Siena

A few years before Deadswitch, Siena, Cam, Emmett, and Dr. Feyrer were on an expedition to collect samples at Garnet Lake in Ansel Adams. Siena busied herself with prepping equipment when they arrived, like she always did, but Dr. Feyrer stole the test tube from her hand.

"Stop acting like you shouldn't have earned your PhD." He pointed to the stump near the water. "Sit."

Feyrer didn't so much as give Cam and Emmett a second glance as they checked the barologger left by a previous group. He held Siena to a higher standard than the rest of his mentees, but he had never blatantly insulted her before.

Siena crossed her arms and glared at him. "Good thing my PhD isn't something you can take away."

"What are you doing wrong?" he asked.

She refused to answer. "I'm not your student anymore."

He smiled. "You will always be a student, as will I."

Siena took a deep breath and focused on not rolling her eyes.

Feyrer gestured to the stump again. "Sit."

Siena sat. He plopped on the ground next to her, groaning as he did so. Feyrer was in his midsixties and could charge up a mountain as easily as the rest of them, but hinted at his aches and pains from minor tasks.

"How many times have you been to this lake?" he asked.

Siena shrugged. "Five, six."

"And what is it trying to tell you this time?"

"Well, I was prepping for samples until you—"

"Don't poke and prod it, Siena. Look at it."

She sighed and gazed out at the lake.

The first time she'd ever visited Garnet Lake, she was seventeen.

Her mother had died a few months before.

Siena had signed up for the Young Environmentalists program, her last-ditch attempt at capturing what was left of her mother in this world and clinging to it. She'd never been allowed on Crystal Dupont's conservationist outings. The Young Environmentalists trip was all Siena had.

She'd spent most of the trip by herself, sitting in wildflower banks, swimming in the clearest waters she'd ever seen in her life, and crying. Cradled between jutting alpine ridges, the lake was surreal in its beauty—as though enchanted—and she'd tapped into grief in a way she hadn't been able to back home.

But sitting with Feyrer, she no longer felt so enamored of it. The water was cloudier. Algae bloom covered the far shore, where the wildflowers had grown all those years ago.

"The lake is sick," she stated. It was a fundamentally unscientific statement, but a true one.

Feyrer was right. She'd been so focused on the samples that she hadn't noticed something growing where it hadn't before.

"I want you to know Emmett told me about your recent struggles."

Surprised, Siena turned to Feyrer. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

"It was wrong of him to tell me," Feyrer continued. "Your illness is a part of your story, not his. He'll learn eventually."

Siena's eyes burned. "Please don't pity me."

"I don't," he said with a smile. "You're undeserving of pity, Siena, which is how I know you're strong enough for Deadswitch. Just promise me you'll let me know what you need, and I'll be there."

Emmett woke the entire team at the crack of dawn. With a duffel of scaling gear hanging from his shoulder, he summoned them outside and through the woods to present to Siena and Cam what he and Isaac had found last night.

What would Wilder Feyrer think of you?Siena gazed up at the primeval giant.

An ashen trunk stretched between the waxy needle crown and the tapered base of knobby fingers. Siena counted thirty paces around its perimeter, almost running into Emmett.

"It looks like a swamp cypress," he said. "Maybe someone planted it here as an experiment and it took root."

"But that's impossible, right?" Siena approached the tree and rested her hand against the peeling bark. "If any environment is the complete opposite of a South Carolina marsh, it's here."

"Well, it's definitely not a sequoia. I brought some gear to scale the thing for canopy samples, but looking at it now, I don't think we can safely climb it." Emmett shielded his eyes and craned his neck upward. "It's too tall."

"Weird how nothing's growing around it." Cam circled the tree from a distance as she sipped at the mug in her hand. "No undergrowth beneath the canopy. The pines aren't crowding it, either."

"How did you find it?" Siena asked Emmett.

Emmett didn't answer right away, and Siena turned to Isaac, who sat at the edge of the clearing with his sketchbook open.

Isaac shrugged. "Dude took off after something in the woods. I didn't see what it was."

Siena returned her attention to Emmett. "Are you the dude in this scenario?"

"It was an animal," said Emmett.

It was unlike Emmett to act so impulsively. "What kind of animal? And why would you take off after it?"

"I don't know," he snapped at her, and threw his hand in the tree's direction. "All I know is it disappeared into that hole before I could see what it was."

Siena followed his extended finger to a fissure in the tree's knobby base. She left Emmett's side and squatted near his duffel, rifling through climbing equipment until she found a flashlight.

When she approached the tree, he said her name in a familiar warning. Cam had aptly titled this tone "Emmett's Dad Call," in which Siena actually meant Siena Ivy Dupont, don't you even think about it.

"Oh, relax." Siena lowered herself to her knees next to the hollow.

"If anything, she'll discover the Lost City of Marmots," Cam drawled. Siena snorted.

Emmett huffed as he joined them. "It wasn't a marmot."

"You aren't giving us a lot of clues to work with," Cam shot back.

