TEN
IT WAS A CURIOUS THING to find her outside, uniformed and idle, in the middle of the day. Gideon plucked another strand of usnea from the skeletal remains of a tree and glanced toward the dock where she sat, unaware of his presence, leaning against a corner post. He lifted another clump of the pale lichen from a higher branch. It was so like balls of tangled hair that he’d imagined a bizarre native ritual the first time he saw it draped on the branches, but now he carried a*****e of it with him at all times.
The weight of the lichen in his pack was inconsequential. He marked the quality of the plant in his mental notebook on the subject, scarcely believing he’d found an organism that embodied perfection this way, this heady marriage of insubstantiality and potency. He glanced at her
