Entry tags:
Infinity Smashed: The Defenders of Treehouse
The Defenders of Treehouse
Series: Infinity Smashed
Word Count: 3200
Summary: With Strong-Legs, Thomas decides to face his fears regarding the infamous carnivorous trees of Treehouse.
Notes: This story was prompted by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ljwrites and sponsored by the Patreon crew! Happy New Year, you guys! Also, you would be well served to read Through the World-Hole before taking on this one. This is one of the later Thomas stories; it takes place less than a month before meeting Raige and M.D.
By the age of fourteen, Thomas could’ve sworn that he knew the woods behind his house like the back of his hand. His family had lived next to it for ages, and he’d spent years tromping around, exploring caves, avoiding coral snakes, and learning the plants and rocks. Between that and a good sense of direction, he’d been about positive that he could navigate the place blind.
So he was disturbed to realize he had no idea where he was.
To make matters worse, he didn’t know how he’d gotten there. He’d been in an area he knew fine, climbing a tree to get a look at a bird’s nest, when the branch he’d grabbed turned out to be rotten and broke under his hand.
It shouldn’t have been a bad fall. He couldn’t have been more than a few feet above the ground. But somehow, it ended up much farther, and when he hit the ground hard enough to hurt, everything was green, the temperature had dropped a good thirty degrees, and it was drizzling.
Thomas wasn’t too freaked out, not yet. He was dressed for the outdoors, and he had his backpack and his Leatherman and some snacks, so things couldn’t be that bad, but he was lost. There were ferns growing here. Had he hit hard enough to knock himself out and somehow rolled into a new part of the greenbelt he’d never seen, with an underground spring maybe?
He tried to retrace his steps, but that only increased his confusion. Nothing looked familiar. It was like he’d been dropped onto another planet. And the drizzle was only getting worse.
Finally, he decided to figure out his location later and take shelter first.
In that, at least, he was lucky. Not far from him was a tree, but not a kind Thomas had ever seen before. There were multiple ‘trunks’ (at least, Thomas thought they were trunks), putting down shoots and branches like the botanical equivalent of conjoined siblings. Each trunk had many open boles or hollow spaces—including one large enough for him.
It’d be a tight squeeze, but Thomas was cold and wet. After a moment to wonder how such a plant had gotten there, he shrugged and hunched his way in.
The walls of the inside of the tree were smooth and curling, slightly juicy with sticky sap. Kinda gross, but it smelled weirdly nice, and at least the rain couldn’t get in. Seriously, what was it, and how had it gotten here, it didn’t look particularly drought-resistant—
The trunk snapped shut on him.
Thomas froze. What?
For a moment, he didn’t understand what’d happened. He felt along the walls, trying to find the opening, only to find that sap was flowing down the walls in far more copious amounts than before. It wasn’t just sticky, either; it burned. As he scrubbed his hands against his thighs, he felt something brush his shoulder and tried to jerk away, only to realize he couldn’t. The walls were slowly but definitely closing in.
All in a rush, he figured it out: this is not home, this is not a tree, and YOU ARE GOING TO FREAKING DIE!
Thomas screamed. He clawed mindlessly against what had been open space just a moment before, and only succeeded in breaking his nails and scraping his burning hands. The air felt stuffy, which only made him redouble his efforts.
For a while, the tree was definitely the one winning the fight. But then Thomas felt a ridge where the open edges of the trunk had snapped shut. He smashed his fists against it, used all the leverage such tight quarters gave him, and finally felt something give. He shoved his hands into the gap, feeling his skin tear, and tore it open.
He lurched out, panting, shaking, and then took off in a sprint. Under any other circumstances, he would’ve thought it a stupid thing to do, but screw that, the tree had just tried to eat him; all bets were off. Who knew? If it could eat him, maybe it could walk too. So he ran until his lungs burned, the rain stopped, and he ran out of adrenaline and collapsed in the grass.
If he’d hoped he could run his way back to Texas, he was out of luck. The scenery was still lush, green, and utterly alien.
