Chapter 55 — Part 3: The Drag and the Choice

Yusuf's hands were oiled with sap. It glimmered on his palms like polish and smelled of old books and rain in the air. He had expected the roots to be cold and dead, like the bark of a monument; instead, they pulsed with something like life. They tugged where they had penetrated his father's skin, drawing sap into the veins draining around the wrist and the throat. It was as though the Tree drank from him slowly, savoring every name.

He couldn't leave that body on the pedestal. He couldn't—wouldn't—leave the man who had provided him with the words to get the job done, even if the man's mind was an accounting sheet of dust.

You help me, Yusuf said to the faceless child, and the request was tinged with defeat. He never requested anything of anyone. Never. But his arms trembled and his breathing was hot and grating now, and the beat of the Codex pounded against his side like a rebuke.

The boy looked up at him with a slant he'd come to hate and half-believe. For a moment its hollow mask creased again, the shape of an eye scribbled by some wandering sap-vein. "The Root does as it pleases," it said. "What you call rescuing, it calls stealing."

"Then we steal him," Yusuf growled, and the fiery certainty of those words braced his back.

He submerged his hand in the tangle of roots and began to withdraw. Not with effort, but with finesse—like a conservator gently releasing an artifact from its casing. He sliced rays of light from the Codex, as fine as a hair, turned them like wire around the constricting roots, and tried to liberate them. Each strand he wove seethed with the names he spoke to himself: the little clerk of Elarra, the cobbler of the broken bridge, the player at the market—names he had cataloged like pebbles in a bag. He coiled them into a thread of remembering and pulled.

The roots did not yield. They tightened. The Tree reacted by contracting beneath him; the cavern contracted as though it were a lung. Faces within the walls rippled in and out, mouths forming words Yusuf couldn't quite hear. When he focused, the edges of those faces blurred as through rain.

Something snapped—not the root, but something inside him. A momentary, private memory waited in ambush, then evaporated before he could catch it: the exact fork his mother had used to prod him to eat when he was a child, the tiny indentation on his pen where he had pushed whenever he was thinking. He stretched—to too late. His hands clapped onto nothing. A flash, whirling pain where the memory had been as if a tooth had been drilled out.

"Do you hear it?" the boy murmured, commenting on the weather. "It's reaching out to remind you of what you are, and you're pulling so tight that it forgets you."

"No," said Yusuf. "Not that. Anything but that."

He ducked his shoulders into the roots and pulled again. Sap jetted, dyeing his sleeves. His father grunted—half groan, half rattle of clearing an old man's throat—but when Yusuf bent over close enough to see, the eyes weren't the sharp, disciplinarian eyes he recalled. They were cloudy and filmed, pinhole-wide pupils sucking up candlelight. But in them, for one broken moment, something moved—an expression that could have been recognition, could have been compassion. Yusuf clung to it like a child holding a rope. It was everything he had.

The Tree shuddered. Low pressure swept through the cavern—no, not noise but pressure. The roots reacted as if offended. Tendrils that had taken hold at first in a nervous manner now started to whip, to reach out toward Yusuf's ankles and wrists, binding him.

Stop, the child commanded. "We can leave him. You can go on—closer to the center—and maybe discover a way to fix him. Or you can hang on to him and become what the Root would have you become—a root in its trunk." The tilt of that hollowed-out face held something like pity in it.

It was the oldest enticement: save what you can, and save it at the cost of becoming what you claim to despise.

Memory is a hungry thing. Yusuf felt it chewing on the edges of his self like rodents in woodwork. Every pull he made, every voice he called out loud to secure a thread, untied a bit of him. The Codex had provided him with a way through, yes, but its pages pulsed with a cold rationality: for every hook he mended in the world, something in its binding went blank.

He felt Rae's voice again—a spark on the wind. "Yusuf—remember why," she had previously warned, the fading echo keeping him not to people but to purpose. Now it floated to him like a tattered hymn, weaker and more tenuous, a solitary thread.

He could not help the pain for his father's approval. The idea of freeing him up and walking on—how many names might he gather to balance the Tree against loft? But with every second spent prying, another memory would be lost: a twist of phrase, a friend's laughter, the comfort of some tawdry habit that had been his. The ledger of his life was being flipped through in a grasping hand.

The roots became narrow as the grip of fate.

A tendril coiled around his leg and pulled, nearly knocking him off. He wildly blinded swung the Codex. Phrases spilled out of him, not merely recitation but the sensation of the minutes he had vowed to hold: the color of dust motes in a shaft of museum light, his mother's method of soaking beans on a sluggish Tuesday. The tendril jerked back with a hiss, drawing back as burned.

You will break, the child said. It had stepped closer. Yusuf felt the chill of its small, featureless face. "You will be what you restore: not man, not remembrance, but vessel."

"You speak as if you know me," Yusuf growled, and he did not know the bitterness of his voice. "What are you, really?

The child's mask flashed. For a furious moment, and then none, the emptiness shattered, and Yusuf caught a impossible superimposition: fingers—too many fingers—flipping pages. Faces that might have been one and might have been many. A memory of being led by a hand the way a child is led. The mask settled again, empty and incomprehensible.

"Finders become binders," it stated. "Binders become root. Root becomes tree. Tree remembers itself last."

He thought about all the little things he'd sacrificed along the way. A name to a fixed street. Some part of his childhood for a city's rediscovered laughter. The mathematics of cost and worry had always remained abstract until now, until the cost tasted like a ransom demanded in seconds rather than years.

He strained. The roots groaned. For a moment, he could pry his father free. The pedestal trembled at the base. Sap dripped from where a root had passed through a rib, and for an instant the man's hand spasmed, fingers releasing as if to hold on to something Yusuf could not give.

