There were four of them there when he arrived: Bettina Borges, the bespectacled librarian with blond hair turning blue who was the real brains behind the archive; Col. Ellen Franco, a fortyish ex-soldier in carbon-colored coveralls who had led the liberation and now managed the battalions of young fighters camped at the edge of town; Carl Denis, the gray-haired builder who had been a successful architect before he joined the underground and became one of their principal designers of DIY weaponry; and Gertie Almeida, the youngest and most strident member of the Council. Two other Council members had walked in after Percy had already started: Claude and Joyce. Half of them were ex-clients of Donny’s. But that wasn’t an advantage. And just how rigged the setup was against him became more apparent when Bettina took the stand to help Percy establish the documentary basis for all her numbers, and then went right back into the jury.

Heather was seated nearby, on the top of the old judges’ bench, her worn ropers dangling over the edge.

Donny had a plan. He would attack them on the facts, challenging Bettina and her climate-scientist teammates on the oversimplified causal connections they distilled from an ecological system too complex for anyone to really even understand. He would attack them on the law, showing their jurisdictional and temporal overreach in making people outside their territory liable for actions that had been legal during the time when they were taken. And he would attack them for their hubris in presuming they were the ones who could speak for the trees.

But when the sun had moved on and it was finally Donny’s turn, he got a different idea. Not just because he knew their minds were made up. And not because he realized, listening to Percy’s case, that if they didn’t stand up for the trees, no one would—the case needed to be made, and there needed to be an accounting, even if it was too late to repair the damage done. His victory condition was different from theirs—he just needed to figure out the most certain way to get Heather freed from their custody and on a plane back to Dallas with him. So instead of making the case they expected from him, he stood up, straightened his tie, and tried something different.

“I would like to call Heather as a witness,” said Donny.

“What for?” said Bettina.

“To help all of you understand what’s at stake more clearly,” said Donny. “And do it in a way that does not try to undermine the compelling arguments Percy made.”

“That sounds a little nonstandard,” said the Colonel.

“This whole process is way beyond nonstandard,” said Donny. “I may have helped come up with the idea that morphed into this, but I can see that you got your ideas of due process from the emergency courts I used to defend some of you from.”