Thomas took in the view with dread. His breathing was far too quick, and he was feeling lightheaded. Where was this place? How had he gotten here? What the freaking hell, man?
Finally, he curled in on himself and started crying. It was the first and only time he ever had a panic attack, and at the time, he was ashamed to be doing it; later, though, he’d think that if he couldn’t cry after losing everything and almost getting eaten by a vegetable, then when could he?
Strong-Legs had found him like that pretty soon after, and that was a year and a half ago. Thomas was sixteen now, and he didn’t take in the greenery with dread anymore. This was his home now, and he knew his way around. Strong-Legs wasn’t just a giant dino-emu, but his roommate, friend, and labor partner. Heck, he was even a formal Treehouse citizen!
So he thought nothing of being up at the crack of dawn with Strong-Legs and a bunch of monster critters. They weren’t aliens to him anymore, but his neighbors and fellow workers, there to watch a giant bug gesticulate furiously on a tree stump—the Treehouse equivalent of reading the job classifieds. Strong-Legs groomed its feathers idly; Thomas leaned against its side and ate his breakfast wraps.
The labor crier rattled off work opportunities in Pidgin Sign. The day healers needed a junior, training provided. The Chewcarvers were forming a lumber party. A trader wanted guards for its journey to Freeport…
“Guarding would be okay, maybe,” Thomas signed to Strong-Legs with his free hand. “Haven’t been to Freeport in a while...”
Strong-Legs waggled its head noncommittally.
But then the crier signed, “Laborers needed for the season’s tree-line wall cleaning! Large laborers, at least the size of my junior, and no insects, please! Only beings who can hold their breaths for a time! Otherwise, it is too dangerous. Flying not required.”
Strong-Legs raised its head high and waggled. “We shall join!”
“What, seriously?” Thomas asked. The tree-line wall was made up of the carnivorous plants that had nearly eaten Thomas on his first day. He’d had no desire to get near them since.
“I have done it before. Very good pay, not too dangerous if you pay attention. And it is good, honorable work, not like that dreadful Scrap Merchant job. I am your helpmeet, so you must believe me.”
“Not anymore, and I do not—” But he trusted Strong-Legs’s judgment, so raised his hand.
The job wasn’t until the next day, which was fine, since they needed time to prep. It would be a rise-set double shift, and required a shopping expedition, but Strong-Legs assured him it would be well worth it. As they headed towards the community gardens for groceries, it told him what it knew.
“The trees, they catch predators, is so? But they can not digest all. So bits pile up. We clean it up and insure their good health, and the bits find use with the scrap-pickers.”
“This sounds like a Scrap Merchant job,” Thomas signed dubiously as he handed their basket to the gardener to fill.
“No, no, no,” Strong-Legs declared, “is completely different. The trees are much cleaner. We will not need to scrub you red and sad afterward, unless you are foolish and fall in a pitcher, in which case I will laugh at you. Thank you,” it added to the gardener, who had finished filling the basket.
“May it feed you well,” it signed politely.
With a sign of thanks, Thomas took back the basket, now full of produce. It was late autumn, which meant it mostly contained purple potato things, dark leafy greens, grass, and seaweed this time around. “Who planted those things, anyway? They didn’t grow in a circle like that, did they?”
Strong-Legs couldn’t bounce, since he was tying the basket to its back, so it trilled with laughter instead. “No one has told you this story? Unforgivable! Here, I tell you.”
As they walked down the street into the market, Strong-Legs gave its history lesson.
“This is all long, long time ago, long before all of us! Before the world-holes, even! Before that, this land, it is ruled by the Tree-Shapers. They are all gone now, in Silver Fern anyway, but before, they grow trees and plants in all the patterns! Our houses? Tree-Shaper houses. The wall? Tree-Shapers too. They know all the secrets. But they leave no hives, no records, so all their secrets are lost now. Some of the garden people, they...” He saw Strong-Legs struggle, search for wording, “they look at the work; they try to do it too. But not so good, is so? It is why the old houses are prettier, and also the best. All Treehouse is built off the bones of their secrets. You look at the bones and can guess, but will never know what the being was truly like alive, is so? Oh, this is the best rope, we’ll take eight lengths, please!”
