eighty-million-dollar development project to a woman chained to a tree.
She had done it in front of nineteen thousand people because it was, all things considered, a rational de-escalation that bought the project protected procedural ground if Nellie Fuller failed to make her case.
That was why.
She pulled onto the access road.
The phone rang through the speakers not two minutes later. Martha.
Sawyer let it ring once more than she normally would before she answered.
“How did it go?” Martha’s question was very carefully positioned between curiosity and professional neutrality, which meant she’d already read the stream.
A long pause.
“I think I just made a deal with a tree-hugger.”
Silence. Then, perfectly dry: “A deal?”
“Don’t.”
Sawyer ended the call and stared at the road and tried not to think about the way Nellie Fuller had smiled at her.