Park grew up an only child. She never knew her mother, who was a Dryad—one of the traveling nomads that now lived in the wildernesses blanketing Earth. Park’s father, a plant researcher, had encountered Park’s mother during a field study of the kudzu vine, the growth rate of which had been drastically mutated by the Comeback. He told it that way to his brother, too—“encountered” her, as if Park’s mother were a wild animal that he had happened to come across. Maybe that was how he really thought of her. He said that the woman, Willow, had been born into the jungles of the Comeback, had grown up with no education and no modern technology to speak of. She’d come with him into the city for a short time to give birth to Park, then vanished back into the dense wildlands, never to be heard from again.

Park’s father went after her, of course. They found his body weeks later, bloated and stripped naked by human scavengers. He had walked right into a pocket of hyper-rich, dense oxygen created by the Comeback plants, a natural trap that filled a victim’s blood with tiny, rapid bubbles as he hiked on. He’d had a grand mal seizure and died without leaving a will. After that, Park was given to his only living relative, his younger brother Sylas: a terse zoologist who was not very comfortable around human children.

After hearing the stories, Park—who even as a child was not overly given to whimsy—often fantasized that her mother was something of a jungle queen. Tanned, muddied, she’d roam the dark groves of Park’s imagination with an untamed mane of hair and rattling anklets of animal bone, ululating to her tribal kinsmen and fending off genetically spliced leopards with spears she’d carved from flint.

When she grew older, Park realized that the reality of it was probably not so glamorous. Real Dryads and Dryadjacks—or Ferals, as the unkinder term for them went—were dirty, vicious scavengers, thickly cloaked to protect themselves from thorns and masked to prevent their own suffocation from the oxygen traps. Illiterate, they were usually ready to cut your throat for anything as shiny as a keychain.

No way of knowing whether her mother fell into this group, or if she was one of the rarer, more peaceful Dryads who roamed the jungles crooning about Providence and the bounty of Mother Earth. No picture of her existed, and her father had never even told anyone the woman’s last name. For all they knew, Park’s mother hadn’t even known it herself.