“Did you get a recording of the language?” Kaveh asked, standing in the doorway.

Ghasabian looked up at him, betraying none of the tension or consternation Kaplan had shown. He looked almost wistful. “Most of it was too quiet for the microphones to pick up, but he repeated one phrase enough times that we got a rough translation.”

“What was it?”

Ghasabian looked at him with an expression that accused him of knowing far more than he was letting on. “He said, ‘Forgive me, Beloved.’”

* * *

“Mazandarani, do you have eyes on AG-ETI-051? Over.”

This army guy pronounced his name like it rhymed with “Santorini.” Kaveh continued down the dirt path he’d been meandering the last few minutes and spoke into his walkie-talkie. “Negative, I am not his fucking babysitter, over.”

“Mazandarani, we need eyes on AG-ETI-051. Over.”

“If he wanted to give you guys the slip, he could do it whenever he wanted and would not need to plot a great escape here. Over.”

Kaveh had not been to a sequoia redwood grove since he was a teenager, and at the time, he was in his “too cool for the majesty of nature” phase. As an adult, he found it positively stunning. It had been a warm winter, and much of the snowpack had already melted, making it easy to wander through the trees without snow boots. The trees themselves were vibrant as they were huge, the bark vivid in its redness, the tops evergreen.

His walk brought him close to a particularly big one with a gaping fire scar at its base large enough to shelter inside, and he ran his fingers over the bark of the tree. From a distance, it looked like polished wood, but up close, it was like thousands of layers of the paper of a wasp hive. It was dry and snowless inside the fire scar, so he decided to take a seat, take a moment to himself. It wasn’t long before Nikola came back into view, neck craned up at one of the other trees. Kaveh raised the walkie-talkie to his lips. It almost felt like a betrayal to play along. “I’ve got eyes on AG-ETI-051. He has not given you the slip just yet. Over.”

“THIS ORGANISM HAS SURVIVED INCREDIBLE FIRES.”

“It’s actually really cool,” said Kaveh, putting the walkie-talkie away. “They need periodic wildfires to reproduce.”

“DO YOU KNOW THEIR AGE?”

“I know the General Sherman tree is at least two thousand years old, kind of like me, but some of them are way older.”