CHAPTER 3 – NELLIE
Getting herself out of the chain took Nellie four minutes, a key she’d been storing in her bra in case she was faced with a pat down, and a level of manual dexterity that had never once made it onto her resume but probably should.
The padlock clicked open. She coiled the chain, tucked the padlock into the front pouch of her backpack, and pressed her free palm flat against Eleanor’s bark—just for a second—before her phone vibrated to life in her pocket.
Paloma: Nellie
Paloma: Nellie WHAT DID YOU DO
Paloma: YOU SAID YES TO A DEAL WITH SAWYER ALBURN???
Paloma: I NEED YOU TO CALL ME IMMEDIATELY. I AM STANDING ON THE SIDE OF A ROAD. I HAVE A brEAKFAST BURRITO IN MY HAND THAT IS GETTING COLD. CALL ME RIGHT NOW.
Then a voice note. Fifty-three seconds long.
Nellie pressed play.
What followed was not, strictly speaking, a coherent language of any sort.
There was a stretch of something in Spanish that she caught enough of to know was unflattering, then a long pause that might have been Paloma collecting herself but was probably just her driving while furious, then a section that appeared to be directed at the breakfast burrito specifically—and now this is COLD, this is BECAUSE OF YOU—before the recording cut out mid-syllable.
Nellie sent back a string of rainbow hearts.
Paloma: DO NOT SEND ME HEARTS RIGHT NOW.
Nellie: I’ll explain everything when you get here
Paloma: I AM HERE. I am on the access road. There are construction workers staring at me.
Nellie: oh perfect! they’re lovely, the young one has great energy… for a dude.
She found Paloma idling behind the flatbed, jaw set, clearly braced for handcuffs. The burrito sat in the center console like a small, slightly tragic monument to good intentions.
Nellie ate it while she explained. She was aware that her version of events placed certain emphases—like, say, the full implications of what she’d agreed to—somewhat to the side, in favor of the parts that were, she felt, genuinely exciting.
The full four thousand acres. Sixty days.
Peer-reviewed science. The evidence she hadn’t even found yet but was already fairly confident existed.
Paloma waited until she’d finished the burrito.
“What do you think you know about this land that Alburn’s own surveyors don’t?”
“Potentially quite a lot,” Nellie said. “The surveys on file with the county are really old. Old-growth dynamics shift. If the team they used missed the mycorrhizal density around Eleanor, they probably missed everything downstream of it, not to mention anything they deliberately overlooked because companies with ridiculous amounts of money always get what they want.”
“And if you can’t make the case? What happens in sixty days?”
“Then I leave and they build.” Nellie sighed. “But I was always going to lose the chain action, Paloma. Haines was patient, but patience has a limit. At least this way I get sixty days with full access instead of a citation and a parking ticket for Dolores.”
Paloma looked at her for a long, flat beat. “I don’t trust it.”
“I know.”
“She’s not doing this out of the goodness of her heart.”
“I know that too.” The offer wasn’t generosity; it was a tactic. The important question was whether it got her onto those four thousand acres, and it did.
Having ushered Paloma back into her own car, Nellie climbed into Dolores—who smelled, reassuringly, of the lavender air freshener she’d hung from the rearview mirror years ago and never replaced—and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel. The forest was quiet around the van.
“Okay,” she said to herself.
And then, louder, because she was alone and she had just talked a billionaire into pausing an eighty-million-dollar construction project over breakfast: “Okay, Fuller!”
She put Dolores in gear and went to find better coffee.
Three hours later, after adequate caffeine and brunch from a vending machine, Nellie called the number she’d found for Sawyer Alburn after some extensive Googling.
It rang twice. “Alburn Systems, this is Martha.”
The voice was pleasant in a precise, professional way, likely refined over years of working adjacent to someone who was probably extraordinary and quite possibly exhausting. Nellie liked her immediately.
“Hi! This is Nellie Fuller. I’m—”
“I know who you are, Ms. Fuller.” Not unkind. “I’ve been informed to expect your call.”
This was, Nellie suspected, a diplomatic way of saying, she’s the one from the tree. “Great! I just had a few logistics questions about the access arrangement.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll be spending the full sixty days living on-site for the survey. What I need to know is whether I can park my van wherever I want on the property or if there are specific designated areas I should—”
“Living?” A long pause. “In your van?”
