The Wrong Trees

Chapter 72

The Wrong Trees

Two days after Roark left, Gray was back at his desk wondering whether regional administration had developed a reproductive cycle.

There had been paperwork before Snowpoint. There had been paperwork waiting when he returned from Snowpoint. There had even been paperwork during the three days he spent trying to pretend the previous paperwork no longer existed. Now there was more of it, which suggested somebody somewhere was either manufacturing forms recreationally or had discovered that every solved problem naturally produced three additional documents requiring signatures.

Gray signed the bottom of a habitat-transfer request, slid it into the completed pile, and reached for the next folder. Before his hand made it there, Marcus placed another one directly on top of the stack.

Gray stopped halfway across the desk and looked at the folder, then at Marcus. “No.”

“You haven’t opened it.”

“That has never prevented me from having an opinion.”

“It’s not yours.”

“Excellent.”

“It might become yours.”

Gray pushed the folder back across the desk without opening it. Marcus stopped it with two fingers and left it sitting between them.

Across the office, Lyra looked up from her laptop for approximately half a second before deciding the exchange had not yet become interesting enough to justify intervention. She had been working through the following month’s scheduling since breakfast, occasionally making quiet noises of irritation whenever two departments tried to book Gray for events occurring in different cities on the same afternoon.

Marcus tapped the folder once. “Regional ecology request. Southwest of Hearthome.”

Gray gestured vaguely toward him. “You are the field ecologist.”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad we established that.”

“I brought it because something in it is odd.”

That changed the conversation enough that Gray stopped trying to give the folder back.

Marcus was not dramatic by nature. He did not drag problems across the lab because one photograph looked strange or because somebody had used the word unusual in a report. If he said there was something odd in a data set, he usually meant he had found a pattern that had survived several attempts to explain it away.

Gray pulled the folder back toward himself.

Marcus smiled faintly. “That was easy.”

“I reserve the right to give it back.”

“Of course.”

The request came from a small agricultural district west of Hearthome, where several farms bordered a tract of woodland that had been classified as unmanaged for longer than anyone involved seemed able to specify. The immediate complaint was not especially serious. Pokémon activity had increased over the past two seasons, particularly around the eastern edge of the woodland. Combee were appearing in greater numbers. Burmy had become common along several field boundaries. Cherubi had been reported more frequently than usual, and Munchlax and Heracross were responsible for enough fruit losses that two growers had asked the district office for guidance on deterrents.

Nothing in the report suggested an emergency. There had been no injuries, no aggressive encounters, and no dangerous Pokémon behaving unpredictably. The farms were losing produce and seeing more movement along the woodland edge, but that was the sort of problem regional ecology offices dealt with constantly. Gray read another page, reached the preliminary recommendations, and looked back at Marcus.

“Why is this here?”

Marcus pulled over the spare chair and sat beside the desk. “The district office wants an assessment before approving more aggressive control measures. They’re considering clearing some of the woodland edge, changing fencing, and using stronger repellents around the orchards.”

“That still sounds like your problem.”

“It is.”

Gray looked up.

Marcus leaned forward and pointed to the species table. “Look at the concentrations.”

Gray did.

The numbers were not absurd. That was the first thing he noticed. Nothing suggested a population explosion or sudden migration. The species themselves made sense for mixed woodland beside agricultural land. Combee would exploit flowering crops. Burmy could thrive almost anywhere with enough plant material. Cherubi near a fruit-growing region was hardly remarkable, and Munchlax stealing produce had probably been occurring since before Sinnoh had roads.

He read the table again, then shifted to the location breakdown and spent longer on it the second time.

“That’s annoying.”

Marcus smiled. “There it is.”

Lyra glanced over from her desk. “What?”

Gray rotated the folder so she could see the page. “The totals are normal. The distribution isn’t.”