The giant spider-beast wound silken rope around two of its legs, cut the end neatly with its jaws, and handed the coil to Thomas, who tossed it over his shoulder and paid for it.
“Where’d the Tree-Shapers go? What happened to them?” Thomas asked, as they headed on to another stall to buy sap-repellant.
“No one knows! They leave only the trees and town bones behind! Such a mystery! Perhaps the world-holes open up, something gets them, is so? A plague, or a Tree-Shaper-eater.”
Strong-Legs paused to hand over payment to the wax seller and snatch a jar of sap-repellant, which it turned and put in the basket with their groceries. Thomas waited to hear more.
When it was finished, it continued, “That is why the tree-line wall is so important. They are older than all of us, much, much so! They are the loyal defenders of town. Very old, very strong. Without them, we would be like others, barring our homes at night, or keeping fighters. But because of the tree-line wall, we are safe. They do not threaten us, unless we are foolish. They ask for nothing but food and water, and a seasonal cleaning. And to care for them this way, it is honorable, the most Treehouse work someone can do.
“And that is why it is nothing like the Scrap Merchant cleaning. To clean Scrap Merchant’s home, it hurts him so! But cleaning the trees makes them happy. It doesn’t hurt at all. You understand? The trees are scary, but as long as you are respectful and smart, there is nothing to fear. Now let us go and put these things away. We have much to do!”
The rest of the day was taken up treating their clothes with the sap-repellant, a kind of waxy goo. After warming it up to melt it, they slathered it on their clothes; once it set, it would repel not just digestive sap, but water and other fluids too.
The next morning, at dawn, Thomas and Strong-Legs headed off to work, dressed in their treated clothes. Thomas wore thick gloves almost to his elbows, and his old combat boots with a padded coat. For its part, Strong-Legs wore its digging boots, brace hardness, and its own coat, plus a broad-brimmed hat. It was just as well that it was a chilly autumn day; the get-up would’ve been stifling in the summer.
They weren’t the only members of the labor party; there were a good dozen people, all similarly armored. Three garden people were in charge, with a day healer standing by just in case.
“We progress in stages,” they explained, standing in front of one of a small green plant. “First, the pitchers. Do not move further until we say. A healthy pitcher looks like this, you see? Green all over, with streaks of red or pink or white, smelling of health and greenery. If a pitcher is healthy, clean around it, but do not touch! Let it be; we will prune them. If there are brown spots, or it is squishy, and smells of rot or bitterness, cut away that bit, with a large margin. Dead pitchers, cut away entirely, and take them here to empty their contents for the scrap-pickers.”
They demonstrated proper cutting techniques with another, less healthy, pitcher plant. It looked simple enough. Thomas had his old Leatherman and would be doing the cutting and trimming; Strong-Legs would be manning a rope and pulley attached to its brace harness to hoist him up and down. That way, he could do the cleaning without touching or trampling the plants themselves.
The pitchers were Treehouse’s first line of defense. They grew all over the place, up trellises or in holes in the ground carved for them ages before. The small ones were barely the size of his finger, while the largest ones could take his arm up to the elbow. They didn’t smell like anything to him, but were apparently irresistible to small insects and their predators; many of the pitchers were glutted with bones and husks, not to mention random junk like stones and small jewelry. Some were so full they’d actually fallen over.
The pitchers took until noon to clear, clean, and prune. After a lunch break, the clean-up crew moved to the other species: the trees.
Here, Thomas was nervous. They looked so pretty, with their sweet smell, pink flowers and red leaves. He’d confused them for late-autumn foliage his first day, before he’d figured out the Silver Fern seasons and learned the trees were always red. Hollow, strange, and delicate, they still looked deceptively fragile, even though he knew better.