“In my van, yes. She’s called Dolores.”
A pause so long Nellie had to check if the call had been disconnected.
“A van,” Martha said again.
“A converted van, yes. Very comfortable. I’ve lived in her for three years, and the ventilation is genuinely excellent. Better than two apartments I’ve rented, honestly.”
“Ms. Fuller…” The persistent click-clacking that Nellie presumed was Martha’s keyboard momentarily paused. “Am I correct in understanding that your plan is to… camp… in a van on Alburn Systems’ private property for two months?”
“That’s correct. But Dolores is very self-contained. I’ve actually written up the composting situation for an outdoor living blog, if you’d like the link—”
The click-clacking resumed, rapid and decisive, like Morse code. “There is a cottage.” More clicking. A pause. More clicking. “On the eastern tree line. It’s unoccupied for”—click—“fourteen months. It has power, a functioning kitchen, and a queen-size bed.”
“Oh, I’m perfectly fine in Dolores, honestly.”
“Ms. Fuller.” Something in Martha’s tone conveyed an entire negotiation without shifting in volume or temperature by a single degree. “The cottage is available. Using it would be”—the smallest of pauses—“preferable.”
Nellie thought about Dolores. Her lavender air freshener, her characterful engine, the way you had to sort of encourage the passenger window to close in cold weather. She thought about a bed with springs.
“I suppose a cottage doesn’t sound all that bad,” she said. “Thank you, Martha.”
“Directions will be sent to you. Is there anything else?”
“No, that’s… Actually, the composting situation for Dolores while she’s parked on-site—”
“Goodbye, Ms. Fuller.”
The cottage sat at the edge of the eastern tree line exactly the way Martha described.
It had a stone foundation, cedar siding gone silver with weather, and a porch that sagged in precisely the right place.
Nellie stood in the doorway for thirty seconds before she registered that she was smiling widely enough to hurt her cheeks.
She couldn’t help it. The smell alone—old wood, pine resin, the faint memory of a woodstove that hadn’t been lit since last winter.
She was constitutionally incapable of not loving it.
Inside was a main room with a stone fireplace, a kitchen with a propane range and wooden cupboards worn smooth at the pulls, a bathroom with white subway tile that had probably been installed sometime in the eighties and survived purely by virtue of being fundamentally decent.
The bedroom was at the back, with a window looking directly into the canopy.
She unpacked with a thoroughness that three years in a converted van had made instinctive.
Field gear on the closet hooks. Sample collection kits arranged on the kitchen table in the order she’d need them.
Laptop plugged into the wall. She stood watching the battery indicator climb like it owed her something, because after three years of managing Dolores’s temperamental power inverter, it genuinely did.
Then she went outside to look at the land.
The eastern tree line dropped from the cottage in a long slope toward what her topo maps suggested was a seasonal creek drainage.
She pushed through the understory—boots finding the give of deep duff, sword ferns parting at her knees—and started noticing things: ferns thick enough to indicate stable soil moisture across seasons and nurse logs at two separate points, old and deeply colonized, built up over decades of decomposition.
She crouched beside one and pressed two fingers into the moss: saturated. The initial survey had not noted this.
She followed the land downslope until she heard water.
Not the thin trickle of snowmelt chasing gravity down a drainage ditch—she knew that sound—but something steadier, more permanent.
She pushed through a wall of salal and nearly walked straight into a stream four feet across, running clear over a gravel bed.
There were caddisfly larvae on the undersides of three consecutive rocks.
She’d need conductivity tests to frame the formal argument, but the gravel composition alone suggested a permanent water feature; her gut, honed by eight years of reading watersheds, knew this was significant.
She pulled out her notebook and started writing.
Nellie had been back at the cottage twenty minutes when a car appeared on the access road—not a sleek electric, this time, but something black and obnoxiously large.
The woman who stepped out was smooth. That was the word Nellie plucked from her gut, exact and immediate, the way wrong came to her when a data set was off.
Mid-fifties, good suit, a face arranged in an expression of geniality that started at the surface and didn’t reach much further.
Silver-templed. The kind of beautiful that worked best in quarterly reports.
“Ms. Fuller.” She offered a confident, too-firm handshake. “Gina Marsh, head of development at Alburn Systems. I wanted to introduce myself and walk you through the ground rules for your time on-site.”
