The green code under Sora's skin was not constant. It moved.
Hana watched it with the focused attention she gave to all phenomena she didn't understand, which meant she was watching it very closely. The code flowed along the lines of Sora's palms and up toward her wrists, visible only at certain angles — when the light came through the canopy in the right direction, or when Sora's hands were very still — and then it would slow and almost stop, and then pulse once, and continue.
"How long has that been happening?" Hana asked.
"I don't know when it started. I noticed it after — a long time. After the forest and I had been here together long enough that some of its processes started running through me instead."
"What processes?"
Sora turned her hands palm-up and looked at them with the expression of someone who has made peace with something they never planned to make peace with. "Memory storage, mostly. The forest is the Remembering Forest — that's what it does. It keeps records of everyone who comes through. The names on the trees, the code in the roots — every trial person who's ever been in this environment left a trace, and the forest keeps it. But a living forest can't run a database indefinitely without something to manage the load."
Hana thought about this very carefully. "It's using you as a memory management system."
"I'm the index," Sora said, with the flat affect of someone stating a fact they have processed completely. "The forest keeps the data. I keep track of where everything is. When someone new comes in —" She nodded at Hana. "When you arrived, I felt it. You felt like a new record being opened."
"Does it hurt?"
"No. It's just — there. Like an extra sense I didn't have before. I know what the forest knows. Which is a lot, after three years."
Hana sat down on one of the large roots. The root was warm in a way that wood shouldn't be — the warmth of something with current running through it. She wrote in her notebook, quickly: Sora = human index for forest memory system. Three years. Code is symbiotic — forest and human running parallel processes. Then she stopped and thought and added: What is her trial?
"What were you supposed to do?" she asked. "Your trial, originally. Before you got stuck."
Sora sat down across from her, knees up, arms around them. It was, Hana thought, the posture of someone who has sat on this same root many times. The posture of a person who has a specific place in a space they never intended to stay.
"My family — my mother and my little brother and me. We came through from Osaka. My mother had been carrying a lot." She said this without elaboration, in the way that people say a lot when they mean something specific and heavy and they're not sure yet if you're someone who will understand. "My trial was about what I knew and what I did with it. I'd been protecting my brother from things for years — things my mother was going through, things I saw and he didn't. I thought I was being good. Protective."
"But?"
"But the forest showed me what it looked like from outside. What protection looks like from the person being protected." She picked at the edge of her thumbnail with her other thumb. "My brother was seven. I'd been managing information for him for two years. The forest showed me all the things he'd figured out on his own, that I thought he didn't know — all the things he'd been carrying alone because I'd taught him, by example, that you carry things alone."
Hana did not say anything. She was very still.
"The trial wanted me to understand that," Sora continued. "And I did understand it. Eventually. But my brother — he came through his own trial environment, and he completed it, and when he got to the nexus, I wasn't there. Because I was still in the forest, working through what I'd seen. And then —" She pressed her lips together. "Then the window started closing. The border started hardening. And I realized I wasn't going to make it out in time, and I made a decision."
"You stayed."
"I let the border close around me. Because the forest was going to need an index permanently — it would have built one out of memory fragments, out of broken trial records, and it would have been incomplete and unstable. And I — I had nowhere else to go. My brother was through. My mother was through. And I was here."
"You chose to stay."
"I chose to be useful. Which is not the same thing as choosing, but it's close enough."
Hana looked at this girl with the code running under her skin and thought: she's thirteen. She looks thirteen and acts like someone much older, because three years of being a forest's memory system will do that to a person, and also because being the kind of person who sacrifices themselves for usefulness starts young and leaves marks.
She thought about her father's notebook. She thought about herself at the kitchen table, sitting with knowledge she'd been afraid to name. She thought about all the things she'd decided, unilaterally, her family couldn't handle.
She thought: Sora is three years ahead of me in the same story.
"The forest," Hana said. "As its index — you know where everything is. Every trial record. Every person who's been through."
"Yes."
"Can you find specific records? If I gave you a name?"
Sora tilted her head slightly. The code in her palms pulsed. "What name?"
"Mei Nakamura. Eleven years old. Came through a portal approximately three years ago. Her family came from Tokyo. There were four of them, three portals opened, and she didn't have one."
Sora went completely still. Not the stillness of thought — the stillness of impact. Of something landing.
"You know Yuki," she said.
"I don't. But the person in the trial environment with my brother does."
A long, complex silence.
"Mei Nakamura is in the forest," Sora said slowly. "She's been here for three years. She came through without a portal — I don't know exactly how, it shouldn't be possible, but the record exists. She arrived at the boundary of this environment and the forest accepted her because it accepts everyone who needs it."
"Is she alive?"
"Yes. She's —" Sora pressed a hand flat against the root she was sitting on, and the code flared briefly visible under the bark. "She's deep in the forest. In the oldest section, Zone 9. She's been — assimilated, in a way. Like me. But younger. And not by choice."
"Can we reach her?"
Sora looked at her with an expression that had several layers to it: exhaustion and hope and something that might have been relief at being asked rather than having to decide alone.
"We can try," she said. "But Hana — before we go. Your trial. The forest won't let you complete it unless you —"
— ✦ —
She stopped mid-sentence. The forest did too — all of it, all at once, the birds and the wind and the distant creak of the old growth, a complete and total silence that had nothing to do with quiet and everything to do with attention. The code on the trees stopped scrolling. The code in Sora's skin stopped moving. And Sora's face changed: went from difficult-subject to something harder, more urgent. "The deletion is starting," she said. "Earlier than the last cycle. Earlier than any cycle since I've been keeping track." She was on her feet before she finished the sentence, scanning the canopy. Hana stood too. "What does deletion mean?" "The forest's memory management. When a zone's records get too fragmented to maintain, the system deletes the zone and rewrites it. Takes everything with it." She grabbed Hana's arm. "Mei is in Zone 9. The deletion is starting in Zone 7 and moving inward." She looked at Hana with the bright, terrible focus of someone who has just understood something that changes the shape of everything. "If we don't get to her before the deletion front does, the forest will overwrite her. And then there will be no record. And then there will be nothing." She ran.