PART I — CONTACT
“No signal,” Ghost muttered.
“Eyes up,” Price said.
Then—
Impact.
She dropped from the canopy spinning—tight rotations, bare feet, wild hair snapping as the sun caught her midair.
“Uncle John! You’re early!”
Price didn’t blink. “You just treat the sun like a clock and bend time to suit your mood.”
“I optimize the sun!” she shouted, voice fading as she turned. “Clocks are just guilt with gears!”
Soap leaned forward, confused. “Is she yelling while flipping?”
“Is she still flipping?” Roach asked.
She twisted again, grinned wide. “You brought a whole squad? Is this a jungle intervention or a midlife band launch?”
Price raised an eyebrow. “We were promised backup vocals. You skipped practice.”
“Well maybe I’d attend if rehearsals weren’t at sunrise!”
She locked her dive—arms out, head down.
“You’re still the most—”
SPLASH.
Perfect. Not a sound above her landing.
Then she surfaced, water trailing from her hair.
“—overprepared disaster I’ve ever met, Uncle John!”
Soap muttered, “She rehearsed that, right?”
Price adjusted his cuff. “She just knows how to land a line.”
PART II — ENTRY
She waded out barefoot, water trailing from her sleeves, eyes bright. Walked past the group like they were lawn ornaments and pressed her palm to the base of a tree thicker than a truck.
Click. Bark folded open like paper. A wooden staircase curled down into the dark.
“Come in,” she said. “Or stand there until something licks you. Dealer’s choice.”
She didn’t wait. They followed.
The platform opened into a massive ring wrapped around the trunk. Netting filtered soft light through high beams. Hammocks swung low over smooth planks. Ropes and thick canvas turned the place into something between a fortress and a memory.
Wolves stretched, half-sleeping. A jaguar blinked from beneath a shelf. Something feathered exploded upward in a flash of red. A hyena thudded down a ramp and rolled into a pile of shredded cloth. Nothing startled. Nothing moved for them.
Walkways branched outward into wide bridges—each leading to mesh-walled enclosures. Trees grew through the platforms. Water trickled along carved channels into shallow basins. A battered trampoline groaned in the breeze. A rope swing still moved from her passage.
Soap stopped in front of a wooden frame holding a theater screen under a tarp. The popcorn machine hummed nearby.
He turned to Price. “She did all this?”
Price nodded once. “Unsupervised.”
And in the distance, the predatorial animals prowl their territory behind careful mesh and well calculated foliage.
PART III — UPPER LEVEL
The stairs curled upward into warmer air.
The top deck was quieter—hammocks, breeze, rain troughs lined in copper. A zipline cable stretched into shadowed green. A monkey zipped by shrieking, dragging something that might’ve been Ghost’s glove.
They moved through spaces that weren’t marked but made sense.
A bedroom tucked into a curve of the tree held a nest of books, a folded jacket, a hammoc, and a bed for the animals.
The kitchen sat open to the wind—spices, utensils, soft fruit stacked in netting. The stove was built from reclaimed steel and stubbornness.
Two pantries waited—one neat, the other rebellious. The dining room held furniture bolted down, so sleepy jaguars don't tip chairs over accidentally.
A composting toilet sat in a hut no one questioned. Cold storage hummed behind a curtain of woven cloth. Solar panels lined the top canopy, cables tied off with worn ribbon. Rainwater tanks gurgled gently.
Farther out, twenty small rooms ringed the edge. Shuttered. Quiet. Some carried the scent of cedar. Some had claw marks on the lintels.
And past those, slender rope bridges drifted to outer platforms, docile creatures wandering about in their enclosures.