“Pleasure,” Nellie said. “That’s very helpful.”
The rules were fairly simple: no heavy equipment on her part, no chemical applications without written Alburn authorization, no access to the northern sector without a company representative present, and all survey data submitted through Alburn’s legal office before any third-party publication or disclosure.
Nellie listened to every word. She asked one clarifying question about the northern sector restriction. Gina’s answer was fluent, thorough, and contained no actual information.
“Any other questions at all?” she asked.
“No,” she said pleasantly. “I think I’ve got everything I need.”
They smiled at each other, and Nellie watched her car reverse back down the road.
Then she called Paloma.
“There’s a head of development. I don’t like her,” she said, the moment Paloma picked up.
“Tell me.”
“Gina Marsh. She came out personally to give me the ground rules.”
“What are the rules?”
Nellie listed them. At the northern sector restriction, Paloma made a sound.
“Something’s up there,” Paloma said.
“That would be my guess too.”
“Nellie—”
“I know. I’m being careful.” She sat on the porch and looked out at the tree line, the last light moving through the canopy in long, slow diagonals.
“I found a stream today that wasn’t in the survey.
The mycorrhizal network around Eleanor is almost certainly an artifact of something running through this whole valley.
I need a couple weeks of sampling, but I know I’m right about this one. I can feel it.”
“You can feel it.” Paloma hummed, nine years of friendship compressed into four words, which somehow managed to mean both ‘that’s not evidence’ and ‘you’re probably right.’
“I’ll get the data. I always do.” A woodpecker hammered at a dead snag forty feet into the trees—one fast, deliberate knock, then another, then silence.
“The deal is real. They’re hiding something in the northern section, fine.
But Sawyer Alburn made that offer in front of nineteen thousand people on a livestream.
I won’t let either of them get away with any tricks. ”
“Just don’t let your confidence make you comfortable. Comfortable people miss things.”
“This cottage has a woodstove and a window directly into the canopy. I’m going to be extremely comfortable, and I’m going to miss absolutely nothing.”
“Be careful.” Paloma chuckled.
“Always.”
Nellie sat on the porch until the light was fully gone and the forest settled into its night sounds—the steady note of the stream, a barred owl calling somewhere to the south, the scuffling of critters going about their nocturnal business.
She wrote notes until she couldn’t see her own handwriting, then went inside and lit the woodstove, sat at the kitchen table, and felt, not for the first time and not for the last, like the land was already talking and she just needed to be quiet enough to hear it.
She heard footsteps at nine forty-seven. Not deer—Nellie knew deer, knew the soft, drifting irregularity of them, the way they paused and tested and drifted again. Not raccoons either. Nellie set down her notebook and opened the cottage door.
Sawyer Alburn was standing ten feet away in front of the generator, examining it with the close and studious attention of someone with no other pressing concerns. The generator hummed on, unbothered, in excellent health. Sawyer had both hands in her pockets and was peering at the unit.
Their eyes met.
“I wasn’t expecting a visit so late.” Nellie smirked.
Sawyer pursed her lips like she’d just been caught in a compromising position. “Yes, well… Martha informed me that you would be staying here. I thought I would check if the generator is in working order.”
Nellie nodded slowly. She couldn’t help the teasing smile. Sawyer Alburn looked so out of her element but clearly had a reason for snooping around after sunset. Nellie had nothing but theories for what that reason might have been. “Works just fine, thanks.”
“Good… Well… Yes. Do you, uh… need anything?” Sawyer asked.
Nellie bit back a laugh so hard she felt it in her back teeth. “Nope.”
The silence that followed grew somewhat awkward. The owl called again, further south now, moving through the dark.
“Okay then,” Sawyer said curtly.
She turned and walked back into the trees. The forest closed around her in about four steps.
Nellie stood in the doorway for a long time, looking out at the dark tree line, turning the exchange over—what it was, what it wasn’t, whether the two were the same thing or meaningfully different and whether it mattered.
She didn’t land on a conclusion. She went inside and made tea instead, which was a perfectly reasonable response to an unreasonable evening, and she did not think about the generator, or the flatness of a voice working very hard not to be anything at all.
She almost managed it.
She did notice, however, that Sawyer’s boots—chunky and practical and seemingly brand new—had been considerably more sensible than this morning’s heels.