The missing patch of bark where I had torn away my fortune was already painted gold. I touched the slick, gilded surface. I touched the papery bark. I thought about my fortune, which was only what I had already known. You will lose her. And yet I hadn’t fully known, until I saw those faint amber words, written as though with the sappy blood of the tree, how much I hoped they would never come true.

A tree is an astonishing thing. So much of it you will never see. Not its roots: a whole secret life spreading out in the blind earth, drinking from unknown sources. Not its core: the sapling it once was, clad by each successive year of growth.

Does a tree know how deep its roots go? Can it locate its original seed?

I thought about how all seeds are necessarily lost things, dropped and abandoned.

This tree, I thought, felt familiar. It felt like me.

It had been stripped like me, like anyone who had ever been tithed. The difference was that someone had taken care to gild the tree’s wounds. I was luckier than so many in the Ward—I had lost only blood. But I didn’t move through the world the way Sid did, as someone who fully owned her body. I had always been afraid. I never knew what would be taken from me or when, and although I didn’t always think about it or fully feel that fear, it was as much a part of who I was as my light brown skin, my sturdy hands.

It was so tiring to be afraid all the time.

So I decided I wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t go to the wall and touch it the way children touch their mothers. I decided it didn’t matter that I was afraid of heights. I chose not to be.

I began to climb the tree. I ignored how sweaty my hands got, how my breath rattled in my throat, how my mouth got dry. I didn’t dare look down.

I went as high as I could, working my way up into the branches, then settled into a crook that was almost comfortable, though my rear ached and my leg eventually fell asleep.

The ground stretched below. The ground feels like such a safe thing … until you get too far above it.

But the leaves rushed and played around me. My breath calmed. I listened to the leaves. Their whispers almost made sense. I realized that was a strange thought, the kind that means sleep is coming, but as soon as I knew it was coming, it was already there.

I didn’t know how much time passed before I woke in the darkness.

I heard the hush of someone walking over grass. The sound below grew closer, and then there was a musical glug and slosh of a large quantity of water flowing from a metallic bucket or can.