Rusk had three days left on the contract and a crew that would walk by Friday if the pay ran short. He stood at the edge of the grove with the work order folded in his glove, its court seal stiff against his palm. The paper listed twenty numbered trees, a wage of one hundred per head, and penalties if he missed the count. Behind him, six men waited by the trucks. In front of him, the heartwood trees rose in dark red columns, their bark scored with old family markings that glowed faint green where the sap ran. A girl stood at the base of the oldest trunk. She had not moved since dawn. Rusk gave the order and the saws started. The first blade bit the heartwood, screamed once, and came out chipped along every tooth. His lead cutter swore and swapped in a fresh blade. That one lasted four minutes. By ten they had ruined six blades, and the stumps they had cut were bleeding a slow dark sap that would not dry. His men stopped pretending it was normal. One of them said the word magic out loud. Rusk pulled the work order from his glove and read the penalty clause again, because paper was the only thing that had ever paid him. He walked to the oldest trunk. The girl watched him come. He did not ask her name. He set his hand on the bark and felt the green veins pulse under his palm like something with a heartbeat. Then he looked at his crew — men with kids, men with debts, men who had trusted him to read the order right — and he made the call. He told the lead cutter to skip the marked trees and take the smaller ones at the edge, off the order, off the count. Undersized timber. Unstamped. It would move fast and it would not pay the full contract, but it would pay something by Friday. The girl did not speak. She only turned her head to follow him as he walked back to the trucks. By dusk they had felled four small trees and stacked them clean. The saws held. The crew got their advance and went quiet around the fire. Rusk sat with the ruined blade across his knees, its teeth chipped, its face streaked with dark sap and faint green scoring in circles he had not cut. He knew what he had done. He had come north to log a stamped grove under a court order, and he had walked away from the trees the paper named. The contract would come up short. The company would ask why. And somewhere behind him, in the dark, the girl was still standing at the oldest trunk, and she had seen his face.

Rusk drove back to town with the ruined blade rattling in the truck bed and sap still dark on his boots. He did not stop at the boarding house. He went straight to the timber office and let himself in with the key the company had cut for him. The stove was cold. He set the work order flat on the desk under the lamp and pulled the boundary ledger down from the shelf above the filing cabinet. It was heavy. He knew the weight of honest paper. This one felt right in his hands, and that was the first thing that bothered him. he opened the ledger to the grove pages and ran his finger down the parcel numbers. The old deed line ran clean along the north edge of the swamp. Then, four pages later, the same parcel appeared again with a fresh boundary drawn thirty yards deeper into the trees. The ink was newer. The court seal over it was newer still, pressed crooked, as if someone had stamped in a hurry. He counted the trees listed on the second entry. Twenty heartwood, added by hand, each with its own inked number. He laid his work order beside the page. The numbers matched exactly. Rusk sat down. He thought about the girl at the oldest trunk, and about six men who were counting on Friday's pay. The contract was not a mistake. Someone had scraped the old line off, drawn a new one, added the twenty trees, and covered the change with a stamp that would hold in any court that did not look twice. His name was on the order as contractor. If the fraud came out, it would come out on him first. If it did not come out, he would fell trees the company did not legally own, and the girl would know, and whoever she answered to would know, and they would come for the crew before the loggers up north ever finished their push. He tore a blank page from the back of the ledger and copied both boundary entries onto it in his own hand, then folded the copy into his coat. He put the ledger back on the shelf exactly as he had found it. He locked the office behind him. On the step he stopped and made the decision that closed the night: he would not tell the crew yet, and he would not cut another marked tree. Friday's pay would come from the edge timber or it would not come at all. Monday he would ride to the county clerk with the copy in his pocket and find out whose hand had drawn the new line. The contract was still on his desk. It was no longer the thing he was working for.