“Attention!” signed the garden person. “These are the trees. Be aware! Stay with your labor partner! Prune back dying leaves or branches too close to their neighbors. If you see mold, get us immediately!
“We must clean out their valves, to prevent rot. Move lightly, and do not touch the walls of the valve. Should you do so, do not struggle. We will come get you. The tree can not digest you very quickly, but if you panic...”
Thomas shuddered. He knew the dangers of that.
“Valves” were the proper name for the hollowed out bits Thomas had noticed before. These trees, being much older, larger, and more robust than the wild one he’d encountered before, had valves big enough to be rooms—in fact, they bore a strong resemblance to the house trees in town. Even Strong-Legs could be trapped by some of them.
The labor team worked carefully, pruning and trimming. That wasn’t too stressful; Thomas had done garden work before, and anyway, the trees were harmless on the outside. Going inside, though…
The walls of the valves were pink, almost translucent, which made them glow in the afternoon sun. It was a pretty effect… except for the bones and other indigestibles littering their insides.
Thomas told himself that things had changed. He wasn’t fourteen anymore; he knew better than to blunder around. Besides, it was embarrassing to be a Treehouse citizen scared of the very trees that guarded it.
So he went and carefully cleaned, and he didn’t touch the valve walls, and the trees let him be.
It took a while, but after a couple hours, he started to relax. Contrary to his secret fears, the trees weren’t chomping down the second he’d entered. They had probably been trained to recognize his scent now, at least a bit, though that was hardly a silver bullet. He could feel his fears dwindling to a more reasonable size.
Then, as he turned to exit the current valve, his foot stuck in some sap and he stumbled. With a feeling that combined, “not again,” with “of course again,” he fell against the wall.
Toomp. The valve snapped shut.
Thomas heard Strong-Legs’s alarmed honk. He could see its silhouette vaguely through the wall, dashing back and forth with alarm.
The valve walls started dripping juice.
Thomas carefully pulled away from the wall, but kept his feet where they were. Don’t move, he told himself. He couldn’t struggle. The tree wasn’t smart; it didn’t know if it had prey or garbage unless he flailed around and cued it that he was alive. If he just held still and conserved his air, the garden folks would come and get him and everything would be fine.
He was sweating, despite the cold, and his hands were shaking. That was fine. The tree probably couldn’t feel that. He just couldn’t shake anywhere else.
Part of Thomas felt terrified and fourteen again. That part of him was positive that the walls were already closing in, a second away from squeezing him to bone and teeth like the detritus he’d already found. That part of him was dead certain that the only way out was brute force and adrenaline. His muscles ached to scrape and rip and run.
But the sixteen-year-old part of him, the Treehouse part of him, knew better. This tree was much larger and older than that first one; struggling would make things worse. And even if he did somehow tear through a tree in full bloom, he’d probably badly hurt it in the process, which was a pretty crummy way to treat his protector.
Thomas clenched his hands in the gloves, shut his eyes, and focused hard on his breathing. Not the walls, not the smell of the sap. Just his breathing. He counted the breaths, forced himself to hold it slow and steady, and he waited.
At breath sixty-one, he saw more light through his eyelids, and when he opened them, the valve was open. The garden people and the healer was there, and so was Strong-Legs, feathers fluffed with anxiety. It ran to him, buried its face in his hair, and Thomas hugged it, inhaled the familiar dusty scent of its feathers.
“You alarmed me so!” it signed. “I am sorry. I never should have suggested this job…”
“I’m okay,” Thomas said. Then he said it again, in Pidgin Sign. “I’m okay.”
Strong-Legs gave him a hard look. It wasn’t human, but it knew him well enough to know his body language pretty well. Its feathers smoothed.
“Is so? Is so.” It groomed his hair with teeth and tongue. “Brave mammal boy.”
Thomas finished the rest of the cleaning in good spirits, and afterward, he and Strong-Legs celebrated payday with a luxurious bath.
He was never scared of the trees again.
