Trucks grumble past the double-wide loaded with logs; bulldozers punch through the end of Arcady Lane and cut a Z-shaped extension up the hillside. Every day, as soon as the last truck leaves, Seymour walks the new roadway with his earmuffs on.

Sewage pipes loll like fallen pillars in front of mounds of debris; great coils of cables lie here and there. The air smells of shattered wood, sawdust, and gasoline.

NeedleMen lie crushed in the mud. Our legs are broken, they murmur in their xylophone voices. Our cities are ruined. Halfway up the hill, Trustyfriend’s clearing has become a tire-churned welter of roots and branches. For now the big dead ponderosa still stands. Seymour trawls his gaze along every limb, every branch, until his neck aches from looking.

Empty empty empty empty.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

“Can you hear me?”

He does not see Trustyfriend for four weeks. Five. Five and a half. Every day more light spills into what was, hours before, forest.

Realty signs sprout up and down the newly paved road, two with SOLD placards already attached. Seymour takes a flyer. Live the Lakeport lifestyle, it reads, that you’ve always wanted. There’s a map of homesites, a drone photograph with the lake in the distance.

At the library Marian tells him that the Eden’s Gate people jumped through all the planning and zoning hoops, hosted a public hearing, handed out some seriously delicious cupcakes with their logo in the frosting. She says they even purchased the crumbling old Victorian next to the library and plan to remodel it as a showroom.

“Development,” she says, “has always been part of the story of this town.” From a file cabinet in Local History she produces black-and-white prints from a century ago. Six lumbermen stand shoulder to shoulder on the stump of a felled cedar. Fishermen hold yard-long salmon up by their gills. Several hundred beaver pelts hang from a cabin wall.

Looking at the images starts the roar murmuring at the base of Seymour’s spine. In a vision he imagines a hundred thousand NeedleMen rising from the ruins of the forest and marching on the contractors’ trucks, a vast army, fearless despite the incredible odds, swinging tiny picks at tires, driving nails through men’s boots. Plumbing vans go up in flames.

“A lot of folks in Lakeport,” says Marian, “are excited about Eden’s Gate.”

“Why?”

She gives him a sad smile. “Well, you know what they say.”

He chews his shirt collar. He doesn’t know what they say.

“Money isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”

She looks as though she expects him to laugh, but he doesn’t understand what’s funny, and a woman wearing sunglasses jerks a thumb toward the back of the library and says, “I think your toilet is overflowing,” and Marian hurries away.