Memory surged in then—an deluge. Not his own at first, but another's: a woman's song from a town whose name he could not remember, the scent of a fiddle from a destroyed theatre, the sharpness of smoke in a morning once quiet. They poured through him and out into the branching passages like unwelded beads. He tried to hold them, but they still slipped away. His hands were heavier with grief.

He was behind. He was slipping too. Panic seethed raw and immediate. He would lose the man and the name and the final threads of his own past if he lost this fight, steam curling from a kettle. He might become something the Tree wrapped around him, a dried-up piece that could never again speak his own name with affection, with the inward ugliness of a son, if he clung to it. Neither seemed like salvation.

"Why do you fight?" The child's voice was small now. It rode the line between cruelty and something akin to curiosity. "If memory is being hollow, would you not take oblivion?"

He had once known that there were worse things than forgetting: living as an accountant, a catalog of other people's lives with no hope of being loved. He had committed his life to making names live simply because the alternative, names used without love, held as objects, was worse. But faced quite this completely, up to mid-thigh in sap and roots pulling at his father's flesh, the creed thinned. He could sense the minute drying up inside like a too-long-languishing fruit on a bough.

Rae's voice floated again, precise and light. Stand. Even if I forget you. It was not comfort. It was command—and it anchored him.

He pulled.

This time his fingers wrapped around something yielding. The roots split apart with a ripping noise like an old volume of books. His father's shoulder came out of the hook it had wedged into, and the man collapsed forward onto Yusuf's arms. Sap flowed from his chest in thick, warm ribbons.

Yusuf possessed him. He carried the weight of the man. He had the more-than-breath in his chest. But the cost was immediate: a memory he enjoyed—a sound of his father's laughter at some long-forgotten meal—disintegrated into grey and then to nothing. It was a small loss in a life he'd always thought of as a ledger, and it burned acutely at the back of his eyes.

He cried once, not loudly more than anything else but from somewhere deep and raw. The child watched, no longer completely expressionless. There was a tenderness to the angle it gave, a calculation that Yusuf could not read.

"You may go now," it said. "The Core exists, but you might steel him and go. Or you might carry him deeper. Which will you do? Which is your truth?"

Yusuf looked down at his father. The man's chest rose and fell raggedly, but his gaze was as dry stone. "I can't leave him," Yusuf spoke in a boy's and a man's voice. "Even if he won't recall, even if I die for it, I can't leave him to the muck of this Tree."

The child's mask darkened with sap or shadow; Yusuf was unsure. "Then you choose to bind the Tree a little tighter with your life," it commented. "You choose the slow erasure. Very well.".

He carried his father draped over his shoulder like an offering. The roots trembled with outrage and then in a kind of attention as if the Tree had known that the decision had been made. His father's weight was not iron and muscle but the weight of history and war and small, fragile tendering. Each step forward was like walking through a world of names clutching at his ankles.

He had never been apt at steps that counted. He had listed and reordered and preserved; he had never had to make the choice to carry the weight.

The hall narrowed. The faces in the bark hung closer to him. Some mouths formed words he once had taught himself to read in margins. But they spoke a language he could no longer grasp; he had begun forgetting the form of letters, the beat of sounds. When one face formed his mother's mouth and spoke, in that unearthly voice, "Remember," Yusuf had to grip the Codex until his knuckles whitened to remember what 'remember' felt like.

The boy followed him, a little patient shadow. It did not help him with each step; it did not need to. The boy's being was solace and blame. "You bind what you cannot carry," it once whispered, as soft as the air. "And the Tree will take its due."

"How much?" Yusuf asked. It was not a question that sought an answer.

The emptiness of the child changed. For a moment the promise of a mouth drew as if it were going to speak softly. "Enough," it breathed. "More than you'd care to give. Less than it might consume."

They descended. Roots wrapped themselves into a pipe below, and the light outside was doubled in upon itself until only the allowed-to-pass-through veins permitted a trickle of memory like honey. Yusuf heard his name—wet, unsteady—ring from the Codex as if the book itself was taking its time to make up its mind to settle on the letters once more.

He did not know how many steps they took. The Tree's heart was like an organism that slept and woke up to check if it could be saved. Yusuf kept moving because there was no place that did not need the proof of movement. The Root witnessed and bristled with silent anger like a storm.

At last they reached a chamber gasping and pulsating like the ribcage of some giant beast. In the middle of it stood a root pedestal towering, cinctured by light and shade. It looked more like a place to sit than the throat of the Tree, something that spoke and ate.

The child set his father down with near-affectionate care. "Rest," it said—word oddly human. "You have chosen."

Yusuf fell to his knees, palms against the plinth. He could feel, through the wood, the vibration of an ancient rhythm, and it was nothing like his heart. It was the book of the world closing a page.

He had to weep until tears no longer stayed, to yell and tear at his clothes and shout out the names he had held in the roots until the Tree of Wishes listened. Instead, he pressed his forehead against the pedestal and whispered, "I did what I could. I did what I could."

The Codex lay open on his feet, ink spreading as if by the first legs of a crawling insect. On the rim someone—elsewhere—had written a single word in a hand that might have been his own or might have been his decades before:

Closer.

The Tree twitched once, a single long involuntary spasm. The child looked at him, and for a moment the blankness of its face held something that might almost have been pity.

"Now," it breathed. "You journey where few would be brave enough to tread behind you. The heart will not be gentle."

Yusuf rose. He looked at his father and was stunned at how small, how so utterly human the man seemed in the unfamiliar light. Yusuf leaned forward, pressed his palm to his father's cold hand, and said the one thing left that seemed rightfully his.

Forgive me for all I shall lose," he gasped.

The kid made a sound that might have been laughter, and they passed side by side through the Root's maw, into the darker pulsing where memory was uncut and salvation came at its own cost.