Series: Infinity Smashed
Word Count: 3200
Summary: With Strong-Legs, Thomas decides to face his fears regarding the infamous carnivorous trees of Treehouse.
Notes: This story was prompted by
ljwrites and sponsored by the Patreon crew! Happy New Year, you guys! Also, you would be well served to read Through the World-Hole before taking on this one. This is one of the later Thomas stories; it takes place less than a month before meeting Raige and M.D.By the age of fourteen, Thomas could’ve sworn that he knew the woods behind his house like the back of his hand. His family had lived next to it for ages, and he’d spent years tromping around, exploring caves, avoiding coral snakes, and learning the plants and rocks. Between that and a good sense of direction, he’d been about positive that he could navigate the place blind.
So he was disturbed to realize he had no idea where he was.
To make matters worse, he didn’t know how he’d gotten there. He’d been in an area he knew fine, climbing a tree to get a look at a bird’s nest, when the branch he’d grabbed turned out to be rotten and broke under his hand.
It shouldn’t have been a bad fall. He couldn’t have been more than a few feet above the ground. But somehow, it ended up much farther, and when he hit the ground hard enough to hurt, everything was green, the temperature had dropped a good thirty degrees, and it was drizzling.
Thomas wasn’t too freaked out, not yet. He was dressed for the outdoors, and he had his backpack and his Leatherman and some snacks, so things couldn’t be that bad, but he was lost. There were ferns growing here. Had he hit hard enough to knock himself out and somehow rolled into a new part of the greenbelt he’d never seen, with an underground spring maybe?
He tried to retrace his steps, but that only increased his confusion. Nothing looked familiar. It was like he’d been dropped onto another planet. And the drizzle was only getting worse.
Finally, he decided to figure out his location later and take shelter first.
In that, at least, he was lucky. Not far from him was a tree, but not a kind Thomas had ever seen before. There were multiple ‘trunks’ (at least, Thomas thought they were trunks), putting down shoots and branches like the botanical equivalent of conjoined siblings. Each trunk had many open boles or hollow spaces—including one large enough for him.
It’d be a tight squeeze, but Thomas was cold and wet. After a moment to wonder how such a plant had gotten there, he shrugged and hunched his way in.
The walls of the inside of the tree were smooth and curling, slightly juicy with sticky sap. Kinda gross, but it smelled weirdly nice, and at least the rain couldn’t get in. Seriously, what was it, and how had it gotten here, it didn’t look particularly drought-resistant—
The trunk snapped shut on him.
Thomas froze. What?
For a moment, he didn’t understand what’d happened. He felt along the walls, trying to find the opening, only to find that sap was flowing down the walls in far more copious amounts than before. It wasn’t just sticky, either; it burned. As he scrubbed his hands against his thighs, he felt something brush his shoulder and tried to jerk away, only to realize he couldn’t. The walls were slowly but definitely closing in.
All in a rush, he figured it out: this is not home, this is not a tree, and YOU ARE GOING TO FREAKING DIE!
Thomas screamed. He clawed mindlessly against what had been open space just a moment before, and only succeeded in breaking his nails and scraping his burning hands. The air felt stuffy, which only made him redouble his efforts.
For a while, the tree was definitely the one winning the fight. But then Thomas felt a ridge where the open edges of the trunk had snapped shut. He smashed his fists against it, used all the leverage such tight quarters gave him, and finally felt something give. He shoved his hands into the gap, feeling his skin tear, and tore it open.
He lurched out, panting, shaking, and then took off in a sprint. Under any other circumstances, he would’ve thought it a stupid thing to do, but screw that, the tree had just tried to eat him; all bets were off. Who knew? If it could eat him, maybe it could walk too. So he ran until his lungs burned, the rain stopped, and he ran out of adrenaline and collapsed in the grass.
If he’d hoped he could run his way back to Texas, he was out of luck. The scenery was still lush, green, and utterly alien.
Thomas took in the view with dread. His breathing was far too quick, and he was feeling lightheaded. Where was this place? How had he gotten here? What the freaking hell, man?