Most of the activity clustered around the same section of woodland, but even that was not quite the interesting part. Within that area, the different species were appearing in narrower bands instead of spreading evenly through the available habitat. Combee observations were heavily concentrated toward the western interior. Burmy reports traced a loose arc farther south. Cherubi sightings clustered near several older tree stands, and even the Munchlax damage appeared to follow two preferred approach routes rather than occurring randomly along the woodland edge.

Lyra closed one scheduling window and rolled her chair closer. “Could be food distribution.”

“Probably is,” Marcus said. “The question is why.”

Gray flipped ahead to the photographs.

Most had been taken by local forestry workers or farm staff. There were images of chewed fruit, damaged fencing, Combee around flowering trees, several Burmy hanging from low branches, and one Munchlax caught on a motion camera with both arms full of something red.

Gray paused on that one.

Lyra leaned over slightly. “What?”

“Nothing. He looks pleased with himself.”

She studied the picture. “He does.”

Marcus took the folder and turned forward several pages. “These are the aerial survey shots.”

The first image showed the woodland in late summer. Gray studied it for several seconds, then moved to the second and back again. There was nothing immediately dramatic about either photograph. The woodland looked like woodland.

Lyra watched his eyes moving between them. “You see something.”

“I’m deciding.”

“About what?”

“Whether it’s actually something.”

Marcus folded his arms and waited.

Gray opened the digital copy on the desktop monitor and enlarged it. The woodland was irregular, as expected. Mature trees broke up younger growth, while open patches appeared where storms, disease, soil conditions, or simple competition had interrupted the canopy. Beyond it, the agricultural fields formed cleaner lines, with long straight property boundaries imposed across terrain that had no particular reason to cooperate with them.

Inside the woodland, several of the older fruit-bearing trees formed a loose curve.

Gray zoomed farther in and adjusted the image again.

“That spacing is wrong.”

Marcus moved around the desk for a better view. “Wrong how?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“That’s reassuring.”

Gray ignored him and brought up the second aerial photograph, taken from a slightly different angle.

The trees were not arranged in neat rows. If they had been, the explanation would have been boring. An abandoned orchard could disappear beneath secondary growth while still leaving obvious planting lines for decades. This was subtler than that. Several of the larger trees sat at intervals that were too regular to feel accidental, but the pattern bent with the land instead of cutting straight across it.

Gray traced the curve with one finger against the monitor.

Lyra followed the motion. “You think they were planted?”

“I think some of them might have been.”

Marcus remained skeptical. “Natural regeneration can create spacing.”

“I know.”

“So can competition.”

“I know.”

“Seed dispersal.”

Gray glanced at him. “Yes, Marcus.”

“I’m checking.”

Gray leaned back and looked at the photograph again. “Spacing alone means nothing. But these aren’t just spaced. They’re following something.”

Marcus studied the screen. “What?”

“I don’t know.”

That was enough to keep him interested.

Marcus pulled up the original vegetation survey. The oldest trees in the tract were listed broadly by species and estimated age class, but the fieldwork had been conducted for forestry management rather than archaeology. Nobody had mapped individual trunks in detail, and most of the fruit-producing trees were described simply as naturalized growth.

Gray read that phrase twice.

“Naturalized from what?”

Marcus looked at the page. “Presumably nearby cultivation.”

“How nearby?”

“The closest active orchard is about two kilometers east.”

Gray shook his head slightly. “Possible, but I don’t like it.”

Lyra sat back in her chair. “You don’t like the explanation, or you don’t like that they didn’t explain it?”

“Both.”

That earned a small smile from Marcus.

They spent the next half hour trying to make the simple explanations work before allowing themselves anything more interesting. The woodland could have been an abandoned commercial orchard, but no modern agricultural records mentioned one there. It could have been seeded gradually from nearby farms, although the oldest tree estimates made that less convincing. Favorable soil could explain both the fruit trees and some of the Pokémon concentration. A local microclimate might account for unusually strong fruit production, while historical logging could have created the curved openings Gray was seeing in the aerial imagery.

