The impending destruction of a forest triggers a battle between two siblings, and nature and humankind, in a gripping and provocative novel by the author of The Canopy Keepers.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Veronica G. Henry’s A Breathless Sky, which is out December 17th 2024.
As climate disasters wreak havoc, a sister and brother take opposing sides on the fate of the human race.
Syrah Carthan wants to save it. A tour guide for the Sequoia National Park, Syrah has an affinity for the millennia-old Giants that extends to Rhiza, a subterranean world as ancient as Earth itself. Syrah is the reluctant heir apparent as its Keeper. Her duty is to maintain a balance between nature and humans. But Syrah’s greatest adversary has his duty as well.
Romelo, Syrah’s brother, wants humankind to get what it deserves. To protect the forests, he’s already instigated one battle that ended in chaos and death. To reverse the near extinction of the magnificent trees, Romelo’s next move is to conspire with the sequoias themselves. If all goes according to plan, it will leave human beings absolutely breathless.
The siblings are going to battle. In the worlds above and below, only one of them can emerge victorious.
Chapter One
Sequoia National Park
The Giant known as General Sherman
April 2043
“By our best guess, General Sherman here is over two thousand years old,” Syrah explains to the host of park visitors strung out around her like a necklace of broken pearls. There’s a gray-haired couple, a teen or two with peach-fuzzed upper lips and pimples. A few onlookers succumbing to middle-aged paunch. Eager ones, the urge to learn, to do good, all but dripping from their pores. A bull of a gentleman wearing the raised eyebrow of a skeptic, fast-blinking believers. More Black faces than she’s seen in these groups before, at least. To a letter, though, and to Syrah’s credit, all hanging on her every word, all rapt like children in a griot’s capable hands. “This Giant is one segment of an entire ecosystem. Did you know that they’re social beings? They talk—not exactly the way we do, but they communicate all the same. These trees support one another, care for their sick, mourn their dead. They are historians. Hermann Hesse called them ‘the most penetrating of preachers,’ and he was right.”
It’s silly after all this time, but the words never fail to choke her up. This community of trees, they call to her . . . Come, rest here with us. Syrah wishes she could be like them, setting down roots, growing wild and untamed. She catches herself, lost once again in pointless rumination, and returns her attention to the group.
She ignores the people who are nodding, offering encouraging half smiles. She focuses instead on two men, one with a cornered badger’s hostility bunched up in the veins of his neck, another as yet unreadable.
“Across this national park, there are four thousand Giants. But none older than this one.” She gestures at the wrinkled, cinnamon tree trunk. “The General’s cleaned about fifteen hundred tons of carbon dioxide from the air in its lifetime. Multiply that by every sequoia in the state, then think about all the trees in the country”—Syrah pauses, meets each expectant gaze—“and the world.”
Murmurs of awe and wonder. Syrah is stunned; each group is different, ranging from mildly interested to can’t be bothered, but this crew, she’s actually reaching some of them. All except the hostile one. Her eyes have rolled over him and snagged at least twice while she’s speaking. The man’s arms aren’t folded across his chest. No smirk mars his otherwise painfully ordinary features. But his stance is loose, that of a boxer sizing up the person in the other corner of the ring. Even before she became Rhiza, she was no slouch. Now, she’d sweep the forest floor with him.
“And you know what that means,” she says, shifting her attention to an eager stump of a woman, one of Syrah’s clear supporters in the group.
“It means horseshit,” the badger barks.
Syrah sighs. The gray-haired couple shoot him a reproachful look, but he ignores them and bulldozes his way forward. He bumps another man, who spins on him like he’s ready to unleash a string of curses but stifles the rebuff when he takes in the badger’s size. “It means that you got your priorities all wrong.” He stabs a thumb over his shoulder. “When’s the last time you left the park? Homeless are overrunning all the towns between here and Los Angeles. We got kids down there that can’t get one decent meal a day. And if that ain’t enough for you, I passed three sorry dogs roaming the street on my way up here. That means to me that you, and everyone parroting this conservation bullshit, are clueless. Or you just care more for these goddamn trees than you do people.”
For her part, Syrah levels the man with a look. His advance comes to an abrupt stop.
“What I’m saying is that I care so much for people that I want them—I want you—to understand that without the Giants, sooner than you think, there won’t be anybody left to argue the particulars.” That bit earns her a few mutters from the group.
Point to Syrah, she thinks with a self-satisfied smile. But the man? That just annoys him.
“Where you go wrong is you’re focusing too far in the future.” The badger isn’t giving up so easily. “We’ve got problems to solve in the here and now.”