Finally, he curled in on himself and started crying. It was the first and only time he ever had a panic attack, and at the time, he was ashamed to be doing it; later, though, he’d think that if he couldn’t cry after losing everything and almost getting eaten by a vegetable, then when could he?
Strong-Legs had found him like that pretty soon after, and that was a year and a half ago. Thomas was sixteen now, and he didn’t take in the greenery with dread anymore. This was his home now, and he knew his way around. Strong-Legs wasn’t just a giant dino-emu, but his roommate, friend, and labor partner. Heck, he was even a formal Treehouse citizen!
So he thought nothing of being up at the crack of dawn with Strong-Legs and a bunch of monster critters. They weren’t aliens to him anymore, but his neighbors and fellow workers, there to watch a giant bug gesticulate furiously on a tree stump—the Treehouse equivalent of reading the job classifieds. Strong-Legs groomed its feathers idly; Thomas leaned against its side and ate his breakfast wraps.
The labor crier rattled off work opportunities in Pidgin Sign. The day healers needed a junior, training provided. The Chewcarvers were forming a lumber party. A trader wanted guards for its journey to Freeport…
“Guarding would be okay, maybe,” Thomas signed to Strong-Legs with his free hand. “Haven’t been to Freeport in a while...”
Strong-Legs waggled its head noncommittally.
But then the crier signed, “Laborers needed for the season’s tree-line wall cleaning! Large laborers, at least the size of my junior, and no insects, please! Only beings who can hold their breaths for a time! Otherwise, it is too dangerous. Flying not required.”
Strong-Legs raised its head high and waggled. “We shall join!”
“What, seriously?” Thomas asked. The tree-line wall was made up of the carnivorous plants that had nearly eaten Thomas on his first day. He’d had no desire to get near them since.
“I have done it before. Very good pay, not too dangerous if you pay attention. And it is good, honorable work, not like that dreadful Scrap Merchant job. I am your helpmeet, so you must believe me.”
“Not anymore, and I do not—” But he trusted Strong-Legs’s judgment, so raised his hand.
The job wasn’t until the next day, which was fine, since they needed time to prep. It would be a rise-set double shift, and required a shopping expedition, but Strong-Legs assured him it would be well worth it. As they headed towards the community gardens for groceries, it told him what it knew.
“The trees, they catch predators, is so? But they can not digest all. So bits pile up. We clean it up and insure their good health, and the bits find use with the scrap-pickers.”
“This sounds like a Scrap Merchant job,” Thomas signed dubiously as he handed their basket to the gardener to fill.
“No, no, no,” Strong-Legs declared, “is completely different. The trees are much cleaner. We will not need to scrub you red and sad afterward, unless you are foolish and fall in a pitcher, in which case I will laugh at you. Thank you,” it added to the gardener, who had finished filling the basket.
“May it feed you well,” it signed politely.
With a sign of thanks, Thomas took back the basket, now full of produce. It was late autumn, which meant it mostly contained purple potato things, dark leafy greens, grass, and seaweed this time around. “Who planted those things, anyway? They didn’t grow in a circle like that, did they?”
Strong-Legs couldn’t bounce, since he was tying the basket to its back, so it trilled with laughter instead. “No one has told you this story? Unforgivable! Here, I tell you.”
As they walked down the street into the market, Strong-Legs gave its history lesson.
“This is all long, long time ago, long before all of us! Before the world-holes, even! Before that, this land, it is ruled by the Tree-Shapers. They are all gone now, in Silver Fern anyway, but before, they grow trees and plants in all the patterns! Our houses? Tree-Shaper houses. The wall? Tree-Shapers too. They know all the secrets. But they leave no hives, no records, so all their secrets are lost now. Some of the garden people, they...” He saw Strong-Legs struggle, search for wording, “they look at the work; they try to do it too. But not so good, is so? It is why the old houses are prettier, and also the best. All Treehouse is built off the bones of their secrets. You look at the bones and can guess, but will never know what the being was truly like alive, is so? Oh, this is the best rope, we’ll take eight lengths, please!”