None of those possibilities required anything unusual, and Gray preferred them for that reason. Ordinary explanations were usually better until the evidence made them stop being better.

He simply did not believe any of them completely yet.

Lyra looked from the monitor to Gray. “What would actually prove someone planted it?”

Gray kept looking at the image. “Nothing by itself.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know.”

Gray enlarged another section of the image and let the cursor rest over one of the older tree clusters. “Tree ages would help. Soil chemistry. Evidence of amendment. Old irrigation or drainage. Stone boundaries. Path remnants. Pollen distribution if we can get useful cores. Historical parcel records. If enough independent things point the same direction, then I’d be comfortable saying the site was managed.”

Marcus kept his attention on the screen. “And if all we find is irregular spacing?”

“Then I’ve spent a day staring at trees.”

“You’ve done worse.”

Gray gave him a brief look. “Yes.”

Lyra reached across for the original request and reread the first page while the two of them continued staring at the aerial image. “How soon do they want an answer?”

“Two weeks,” Marcus said. “The district agricultural board meets after that. They’re not clearing anything tomorrow. They just want recommendations before they approve changes.”

Gray liked that better. Two weeks was enough time to actually investigate rather than rush toward whatever interpretation happened to fit first. There was room for them to be wrong, which generally made being right more useful. He looked again at the curved spacing, the older trees, and the concentrations of Pokémon activity around them.

“I think somebody planted part of this.”

Marcus did not argue. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Gray turned toward him. “You already thought that.”

“I thought it was possible.”

“You brought this to me so I’d say it first.”

“I brought it because you enjoy old mistakes.”

“That is not a discipline.”

“It could be.”

Lyra had already turned back toward her laptop. “It basically is for you.”

Gray ignored both of them and reopened the vegetation map.

By ten thirty, Mira had been pulled into the office as well. She arrived carrying coffee and wearing the expression of someone who had been told there was a quick question and knew from experience that this usually meant losing the next hour of her morning. Gray moved several folders off the second chair so she could sit, while Marcus brought the available soil records onto the larger monitor.

“What am I looking at?” Mira asked.

“The woodland southwest of Hearthome,” Marcus said. “Possible old managed site. Maybe.”

Mira took a drink of coffee before sitting down. “That last word seems important.”

“It is.”

The available soil samples were limited. Most had been collected from agricultural boundaries and a handful of forestry monitoring points rather than the sections Gray actually wanted, which meant nobody was going to get a clean answer from the existing data. Even so, there were enough differences to keep Mira interested.

She zoomed in on the nutrient map. “This is messy.”

Gray leaned forward. “Useful messy?”

“Possibly.”

Several pockets inside the woodland showed elevated phosphorus and potassium compared with nearby reference points. The difference was not dramatic enough for Mira to call the soil cultivated on chemistry alone, but the richer patches overlapped with some of the older fruit-tree clusters often enough to deserve attention.

Mira pointed to one series of readings. “If the sampling is good, there’s probably been long-term nutrient concentration here.”

“Manure?” Gray asked.

“Could be.”

“Old settlement waste?”

“Could be.”

“Natural Pokémon activity?”

“Also could be.”

Gray looked at her.

She smiled into her coffee. “You asked.”

Marcus shifted another map onto the screen. “What about persistence? If nobody has managed this place in over a century?”

“That depends on what happened afterward.” Mira leaned back slightly. “Soil doesn’t politely reset when people leave. If the ecosystem keeps moving nutrients through the same places, you can preserve patterns for a very long time. Especially if Pokémon are part of that cycling.”

That caught Gray’s attention more than the raw values had. “Which Pokémon?”

“I have no idea yet.”

“Combee?”

“Not enough by themselves.”

“Burmy?”

“Probably not at this scale.”

Marcus, still looking at the map, said, “Munchlax.”

Mira turned slowly toward him. “If you’re proposing two hundred years of concentrated Munchlax defecation, I’m going home.”

