Charlie Junior stood in the greenhouse doorway with three angry buyers on the gravel and a wooden crate of unlabeled saplings between them. The tallest man held up a sapling by its burlap ball. "You sold my brother a red maple last spring. It came up a silver birch. What is this one?" Charlie Junior did not know. The saplings looked alike at this age. His father had left him the greenhouse to build into the region's most trusted source for rare trees, and Charlie Junior could not name the tree in the man's hand. "Come back tomorrow," he said. "I'll have an answer." The buyers left. Charlie Junior walked the rows between the wooden planters under the glass roof. Hanging pots dripped on his shoulders. He had over two hundred saplings inside, sorted by size, not by parent. He had bought seed from four different foresters this season. He had written nothing down. He sat on an overturned bucket and thought about what he actually knew. Every sapling had come from one cone. Every cone had come from one tree. If he could not walk back from sapling to tree, no buyer would trust him twice. He took a lantern to the toolshed and found a stack of thin cedar offcuts from the sawmill. He cut them into tags with his pocket knife. He mixed lampblack and boiled linseed oil into a rough ink. Then he pulled out the ledger his mother used for seed orders and turned to a blank page. He worked through the night. He gave each parent tree a number. Tree 1 was the ink pine on the scriptorium porch. Tree 2 was the black walnut behind the sawmill. He kept going until he reached thirty-one. For each number he wrote the species, the location of the parent, and the date he had collected seed. Then he went sapling by sapling. He questioned every planter box. Where had this batch been sown? Which sack had the seed come from? Some he could trace with certainty. Twenty-two he could not. He carried those twenty-two to a separate bench by the door and marked them UNKNOWN in fresh ink. At dawn he tied a cedar tag to every stem in the greenhouse. Numbered saplings on the rows. Unknown saplings on the bench. The three buyers came back at noon. Charlie Junior walked the tall man to row four. He lifted a tag. "Tree 7. Sugar maple. Parent stands at the north edge of the plow fields. Seed collected September last. I can take you to the tree." The man studied the tag. He set his sapling down and pointed at the bench by the door. "What about those?" "Those I won't sell you," Charlie Junior said. "Not until I know." The man paid for two numbered saplings and left satisfied. Charlie Junior looked at the twenty-two UNKNOWN tags on the bench. His system worked. Now a third of his stock was worthless until he could trace it back.

By morning the twenty-two unknown saplings on the bench looked worse than they had at dawn. Two buyers passed the doorway, saw the UNKNOWN tags, and walked on without asking a price. Charlie Junior counted three days since he had sold anything from that bench. A greenhouse with a quarantined third would not become the region's most trusted source. He needed an eye he did not have. He wiped his hands on his apron and walked the path to the older greenhouse across the settlement. Shannon Bell ran that house. She had grown seed cones back from ruin. His mother trusted her. If anyone could name a sapling by leaf and stem, it was her. He found her inside her glass house, kneeling by a tray of ink pine starts. Her goggles were pushed up on her cap. She was pinching a yellowed needle between her thumb and finger, frowning at it like it owed her money. "I need help," Charlie Junior said. "Twenty-two saplings. I can't name them. Buyers are walking off." Shannon set the needle down. "You tagged the rest?" "Every one. Parent tree, location, date." She stood and brushed her knees. "Then you already did the hard part. Show me." They walked back together. Shannon took her time at the bench. She lifted each sapling out of its planter, turned the leaves, rubbed a stem between her fingers, snapped a twig near her ear. She did not speak for a long time. Charlie Junior stood with the ledger open and a fresh cedar tag in his hand. "Red oak," she said, and he wrote it. "Red oak. Hornbeam. Another hornbeam. This one's a birch, not a maple. Somebody sold your father bad seed." She kept going. She named eighteen without pausing. At the nineteenth she stopped. She held it under the light and turned the pot slowly. "This one I don't know," she said. "And these last three match it. Four saplings from a parent neither of us has seen." Charlie Junior looked at the four. "Can you guess?" "I won't guess. Not for your buyers." She set the sapling down. "You've got eighteen back on the floor today. The four stay unknown until the parent shows itself. Could be a year. Could be never." He tagged the eighteen and moved them to numbered rows. He wrote four new lines in the ledger marked UNKNOWN with Shannon's initials beside them. By afternoon the tall buyer came back. Charlie Junior sold him a red oak and two hornbeams off the recovered bench. When the buyer left, Charlie Junior stood over the four remaining pots. Eighteen sales had cleared the doorway. Four saplings sat in a corner with no parent and no name. He had bought his trust back today. He had also learned there were trees growing in his greenhouse from a tree nobody in the settlement could identify.