The giant spider-beast wound silken rope around two of its legs, cut the end neatly with its jaws, and handed the coil to Thomas, who tossed it over his shoulder and paid for it.
“Where’d the Tree-Shapers go? What happened to them?” Thomas asked, as they headed on to another stall to buy sap-repellant.
“No one knows! They leave only the trees and town bones behind! Such a mystery! Perhaps the world-holes open up, something gets them, is so? A plague, or a Tree-Shaper-eater.”
Strong-Legs paused to hand over payment to the wax seller and snatch a jar of sap-repellant, which it turned and put in the basket with their groceries. Thomas waited to hear more.
When it was finished, it continued, “That is why the tree-line wall is so important. They are older than all of us, much, much so! They are the loyal defenders of town. Very old, very strong. Without them, we would be like others, barring our homes at night, or keeping fighters. But because of the tree-line wall, we are safe. They do not threaten us, unless we are foolish. They ask for nothing but food and water, and a seasonal cleaning. And to care for them this way, it is honorable, the most Treehouse work someone can do.
“And that is why it is nothing like the Scrap Merchant cleaning. To clean Scrap Merchant’s home, it hurts him so! But cleaning the trees makes them happy. It doesn’t hurt at all. You understand? The trees are scary, but as long as you are respectful and smart, there is nothing to fear. Now let us go and put these things away. We have much to do!”
The rest of the day was taken up treating their clothes with the sap-repellant, a kind of waxy goo. After warming it up to melt it, they slathered it on their clothes; once it set, it would repel not just digestive sap, but water and other fluids too.
The next morning, at dawn, Thomas and Strong-Legs headed off to work, dressed in their treated clothes. Thomas wore thick gloves almost to his elbows, and his old combat boots with a padded coat. For its part, Strong-Legs wore its digging boots, brace hardness, and its own coat, plus a broad-brimmed hat. It was just as well that it was a chilly autumn day; the get-up would’ve been stifling in the summer.
They weren’t the only members of the labor party; there were a good dozen people, all similarly armored. Three garden people were in charge, with a day healer standing by just in case.
“We progress in stages,” they explained, standing in front of one of a small green plant. “First, the pitchers. Do not move further until we say. A healthy pitcher looks like this, you see? Green all over, with streaks of red or pink or white, smelling of health and greenery. If a pitcher is healthy, clean around it, but do not touch! Let it be; we will prune them. If there are brown spots, or it is squishy, and smells of rot or bitterness, cut away that bit, with a large margin. Dead pitchers, cut away entirely, and take them here to empty their contents for the scrap-pickers.”
They demonstrated proper cutting techniques with another, less healthy, pitcher plant. It looked simple enough. Thomas had his old Leatherman and would be doing the cutting and trimming; Strong-Legs would be manning a rope and pulley attached to its brace harness to hoist him up and down. That way, he could do the cleaning without touching or trampling the plants themselves.
The pitchers were Treehouse’s first line of defense. They grew all over the place, up trellises or in holes in the ground carved for them ages before. The small ones were barely the size of his finger, while the largest ones could take his arm up to the elbow. They didn’t smell like anything to him, but were apparently irresistible to small insects and their predators; many of the pitchers were glutted with bones and husks, not to mention random junk like stones and small jewelry. Some were so full they’d actually fallen over.
The pitchers took until noon to clear, clean, and prune. After a lunch break, the clean-up crew moved to the other species: the trees.
Here, Thomas was nervous. They looked so pretty, with their sweet smell, pink flowers and red leaves. He’d confused them for late-autumn foliage his first day, before he’d figured out the Silver Fern seasons and learned the trees were always red. Hollow, strange, and delicate, they still looked deceptively fragile, even though he knew better.
“Attention!” signed the garden person. “These are the trees. Be aware! Stay with your labor partner! Prune back dying leaves or branches too close to their neighbors. If you see mold, get us immediately!