Lyra laughed from the other desk, and even Gray had to look away from the screen for a second before returning to the data.

“The important part is that the pattern might still be active,” he said.

“Maybe,” Mira replied. “Don’t make me regret using that word.”

“I heard the caveat.”

“You hear caveats the way Chatot hears profanity.”

“That feels unfair.”

From somewhere in the hallway, Chatot immediately shouted something obscene.

Mira pointed toward the door. “Exactly.”

Elias joined them shortly before noon carrying three historical maps, two property ledgers, and the quiet air of a man already disappointed by the quality of everyone else’s recordkeeping. He placed the oldest map on the central table, flattened one corner beneath a ledger, and began without ceremony.

“Modern parcel maps call the tract unmanaged woodland. So do the district surveys from forty-three and sixty-eight years ago. I found an older land-use record from one hundred and six years ago.”

Gray leaned over the map.

The area was still marked as woodland.

“No orchard?”

“No.”

“Settlement?”

“No.”

“Private parcel?”

Elias shook his head. “Not in the form you want.”

Gray looked up. “What form do I want?”

“One that resolves this quickly.”

“That would be nice.”

Elias slid another sheet forward. “There was a boundary revision one hundred and thirty-two years ago. Part of the land changes administrative designation, but no agricultural use is listed.”

Marcus studied the old property lines. “Could the records just be incomplete?”

“They are incomplete,” Elias said. “That does not mean we get to decide what the missing pieces say.”

Gray nodded. That was why he liked Elias.

The fourth document was more interesting. It was a survey copy old enough that the original paper had long since been replaced by a preservation scan. A narrow track ran west from what had once been a larger rural road, curved through low ground, and ended close to the present woodland.

Nothing was marked at the end.

Gray bent closer over the table. “How old?”

“One hundred and fifty-eight years.”

“Road?”

“Possibly. The surveyor labels it access track.”

“To what?”

Elias tapped the blank section of the map with one finger. “Apparently nothing.”

Marcus smiled slightly. “Useful.”

“Annoying,” Gray corrected.

Elias had also found a later reference to periodic maintenance on the same route several decades after the first survey, but again there was no destination listed. Eventually the track simply disappeared from subsequent maps, as though whatever reason people once had for keeping it open had stopped mattering enough to record.

Gray looked from the old survey to the modern aerial image. The alignment was not exact, but it was close enough to be worth testing.

“Can we overlay these?”

Lyra glanced at the clock before answering. “Before or after lunch?”

Gray looked at her.

She met his stare. “Lunch.”

“We’re doing something.”

“Yes.”

“This is work.”

“Yes.”

“Then why—”

“Lunch.”

Mira stood immediately and picked up her coffee. “I support this ruling.”

Marcus did too. Elias gathered nothing from the table, which Gray interpreted as a deliberate refusal to let the conversation continue until food happened.

They ate in the larger staff room because the office table had effectively disappeared beneath maps. Gray had intended to spend ten minutes there, long enough to satisfy everyone that he had consumed something other than coffee before returning to the overlay.

He was still sitting twenty-five minutes later because Lyra had somehow produced actual food instead of allowing him to count caffeine as caloric intake, and because Dracovish wandered through the open side door halfway through the meal.

He came in wet.

Gray looked at him.

Dracovish looked delighted.

Marcus glanced toward the window and then back at the Pokémon. “Was he supposed to be in water?”

“Probably not.”

Dracovish approached the table with the confident purpose of someone who had discovered an activity and expected everybody else to be pleased about it. Gray moved his food before Dracovish could investigate the plate, but he was too slow to save the aerial photograph lying beside it.

Dracovish lowered his head directly onto the paper.

Most of the photograph disappeared beneath his face.

Lyra stared at him.

Gray put down his sandwich. “Move.”

Dracovish did not.

“That is not enrichment.”

