Colour Kid's Arc

Chapter 15 of 15

Colour Kid sat on the curb while the forest kept growing. Trees pushed up through the gutter. Vines climbed the light pole. He had not told them to keep going. They were doing it anyway, drawing from him, and he could feel each new leaf the way you feel a hair being pulled. Alec crouched in front of him. He had come out of the trees with dirt on his knees. "Headcount," Alec said. "Forty-one inside. All breathing." "Good," Colour Kid said. His voice came out thin. Alec looked at his face. "Your nose is bleeding again." "I know." "Stop feeding it." "I can't. If I stop, it goes." He lifted a shaking hand toward the trees. "They're inside it. If the forest goes, they go with it. There's no ground under them anymore. It's me." Hexa Vire's voice crackled through the copper at his wrist. Flat and clean. "He is correct. I am reading the block. There is no asphalt beneath the moss. There is nothing beneath the moss. If he drops, the space folds. Forty-one people fold with it." A hitch. "Sweetheart." Elder Bright stood at the edge of the new grass with his staff. He looked older than he had five minutes ago. "You built them a room with no floor," he said. "And you are the floor." "I know," Colour Kid said. His teeth were chattering. "I didn't know when I did it. I know now." "Then give it a floor," Elder Bright said. Colour Kid blinked at him. "What?" "Put it down. On the ground that was there before. Let the concrete be concrete. Let the forest sit on top." "I don't know if I can." "You made a country out of a sidewalk," Elder Bright said. "Set it on the sidewalk." Colour Kid closed his eyes. He pictured the block the way it had been that morning. Cracked asphalt. A drain cover. The curb he was sitting on. He kept those. He pushed them under the forest like a tray under a cake. Something in his chest gave. Not broke — released. The pull on his ribs eased. The trees kept standing. The grass kept growing. But he was not holding them up anymore. The street was. He opened his eyes. His hands stopped shaking. Alec touched his shoulder. It was the only warm thing Alec had done all week. "You're not it anymore," Alec said. "No." Hexa Vire, in the copper: "Signal stabilized. The forest reads as a place now. Not a person." A pause. "Which means every faction watching just learned you can leave a thing behind and it stays." Elder Bright tapped the pavement with his staff. "They will not send an axe now," he said. "They will send a map. They will want to know where else you have already put one of these." Colour Kid wiped his nose on his sleeve. The forest breathed without him.