“We must clean out their valves, to prevent rot. Move lightly, and do not touch the walls of the valve. Should you do so, do not struggle. We will come get you. The tree can not digest you very quickly, but if you panic...”
Thomas shuddered. He knew the dangers of that.
“Valves” were the proper name for the hollowed out bits Thomas had noticed before. These trees, being much older, larger, and more robust than the wild one he’d encountered before, had valves big enough to be rooms—in fact, they bore a strong resemblance to the house trees in town. Even Strong-Legs could be trapped by some of them.
The labor team worked carefully, pruning and trimming. That wasn’t too stressful; Thomas had done garden work before, and anyway, the trees were harmless on the outside. Going inside, though…
The walls of the valves were pink, almost translucent, which made them glow in the afternoon sun. It was a pretty effect… except for the bones and other indigestibles littering their insides.
Thomas told himself that things had changed. He wasn’t fourteen anymore; he knew better than to blunder around. Besides, it was embarrassing to be a Treehouse citizen scared of the very trees that guarded it.
So he went and carefully cleaned, and he didn’t touch the valve walls, and the trees let him be.
It took a while, but after a couple hours, he started to relax. Contrary to his secret fears, the trees weren’t chomping down the second he’d entered. They had probably been trained to recognize his scent now, at least a bit, though that was hardly a silver bullet. He could feel his fears dwindling to a more reasonable size.
Then, as he turned to exit the current valve, his foot stuck in some sap and he stumbled. With a feeling that combined, “not again,” with “of course again,” he fell against the wall.
Toomp. The valve snapped shut.
Thomas heard Strong-Legs’s alarmed honk. He could see its silhouette vaguely through the wall, dashing back and forth with alarm.
The valve walls started dripping juice.
Thomas carefully pulled away from the wall, but kept his feet where they were. Don’t move, he told himself. He couldn’t struggle. The tree wasn’t smart; it didn’t know if it had prey or garbage unless he flailed around and cued it that he was alive. If he just held still and conserved his air, the garden folks would come and get him and everything would be fine.
He was sweating, despite the cold, and his hands were shaking. That was fine. The tree probably couldn’t feel that. He just couldn’t shake anywhere else.
Part of Thomas felt terrified and fourteen again. That part of him was positive that the walls were already closing in, a second away from squeezing him to bone and teeth like the detritus he’d already found. That part of him was dead certain that the only way out was brute force and adrenaline. His muscles ached to scrape and rip and run.
But the sixteen-year-old part of him, the Treehouse part of him, knew better. This tree was much larger and older than that first one; struggling would make things worse. And even if he did somehow tear through a tree in full bloom, he’d probably badly hurt it in the process, which was a pretty crummy way to treat his protector.
Thomas clenched his hands in the gloves, shut his eyes, and focused hard on his breathing. Not the walls, not the smell of the sap. Just his breathing. He counted the breaths, forced himself to hold it slow and steady, and he waited.
At breath sixty-one, he saw more light through his eyelids, and when he opened them, the valve was open. The garden people and the healer was there, and so was Strong-Legs, feathers fluffed with anxiety. It ran to him, buried its face in his hair, and Thomas hugged it, inhaled the familiar dusty scent of its feathers.
“You alarmed me so!” it signed. “I am sorry. I never should have suggested this job…”
“I’m okay,” Thomas said. Then he said it again, in Pidgin Sign. “I’m okay.”
Strong-Legs gave him a hard look. It wasn’t human, but it knew him well enough to know his body language pretty well. Its feathers smoothed.
“Is so? Is so.” It groomed his hair with teeth and tongue. “Brave mammal boy.”
Thomas finished the rest of the cleaning in good spirits, and afterward, he and Strong-Legs celebrated payday with a luxurious bath.
He was never scared of the trees again.
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--Hikaru
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Thank you! I'm still not completely satisfied with the design of the trees, but going to a carnivorous plant show with my roommate and investing in a book about them has helped immensely!