Dracovish made a pleased sound and settled another fraction of an inch downward.

Marcus reached for the exposed edge of the photograph, but Gray stopped him before he could pull.

“Don’t.”

Marcus paused. “Why?”

“Because then he’ll think it’s a game.”

Marcus withdrew his hand immediately.

Gray stood, placed both palms against the sides of Dracovish’s head, and carefully guided him upward. The photograph came with him.

For one ridiculous second, it remained stuck to the underside of his jaw.

Lyra covered her mouth.

Gray peeled the paper free and inspected the damage. A broad wet mark now crossed most of the western half of the site, blurring several annotations and making the forest look as though it had developed weather of its own.

Mira leaned over for a look. “Improved resolution.”

Gray gave her a flat look, then carried the photograph to the counter and laid it out to dry.

Dracovish remained beside him, apparently pleased by his contribution.

A minute later, Chatot flew into the staff room, stole a piece of bread directly from Marcus’s plate, and escaped through the same open side door with the speed of a practiced offender. Marcus stared after him for a moment, then looked down at the empty section of his plate. Gray glanced toward the doorway, considered the effort that would be required to retrieve one piece of bread from a Pokémon who would interpret pursuit as entertainment, and returned to his lunch. Nobody followed him. They had standards.

By the time lunch ended, Gray’s field boots were sitting beside the office door.

Lyra noticed immediately. Marcus only noticed because Lyra had stopped what she was doing and was looking at them, which meant Gray then noticed both of them noticing. He paused with a folder in one hand and frowned.

“What?”

Lyra’s eyes shifted toward the boots. “Nothing.”

“They were there already.”

“No, they weren’t.”

“They could have been.”

“You cleaned them yesterday.”

Gray set the folder down. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

Marcus folded his arms and looked from the boots to Gray. “You’re going.”

“We don’t know enough yet.”

Lyra glanced toward the boots again.

Gray followed her gaze and frowned harder. “That proves nothing.”

“Of course,” she said.

He disliked the way she said it.

The map overlay took another hour.

Elias corrected the historical survey for scale, rotation, and the small distortions introduced by the original mapping methods. Once the layers aligned well enough to compare, the old access track ended approximately two hundred meters north of the densest fruit-tree cluster. It did not terminate directly inside it, which would have been cleaner and less believable, but it came close enough that Gray leaned forward.

“Can we get winter imagery?”

Marcus turned back to the forestry archive and searched through older aerial surveys until he found one taken after leaf-fall four years earlier. Without most of the canopy in the way, the woodland floor was easier to read, and several shallow lines became visible through the trees. They were faint and irregular, the sort of features Gray might have dismissed as natural drainage if he had seen them without any other context.

Marcus pointed to the longest one. “That looks natural.”

“It might be.”

Mira leaned closer to the screen and studied the same feature. “Water definitely follows part of it.”

Gray nodded. “That doesn’t tell us whether it started naturally.”

“No,” she said. “Just that it still functions like drainage now.”

Gray traced the line with one finger. It curved through several of the older tree clusters, crossed a low depression, then split. A second feature appeared farther east, weaker but still visible, and another ran toward the southern side of the tract.

Lyra came around behind them and looked over Gray’s shoulder. “Are those paths?”

“Maybe.”

“Drainage?”

“Also maybe.”

She gave him a look. “You are very informative today.”

“I’m trying not to invent archaeology from pixels.”

Elias adjusted the contrast on the image, and a pale patch appeared near one of the intersections. Gray zoomed in, but the resolution was not good enough to identify it cleanly. It might have been exposed stone. It might have been old rubble. It might have been a patch of bare ground catching the light differently.

Marcus pulled up a second image from another year, and the pale feature was still there.

Mira pointed toward the southern edge of the woodland. “That section stays wetter.”

Gray pulled the Pokémon observation layer back over the imagery and started comparing the distributions again. Combee activity first. Then Burmy. Then the mapped fruiting trees and the repeated movement routes from the camera traps.