Syrah shudders then. She runs her hands up and down her arms, grimacing. Her fungi are choosing this moment to flare?
“If you would allow me to get on with my presentation, perhaps we can—”
“No, I won’t allow it. I want you to answer me.”
Syrah tilts her head, measuring. “What did you even come up here for? Harassing a tour guide.” She scoffs. “Pretty sad, don’t you think? You want a fight, you need to take it to—”
“I’m not going to stand by while you lie to them.” The man takes another step, and Syrah closes the distance.
Syrah is trembling now, struggling. While the two of them exchange heated words, the others in the group fall back. In the midst of all that, she catches sight of the other man—the unreadable one—standing at the edge of the crowd. He’s studying the whole exchange intently, fingering his chin. He’s got eyes the color of tree leaves, green in the full of summer, assessing everything, not just the two idiots arguing, but the entire forest.
After a brief nod, as if he’s come to some important conclusion, the man weaves his way forward until he stands near Syrah and the denier.
“If you are quite done,” he says, gaze firmly fixed on the man, “I have something of real importance to discuss with our guide here.”
The denier grinds his jaw until Syrah imagines his teeth are on the verge of cracking. With a wave of his hand, the denier relents. “She’s all yours.”
“You were here for it all,” the man says by way of introduction.
Syrah sighs. “I have a job to do. Say what you have to say, and let me get back to it.” By now, the crowd has dispersed.
“The bear attack here last summer, coyotes and dogs down in Three Rivers, a suspiciously coinciding momentary shift in the mycorrhizal network.”
Syrah is halfway turned toward her wary group, but her neck snaps back to the all-too-knowledgeable stranger. “Can you give me one moment, please,” she mumbles to them and then gestures for the man to accompany her a short distance away. “Who are you? And what exactly do you think you know?”
The man’s hand reaches into his back pocket and emerges with a relic, what looks like a business card. He hands it over. “Dr. Baron Anthony. I’m a wildlife biologist with the US Forest Service. I’m here at the request of a consortium of interested parties—mostly private.”
“To do what?” Syrah asks, taking the card.
“Syrah Carthan, former fire chief of Station Ninety-Three,” the biologist rattles off. “Quit in a huff when your prescribed burn went wrong. You huddled for a bit but mysteriously reappeared, helping park visitors battle a bear. Helping a woman whose dog had turned on her, partnering up with a coyote, of all things. And animals all over the region went crazy. After everything died down, you spent some time in Compton with your parents, some here with Dane Young. Then you disappeared. For the last six months. And when you surface, it’s under the guise of park guide? Look, the rest of the country may have moved on to the latest disaster or skirmish, but I and the group I lead, we know that there’s something more to what happened here. And you’re at the center of it.”
In spite of herself, Syrah is impressed. The man has done his homework.
She rubs those arms again, and her fungi stand down. “Thanks for the walk down bad memory lane. I would expect someone with your backing to have a better way to spend your time than chasing ghosts that don’t exist. I made a mistake; I chose a different profession. One that keeps me close to the park and forest that I love and have fought my whole life to protect. Sorry to disappoint you, but there’s nothing more to it.”
“Any thoughts on what caused the animals to turn that way?”
Syrah bristles again but shakes her head. “You’re the biologist, you tell me.”
The man doesn’t try to intimidate or overpower. His is a confidence borne of determination, at least to Syrah’s eyes. “That’s exactly what I plan to do. The winter’s done for, or whatever passes for winter around here anymore. That stalled my progress, but not my mission. I’m going to be combing through this forest and bringing a lot of people with me. We’ll get to the bottom of this with or without your help. I’d like for it to be with your help, if that matters. But either way, I will have my answers. And I’m starting, amassing my team now. There’s nothing you or the park service can do to stop it, so help me.”
There’s no way. It’s not possible. He can’t discover Rhiza; it’s never happened before, and it won’t happen now. But there’s something about this man, something very determined, and it’s set Syrah’s fungi on edge. She—they—cannot have this man and his team, whoever they are, trampling through Sequoia. She won’t stand for it.
Syrah retreats, rubbing furiously at her forearms, then turns and sprints away from the biologist and her group of tourists. After she’s gained enough distance from everyone, she hides behind a tree and glances back. Her group stands blinking, shuffling around aimlessly, before they begin to disperse like wandering sheep. The loudmouthed climate denier wears a self-satisfied smirk. The watcher, as Syrah has come to think of him, remains long after everyone else has gone.
