Greg folded dirty clothes, carefully sliding the neat stacks into a vacuum-seal bag to be compressed. Both his daughters had over-packed so much for the trip that their laundry wouldn’t fit back in the suitcase any other way, and instead of packing they’d gone off with their mother for one last walk in what Tara called the Magic Forest. It was the perfect name for this beautiful place, much better than “Disputed Woodland Zone 581,” an awkward official designation that had been the only acceptable compromise between three different countries speaking six different languages, once they’d finally agreed to stop building bunkers and open the area up for research and tourism.
He could hardly blame the girls for escaping to the forest. Tall, thick trunks seemed to reach all the way to heaven, like pillars in a magnificent cathedral, each topped with a dense crown of leaves that rustled and whispered, the irregular green clouds quilting a canopy full of sunlit gaps and seams that shifted and writhed as the trees swayed gently, a mesmerizing, abstract Sistine Chapel painted by lightning in slow motion. Thick vines draped down from high boughs like silk tapestries, decorated with orchids of every description that were twins of the colorful birds sitting in the branches. Hummingbirds darted about, untroubled by the humans scrambling to get out their phones, hovering, backing up, twisting in midair—Tara said they moved like fairies, and Navi had, for once, not contradicted her big sister on principle but solemnly agreed. They were at such lovely ages, eight and six, when all the world was wondrous and full of possibility.
But how much of this idyllic world will still exist when they’re my age?
His art—rendered in incredible detail for a dynamic visualization module that held an entire ecosystem—seemed more relevant than ever, not just an observation about the world, but a testimony. A digital twin of the Magic Forest encapsulated in what looked like nothing more than a snow globe. He was grateful that he’d had the opportunity to come here to make some final sketches and calibrations, with Mia of course since she was a biologist on the project, but also to share this experience with their daughters.
Mia ducked her head into their tent. “Where are the girls? The charter bus is here to take everyone back down the mountain to the airport.”
“I thought they were with you. They told me you wanted to take one more hike in the Magic Forest.”
“I was out buying souvenirs,” Mia held up a canvas shopping bag with the tour company logo. “I thought they were helping you finish packing.”
Greg shut the suitcase lid. “I last saw them fifteen minutes ago. They can’t have gotten far.”
His initial confidence soon proved misplaced. They split up and searched the campsite, asking everyone if they’d seen the girls, but no one had. Eventually they couldn’t hold the bus any longer, so it started down the winding mountain road, and still no sign of Tara and Navi. Most of the staff joined in the search, widening the radius and chattering on walkie-talkies.
In fairy tales, a Magic Forest could be dark and full of danger. Were the girls lost?
Greg and Mia searched at all the activity sites, all their wonders now tinged with worry: the observation deck where you would be winched hundreds of feet up on a rickety platform at four in the morning to catch sunrise above the mist-shrouded canopy (what if they fell?), the trunk of a tree whose side had been replaced with glass so that you could see a colony of ants churning like a living river inside (what if the ants felt threatened and sent out their soldiers?), the river crossing where you could dangle in vine-woven nets above thundering whitewater filled with leaping fish while eating lunch made from fruits and insects foraged from the surrounding forest (what if the girls tumbled in?), the trailhead that began a miles-long hike through the jungle for a glimpse of an elephant matriarch teaching her grandchildren how to fashion a backscratcher out of thorny branches (what if they couldn’t find their way back?) …
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