The overlap was imperfect, but it was there.

“That’s more interesting,” Gray said.

Marcus nodded. “The Pokémon distribution?”

“Yeah.”

Lyra looked from one layer to the next. “Because they’re using the same parts of the site?”

“Some of them are.” Gray brought the tree layer back over the older ground features. “Combee activity clusters around the older fruit trees. Burmy sightings are strongest along these edges. Several of the repeated movement routes follow the shallow depressions.”

Marcus studied the screen. “Could still just be resources.”

“Probably is resources.”

Marcus looked at him. “That sounded like agreement.”

“It is.”

Gray leaned closer to the screen again. “But if the resources are distributed according to old land use, then the Pokémon are responding to a landscape humans shaped a long time ago.”

Mira folded her arms and considered that. “And if their behavior keeps reinforcing the same nutrient or seed patterns, then parts of that layout could persist even if nobody has been actively managing it.”

Gray nodded. “Exactly.”

For a few seconds, nobody said anything. Not because the idea was especially dramatic. They were all just looking at the same collection of imperfect evidence and deciding how much weight it deserved.

Gray finally sat back. “We need field data.”

Lyra smiled.

He pointed at her. “Do not.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to.”

“Probably.”

The local agricultural board joined by video call late that afternoon. There were four people on the screen: two growers, a district land-use representative, and a forestry officer who looked as though he had been outside five minutes earlier and would rather be there again.

The discussion was refreshingly practical.

One grower explained that Pokémon-related losses had increased enough to matter financially, but not enough to justify drastic measures on their own. The concern was the trend. More Combee meant more pollination, which nobody objected to, but Munchlax damage had risen, Burmy were spreading into cultivated shelter belts, and the woodland edge had become more difficult to maintain.

The district representative eventually asked whether Gray believed the tract had historical significance.

Gray answered directly. “I don’t know yet.”

Nobody looked disappointed.

That helped.

Gray explained what they had actually found rather than what he suspected might be there: possible planted tree distributions, unusual nutrient patterns, remnants of an old access route, and ecological activity that might still correspond to previous land use. He was equally clear about the limits. None of it, individually or together at the current level of evidence, justified formal protection yet.

The forestry officer nodded once and asked, “Then what do you need?”

“Two days on-site,” Gray said.

Marcus looked at him.

Lyra looked at him.

Gray ignored both of them and continued. “Tree cores, soil samples, ground mapping, inspection of the depressions we can see in the winter imagery, and a closer look at the older fruit-tree stands. If there’s actual infrastructure under the vegetation, we should be able to find enough of it to tell whether this was managed land or whether we’re overreading a few patterns.”

One of the growers leaned toward his camera. “If it turns out somebody planted trees there a hundred years ago, does that mean we can’t touch anything?”

“No.”

The answer seemed to surprise him more than Gray expected.

Gray folded his arms. “Old does not automatically mean important. If it was a failed orchard that naturalized and nothing else distinguishes it, I’ll tell you that. If it represents something more useful historically or ecologically, I’ll tell you that too. I’m not interested in preserving every abandoned fencepost in Sinnoh because somebody put it there before my parents were born.”

The grower considered that for a moment, then nodded. “Fair enough.”

Gray liked him immediately.

There was no villain here, which was refreshing. Nobody was trying to destroy something rare for the pleasure of destroying it, and nobody on the call seemed particularly invested in forcing the answer in one direction. The growers were losing enough produce to care, the district needed to decide how the land should be managed, and the forestry office wanted to know whether removing part of the woodland edge would create a larger problem than it solved.

They wanted to know what the land was before spending money managing it one way or another.

That was how these questions were supposed to work.

After the call ended, the screen went dark and the office became quieter again. Marcus remained beside it instead of returning to his desk.

“You said two days.”

“Yes.”

Lyra had already opened the equipment inventory on her laptop.

