Four days to reassemble himself.
The pulse he'd sent through the root beside Sera had scattered him across the entire network. Every connection he'd spent six weeks building had vibrated at once, and his sense of self spilled into places he hadn't meant to reach — root tips, soil seams, the deep slow currents of groundwater moving beneath the Barrens. For four days he was nowhere and everywhere. Roots didn't see. They sensed — temperature, moisture, pressure, the chemical signatures of things growing and decaying in the earth. All of it came at once, all of it equally loud. Six weeks of learning to mute the noise enough to think.
When coherence returned, something had changed. Before the pulse the network had been a blur — not dead but unfocused, a wash of sensation hitting him in waves. After, there was structure underneath the noise. The connections that had carried the pulse to Sera were stronger, clearer. He could follow them now, tracing trunk to root to the place where her back had rested against bark.
He couldn't do it again yet. The pulse had emptied him. But the paths existed.
The shaman came every morning.
She arrived at dawn and settled into the same spot at the trunk's base — a gap between two major roots where the bark was smoother. Palms flat in the soil, fingers spread wide. The symbols on her flanks glowed faintly, faded charcoal and plant sap catching the early light. Then she began to speak in a language older than the empires.
Chris didn't understand the words. But each syllable sent a ripple through the soil, the ripples layering until they formed a framework — a lattice his scattered awareness could grip. Three weeks to figure that out. Three weeks of sitting in the blur while the shaman spoke her old words into the ground. Then one morning the blur was slightly less blurry, the connections sharper. She was giving his consciousness fixed positions in the network. Reference points, the way stars let you navigate a sky you can't otherwise read.
She came every morning, spoke, left. A beetle crawled across the bark beside her hand one morning. She didn't notice. Neither did Chris, not really — he registered pressure, movement, something small and alive crossing the surface near her fingers, but it dissolved into the noise before he could hold it.
Today was different. For the first time, he managed to focus on a single connection and hold it.
A root tip two hundred yards northeast of the trunk, threading through a pocket of moister soil. Smooth bark tapering to root hairs drinking from the earth. The soil's temperature, the mineral taste of water cupped in clay. And something pressing against the root tip from above, a weight that was almost nothing.
A bird. Small. It had landed on the surface directly overhead, claws gripping the soil, and that grip traveled through the earth into the root and into him — a tiny sharp point of contact in the dark of the network.
He held the connection for three seconds. Then it slipped, and the blur rushed back. But for three seconds, he'd sensed a bird land on a root.
The child came in the afternoon.
Milla. The younger of the two refugee children who'd been trailing the centaur shaman since they arrived. Five years old, maybe six. She'd been told not to touch the tree. Everyone had been told not to touch the tree, except Sera, who touched it every evening and didn't care who saw.
Milla touched the tree.
She walked up to the trunk while her older brother was distracted, talking to one of the elven botanists about something, and pressed both palms flat against the bark. Chris sensed it immediately — small, light, two palms pressing against his bark with the weight of a child who wanted to see what would happen.
He tried to respond. What came out was barely a flicker.
Milla pulled her hands back and looked at the bark. Looked at her palms. Then she leaned forward and pressed her ear against the trunk.
"Are you in there?"
The question traveled through bark and wood and network, vibrating along his roots. He registered her voice through the actual sound — the compression wave traveling through air into bark into wood fiber. The clearest thing he'd experienced since the fusion.
He pushed his awareness toward the point where her ear pressed against bark, toward the warmth of her small body against his trunk. For a single stretching moment he almost touched the other side.
Her brother called her away. She went, looking back twice before disappearing around a root. Her hands had left small prints in the bark — palm-shaped, barely visible. The bark kept growing, and within a day the impressions faded.
Chris held onto the memory of them. A beetle had landed on one of the prints before they vanished. He'd noticed that — a weight, a tickle of legs, the faintest scratch. Gone before he could focus on it. But he'd noticed.
The shaman stayed later than usual that evening. The sun was dropping toward the horizon, painting the sky in shades of copper, and she was still at the trunk's base, hands in the soil, symbols glowing faintly. She wasn't speaking the framework language. Something quieter.
"He was present for the child today. The bark where she touched — the temperature changed. Brief. Not enough for most people to catch." She pulled her hands from the soil and wiped them on her coat. "But I caught it."
She stood and looked at the tree.
"Patience." Her voice was low. "Growth takes time. You know that better than anyone."
She walked away. Korr had been standing a few yards away the whole time, watching the perimeter. He hadn't spoken. When the shaman passed him, he grunted something that might have been acknowledgment or might have been a cough. She didn't stop to find out.
Chris tried once more. The bark felt different where Milla had touched it — the grain had shifted slightly as it healed, a swirl pattern where two palms had pressed. He traced the swirl with a thread of awareness. Held it for two seconds before the blur swallowed it.
Two seconds. Three seconds with the bird. Small numbers. But numbers.