CHAPTER 7 – NELLIE
The hold music Alburn Systems used was minimalist jazz that had been engineered, Nellie was fairly certain, to make callers feel they were wasting everyone’s time, including their own.
She’d been on hold for four minutes, sitting on the cottage porch with her secondary pack already loaded and her topo maps spread across the railing.
“Ms. Fuller.” Martha’s dry tone finally greeted her. “How can I help you?”
Nellie shifted the phone, already irritated that she had been forced to call Sawyer’s office with a matter that by no means or by any stretch of the imagination concerned the CEO.
Unfortunately, all other contacts at her disposal had failed to come up with an answer for her.
“The permissions revision Gina Marsh sent me restricts survey work near active water features to supervised access only. The northern ridge survey today includes three riparian zones. Per the new terms, I need an escort. Everybody I’ve spoken to at your company has cheerily tried to hand me off as somebody else’s responsibility this morning. ”
“I see.” The keyboard percussion began immediately. “I can arrange for one of the site representatives to—”
A sound in the background. A second voice—clipped, direct, immediately recognizable in the way a thunderclap was immediately recognizable. Martha’s keyboard stopped clacking.
“Is that Ms. Fuller? Did Gina specify who was considered appropriate company? I wasn’t even aware the permissions had been revised. Why is it the first I’m hearing of this? Forget it, I’ll go.”
Nellie’s coffee mug stopped halfway to her mouth.
“Ms. Alburn—” Martha began.
“Cancel my eleven and my two. Reschedule the infrastructure call.”
“The infrastructure call has been rescheduled twice.”
“Then it can survive a third. Nellie, are you still there?”
Nellie pulled her phone away from her face and stared at it as if it were some strange device that had spontaneously transported her to an alternate dimension. “Yes.”
“I’ll be there by nine.”
Nellie sat in dumbfounded silence as the distant sound of tapping high heels faded away completely.
“Um… Martha?” she tried.
“Please standby, Ms. Fuller.” A long, quiet exhale. “Your company escort will be there soon.”
“She just—” Nellie gestured at the air with the phone, realized this was useless, and put her hand down. “She canceled three meetings to walk me through a forest.”
“Two,” Martha corrected. “The infrastructure call will be postponed, so it wasn’t technically—” She stopped and sighed again. “Yes. She did.”
Nellie blinked several times, then looked around as if she might identify any details which proved she’d somehow landed in a parallel world.
“Right, well… thank you, Martha,” she finally said.
Sawyer arrived at eight fifty-three, seven minutes early, which Nellie suspected was less a choice and more a constitutional condition.
Her clothing represented a clearly effortful compromise between her natural habitat and the one she was about to enter: dark technical trousers, a charcoal quarter-zip that was doing its best to look outdoorsy but was almost certainly designer, and the boots—definitely the only hardy shoes in Sawyer’s wardrobe. The cashmere coat was absent.
Nellie leaned against the porch rail and took it all in.
She had been, she realized, somewhat insulated from the full effect of Sawyer Alburn’s face on their previous encounters—by the chain, the rare fungus, the low light of a cottage kitchen.
In the clear morning light, with no occupation to redirect her, the effect was considerably less manageable.
Pale-blonde hair pulled back cleanly into a long ponytail.
High cheekbones that could have been used as a geometry teaching aid.
Icy blue eyes set under a brow that communicated, even in repose, that it had seen everything and formed opinions about most of it.
The overall impression was of something sculpted rather than born—winter-sharp and beautiful in the way that certain things were captivating precisely because they were also somewhat frightening.
Like a cluster of foot-long icicles above your head. Or a very expensive knife.
Nellie’s brain produced, helpfully: oh, that’s a problem.
Her brain had excellent timing.
“You look—” she started.
“Don’t.”
“—like you Googled ‘what to wear in a forest’.” Nellie chuckled anyway.
Sawyer surveyed the equipment spread across the porch: two packs, the topo maps, the field notebook, the sampling kit in its labeled pouches. “Is all of this necessary?”
“Yes.”
“Both packs?”
“Yes.” Nellie slung hers on. “The second pack has the sample vials, the conductivity meters, and lunch. You could carry it if you want to be helpful.”