Gray looked at her. “Why are you doing that?”

She did not look up. “Because you said two days.”

“We may only need one.”

Her fingers kept moving across the keyboard. “I’m packing for three.”

“That is excessive.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Marcus nodded. “It isn’t.”

Gray looked between them. “This has become hostile.”

Neither responded.

By five, the first field list was complete.

They would take the soil sampling kit, tree coring tools, GPS mapping units, camera traps, measuring tape, flag markers, sample bags, portable moisture probes, copies of the historical surveys, the high-resolution winter imagery, and enough overnight equipment to cover the stay without assuming the weather would cooperate.

Gray added an extra notebook.

Lyra added an extra day of food.

Marcus added replacement batteries for everything, having apparently learned from Snowpoint that batteries considered cold weather a personal insult.

Mira would stay at the lab initially and process samples as they sent them back, which made more sense than dragging her into the field before they knew whether the soil question was even worth pursuing. Elias would continue searching land records and older district archives while they were gone, especially anything that might explain the access track or why it had once received maintenance despite apparently leading nowhere.

Nobody suggested bringing Roark.

Gray appreciated that.

This was not a fossil problem.

Yet.

By the time most of the staff had gone home, the office had settled into the particular quiet it only reached after everyone else stopped moving through it. The building still carried faint noises from farther away—the heating system, an occasional door, Pokémon outside the windows—but the constant conversation and footsteps were gone.

Gray remained at his desk with the aerial images open.

The winter photograph sat beside the historical survey, both already marked with enough notes that a less charitable person might have accused him of becoming invested.

He overlaid them one more time.

The old access track sat beneath one layer. The shallow depressions cut through another. The older tree clusters, wetter soil, and Pokémon observations added more shapes on top until the screen became crowded enough that Gray had to start hiding and restoring layers individually.

Nothing lined up perfectly.

Old landscapes rarely did.

Roads shifted. Water moved. Trees died and new ones grew in their place. Pokémon altered paths according to food, shelter, competition, and whatever else mattered to them at the time. Humans changed boundaries, repaired them, abandoned them, redrew them, and sometimes forgot why they had existed in the first place.

Gray adjusted the transparency again.

The pattern became easier to see when he stopped looking for straight lines.

Marcus came back into the office carrying his coat and stopped when he realized Gray was still at the desk. “You’re still here.”

“Yes.”

“I can see that.”

Gray pointed at the screen.

Marcus sighed, set the coat over the back of a chair, and stepped closer. “What?”

“The trees aren’t in rows.”

Marcus looked at him. “I thought that was the problem.”

“No.”

Gray shifted the overlay slightly and traced one of the curved lines with the cursor. “Look at how they bend.”

Marcus leaned toward the screen.

Once the layers were aligned, it became more obvious. The older trees curved with the drainage features instead of crossing through them. Several clusters sat along slightly higher ground, while others followed the edge of the wettest section. The spacing still looked deliberate enough to suggest planting, but whoever had done it had not imposed a rectangular grid over the terrain.

Marcus frowned. “They planted around the land.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“For drainage?”

“Maybe.”

“Pokémon movement?”

“Maybe.”

Marcus smiled slightly. “There’s that word again.”

Gray leaned back in his chair. “I’m learning restraint.”

“No, you’re not.”

“That was unnecessary.”

Marcus picked up his coat again. “Tomorrow morning?”

“Seven.”

“That means six forty-five.”

“Seven.”

Marcus gave him a look that suggested he had already translated the answer correctly and left.

Gray stayed where he was for another minute.

The modern survey called the tract unmanaged woodland. That was probably accurate in the narrowest sense. Nobody currently pruned the trees. Nobody maintained the old track. Nobody cleared the shallow channels or marked whatever stonework remained beneath the vegetation.

But unmanaged was not the same as untouched.

Gray saved the overlays, shut down the monitor, and finally stood.

His field boots were still beside the door.

He put them on.