"Children," Siena muttered, clicking on her light and shining it into the hollow.

Emmett Dad-called her again. To spite him, she sat on the ground and stuck her head into the hole, propping the light beneath her chin.

She blinked a few times to filter through the darkness, but there was nothing. The entire inside of the tree was cavernous, the inner walls onyx and smooth like petrified wood. At the back of the cavity, tucked between a few exposed roots, was an entrance to a burrow. If Emmett had seen an animal, then this was likely its home, though the start of the channel was bizarrely smooth and straight. She felt like she was shining a light down someone's esophagus.

Siena pulled her head out of the tree's innards. Cam and Emmett stood next to her, both with their arms crossed. Neither looked pleased with the other.

"There's a burrow," Siena said. "Probably big enough for me to crawl through. I want to see if it's a habitat."

Emmett shook his head. "Absolutely not."

"I could get a xylem and root sample while I'm in there, since we don't have a borer. We need to bring something back to a dendrologist."

"We can take pictures, instead. Bark and needle samples."

Siena shrugged dramatically. "Sure, we can do that too. Let's do all of it. There's a slim chance this growth is at all related to the Alpenglow melt, but the more data we have, the more we'll know."

"And what if the tunnel collapses on you?"

"You'll dig me out."

"And if we can't reach you?"

"Then I guess I'll die, Emmett."

Cam covered her mouth with her hand to block her smile.

Emmett turned on Cam. "You think this is funny?"

Cam dropped her hand. "I think you have a stick up your ass. Siena is an intelligent and capable adult who can make her own decisions."

Emmett sneered at her. Siena knew he was mere seconds from losing his cool, but too smart to do so. Devolving into anger wouldn't win him any points.

"Then I'll do it. I'll go in and get the samples," he said.

Siena cocked her head at him. She wasn't na?ve. Emmett was only saying this to maintain control over the situation, but she also knew he was trying to compromise because he still cared about her.

"You won't fit," she said.

He released a grunt of frustration and stomped away from them, scratching the back of his head. "I don't like this."

"Of course you don't." Cam retreated to the duffel bag, digging through it until she procured a climbing harness, a couple of carabiners, and a long coil of rope. She brought the gear over to Siena. "So Emmett can keep track of you." She winked.

Siena stood and climbed into the harness. "Do you think I'm being an idiot?"

"I think you're being stubborn." Cam clipped a carabiner to the back of the harness. "Which I fully support. Do I think you're going to find anything more than a few nasty bugs? Probably not." She circled back to Siena's front and adjusted the harness buckles. "But it's worth exploring. That's why we're up here, after all."

"We're here for the glacier," Siena said, almost as a reflex.

Cam met her eyes. "The glacier. Right."

Cautious intrigue swept over Siena, tethered to a memory—a warm, quiet bar on a rare rainy evening in wine country. The old man muttering stories over too many pints of English ale.

"Feyrer was drunk that night," Siena said.

"I'm not arguing that." Cam released Siena's harness and lifted her pinkie. "Don't get bitten by a marmot, okay? Those things carry rabies, and I don't want to hike your ass out."

Siena glanced back at Emmett, who stood near Isaac and watched her from the back of the clearing. He frowned, keeping his eyes on her like he used to. When he loved her.

He still loved her, but that didn't mean she had to tend to his every concern.

Siena hooked her pinkie with Cam's and then fixed her headlamp in place. She checked her pockets for her knife, recorder, and the sample tubes. Kneeling to meet the hollow, Siena tilted sideways and wriggled through the opening.

Once in the tree, she pressed her palms to the earth, inching forward until her hips were through the fissure. The damp ground smelled of decay and lichen, not the dust and pine she'd grown accustomed to over the past week. She took a sample and pocketed the vial, then squeezed between the thick roots into the burrow. Her pocket chirped as she wriggled around and set off every button on her recorder. She'd worry about that later.

"You okay, Doc?" Cam called, shining her own light into the entrance.

"I'd tell you if I wasn't," Siena sang.

The passage sloped downward, and once she passed the initial cluster of roots, she could push up to her hands and knees as the tunnel fanned wider. She couldn't imagine any marmot large or meticulous enough to create such an artery.

"What do you see?" This time it was Emmett. He had ceased his pouting to rejoin Cam near the hollow's entrance.

Siena squinted down the tunnel's throat. "Nothing, yet. Give me some slack so I can push forward a little."

"Be careful!"

"Yeah, yeah," Siena whispered. The tension on her belt lessened as Cam fed her more rope.

As she crawled deeper, blood pulsed in her ears. She felt no different—no dizziness or change in pressure. No fear. But her heartbeat grew louder until it echoed through her skull.

She held two fingers to her neck. Her own heartbeat carried a separate rhythm, its thrum divorced from the thudding she heard. As the beat thundered, Siena sat up to orient herself, reaching upward for balance. No sooner had she pressed her hand against the passage than she jerked it back.

An icy chill washed through her blood, and the ghost of a heartbeat lingered against her palm.

The noise wasn't coming from her. It was coming from the earth.