—Enrico Ventasi, If I Knew Then: Collected Essays, 2050

One Stone at a Time

IT WAS DYING. SLOWLY, BUT SURELY. AND IT HAD TO come down.

Leo found his father staring up at the cherry tree that for years had been the eye-catcher of the backyard, if not the entire block. But not this year. This year the blossoms withered much too quickly—those that even managed to bloom. The bark, scaled over with patches of white, began to peel, exposing the wood underneath. Broken branches could be found scattered about its feet, their suppleness sapped.

This was the end.

The botanist Leo’s dad had brought out from the university identified the disease as xenoblight, so named because it had first appeared within a year of the Aykari’s arrival. Some freak side effect of the mining process was the current thinking, perhaps something seeping into the water table. Or maybe some kind of fungus the aliens brought with them that had no noticeable effect on most living things but was a death sentence to certain species of flora. The botanist could not prescribe a remedy, but she could provide a prognosis—the tree wouldn’t survive the year. Best to cut it down before it splinters and falls.

Which was why the arborists were coming today: to lay it to rest. Leo had come out to say one last goodbye to the tree that was always base in their games of tag and provided shade for a few dozen backyard picnics. Both brothers had carved their initials in its trunk with Gareth’s pocketknife, though the stripped bark and creeping mold had since obscured them. Still, Leo loved this tree.

Though not as much as his mother did. He’d often find her standing at the kitchen window, looking out over the backyard, her eyes fixed on the explosion of pink-and-white petals. “It’s just so nice to look at, isn’t it?” she’d ask, not expecting an answer, assuming it was a given—that everyone found the same measure of beauty in it that she did. She would have hated to see it cut down, so Leo hated it on her behalf.

“When are they coming?” he asked, standing next to his father.

“This afternoon,” his dad said, rubbing his chin. “But we have a problem.” Dr. Fender pointed up through the barren branches, most of them stripped. “See there?”

Without the blossoms it was easy to spot. The patchwork of grass and twigs balanced on a branch halfway up. A bird’s nest. It wasn’t as pretty or as uniform as Leo imagined it, not the perfectly round basket like in picture books, but it was clear that some mother had taken care in its construction nonetheless. “Are there eggs in it?” he asked.

“That would be the problem,” his father said. “We can’t move it if it’s occupied. It’s illegal. I’ve been watching for a while and I haven’t seen its builder come back. Though she could be somewhere, watching me watch for her.”