She’d offered expecting it to land as a teasing suggestion and be declined. Instead, Sawyer picked up the pack and slung it over one shoulder. “Lead the way.”
Nellie blinked slowly a few times before she remembered how to move her feet.
The northern ridge ran along the upper edge of the boundary in a long diagonal, climbing from the eastern drainage through three distinct habitat zones before cresting at a rocky outcrop Nellie had been mentally circling for a week.
The route was not technically difficult terrain.
It was also not, by any stretch, a path.
It was undergrowth and gradient and the kind of ground that required you to think simultaneously about where your feet were landing and what your hands were doing, a skill that developed naturally after years in field gear and did not transfer automatically from boardrooms.
Sawyer Alburn was used to boardrooms.
“Step over,” Nellie said, at the first nurse log, not looking back.
“I see it.”
Having said this somewhat defiantly, Sawyer clipped the bark on the landing, boot toe catching the edge, and Nellie—who had developed eyes in the back of her head somewhere around her third field season—caught this in her peripheral vision and said nothing. The restraint was heroic.
The sword ferns on the mid-slope were thick enough that pushing through required forward momentum and a certain amount of faith, and Sawyer hit them at roughly the pace and body language of someone approaching a cold swimming pool.
Nellie watched from ten paces ahead, pretending to check her compass heading.
“You can just—” she started.
“I know how ferns work.” Sawyer pushed through, fighting rather than reading the terrain. “This is fine.”
“Sure.”
“It’s a fern.”
“Many ferns.”
“I’m aware of how many ferns there are, thank you. I’m inside of them.”
Nellie tucked the compass away and kept walking. Behind her, a branch snapped—not dangerously, just the sharp report of someone who had committed to a route and was not going to be argued with by vegetation. She pressed her lips together hard.
They climbed for an hour without stopping.
Nellie moved at a pace that she’d been told before was unsettling for people unaccustomed to fieldwork; she didn’t hike so much as track, forward and diagonal and crouched and upright again in a rhythm that made no accommodation for aesthetics.
Behind her, Sawyer kept pace. Not easily, and not silently, but without complaint.
Which was its own category of stubborn, and she found herself, quietly and somewhat against her will, respecting it.
“How old are you, Ms. Fuller?” Sawyer suddenly asked at the second switchback.
Nellie glanced back, surprised by the random inquiry, and the fact that Sawyer had reverted to calling her Ms. She had noted the casual way she’d addressed her as Nellie over the phone this morning. “Thirty-four.” She adjusted left. “You?”
“Forty-six.”
“Really? I would have guessed younger. Twelve years and you’re keeping up just fine.”
She immediately cringed to herself at her clumsy response; she hadn’t intended for it to sound so backhanded.
“Was that a compliment?”
“It was just an observation.”
“From you,” Sawyer said, “I’m beginning to understand those may be the same thing.”
Nellie stepped over a root mass and didn’t answer, mostly because she was smiling and didn’t particularly want to advertise it.
The wind moved through the upper canopy in a long, slow pass, and the light shifted.
Somewhere to the north, a pileated woodpecker hammered a fast, insistent rhythm against a dead snag.
“The bird,” Sawyer mused. “Is that normal? It sounds stressed.”
“It’s completely normal.” Nellie chuckled. “Excavating carpenter ants, probably. Old snags.” She glanced up through the canopy to find it. “That sound means significant standing dead wood. Which means the forest is old enough to have generated it, which is actually useful—”
“The woodpecker is evidence?” Sawyer sighed, no shortage of skepticism in her drawl.
“What the woodpecker indicates is evidence. There’s a difference.”
Sawyer considered this with more apparent attention than Nellie had expected her to give it. “People who answer so smugly are usually building up to telling you something you don’t want to hear.”
“That’s a very cynical read.”
“That’s twelve years on you.”
Nellie dropped her head back and laughed, shooting her escort a mental touché.
Sawyer did not appear amused in the slightest, but her eyes did widen slightly as if she was stunned that her retort had been received as comedic.
Nellie couldn’t help but revel in the softening of the woman’s features, feeling as if she were glimpsing behind a curtain few managed to get anywhere near.
She was also becoming very conscious of the fact that she was learning things about Sawyer Alburn’s expressions at all. That had not been on the survey agenda.