The tree was wrong.

  Not dramatically — not the kind of wrong that announced itself. The quiet kind. The kind that existed at the edge of perception, in the space between what the eye saw and what the mind expected.

  You noticed first.

  "Was that already like that?"

  We had stopped — or I had stopped and you had stopped at your customary distance — in a section of forest I had passed through the previous day. I had passed through and the forest had been forest and the trees had been trees and the arrangement of trunks and branches had been standard.

  The tree was a pine. Old growth. The kind that had been here for a century or more — thick trunk, lateral branches weighted toward the south side where the light was strongest, the characteristic asymmetry of long-term survival.

  Except the branches were wrong.

  The lateral branches — the ones I remembered pointing south, or should have remembered pointing south — pointed east. Not dramatically east. Slightly. The angle of deviation was visible if you looked for it and invisible if you didn't.

  "You're seeing things," I said.

  The words came out flat. I had spoken to you — the first voluntary sentence since your arrival, if this counted as voluntary.

  You wrote it down.

  "I'm not," you said, to the notebook. "The branches. They were different yesterday."

  "They're trees."

  "Trees don't move."

  "You've been in the forest too long."

  You looked at me — the look of someone who had just heard the subject speak and who understood that the speaking was significant regardless of the content. I had spoken. Not just a word. But a sentence. Two.

  You did not comment on this. You wrote. Then you walked to the tree and examined the branch formations. You touched the bark. Measured something — the distance from trunk to branch-tip, estimated with your hand.

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  "It could be nothing," you said.

  It was nothing. Or it was something that was nothing to me because the category of things-that-mattered had emptied and branch direction was not going to be the thing that refilled it.

  "Trees grow," I said. "Branches shift. Wind. Weight. Snow."

  "Not overnight."

  I did not respond to that. The responding had exhausted its budget. The allocation that the disconnection permitted before silence reasserted itself.

  The branches were wrong. I should have paid more attention to wrongness.

  You sketched it. Quick, precise, shorthand for things that didn't fit standard categories. The tree. The branch angles. The cardinal directions. The date — you were tracking dates, keeping the temporal framework I had abandoned.

  "I'll check tomorrow," you said. "If the branches have moved again, it's not wind."

  The branches would not have moved again. Or they would. The question occupied a category I did not inhabit — curiosity, the desire to understand phenomena, the motivation that drove your existence and that I had once possessed.

  We moved. Or I moved and you followed. The standard configuration — one body ahead, one body behind, ten paces of gradient between them. Through forest that was forest. Past trees that were trees.

  Except.

  A shadow. Half an hour later. On the ground between two rocks. The shape of shadow that a tree produced when the sun was at a certain angle — the geometry of light and obstruction, predictable.

  The shadow was wrong.

  Not dramatically. The same quiet wrongness as the branches. The shadow fell in a direction that suggested the sun was somewhere it wasn't. Small. Dismissable.

  I dismissed it.

  You stopped. Looked at the shadow. Looked at the sun. Looked at the shadow again. Wrote.

  "Did you — " you began.

  "No."

  "You didn't hear the question."

  "The answer is no."

  You wrote that down nevertheless. The whole exchange. Subject spoke. Denied observation. Defensive? Or disinterested.

  Disinterested. The accurate word. I was not denying the wrongness — I was failing to care about it. The branches, the shadow, the atmospheric oddities that you detected and documented were data points in a category that required the expenditure of attention and the expenditure of attention required the kind of motivated engagement that the disconnection had severed.

  But.

  The shadow was wrong. I knew it was wrong the way I knew the branches were wrong — not through careful observation but through the passive awareness that thousands of years had installed. Something in me noticed anomalies without seeking them, catalogued them without prioritizing them. This one was inconsistent.

  Inconsistent with what, the filing system did not specify. Inconsistent with the physical laws that governed light and obstruction? Inconsistent with my memory of this location? Inconsistent with reality?

  The category remained. Unfiled. Unprocessed. Present.

  We walked.

  Behind us was a tree with wrong branches and a shadow with a wrong angle. The forest that was forest except in the details that were not.

  Ahead — more forest. Predictable and normal.

  Except perhaps not.

  You walked behind me, writing as you walked, documenting an environment that might not be behaving the way an environment should.