He pushed through the rear door and walked toward the tree line. When there was something to think through, the forest was where he did it.
He had been going there since he was seven years old. It was his place.
Not legally -- the land belonged to the county, transitioning past a certain point into a nature preserve maintained by an organisation whose name he had seen on a sign at the trail head and had never bothered to research, because in seven years of daily use he had never once encountered a representative of it and had concluded that the organisation's relationship to the preserve was primarily administrative and that their practical claim to it was therefore considerably weaker than his.
Ownership was also a matter of time and consistent presence. By that standard, the forest was his more completely than anything else in his life.
He had found it by accident the first time. He was seven, slipping out through the rear gate during a supervised outdoor period while the supervising staff member -- a young man named Jacob who had been at Ashveil for three weeks and was still operating under the impression that twelve children with abilities were a manageable number of children -- was fully occupied with an incident involving two children and an uncontrolled telekinetic demonstration near the back wall.
Mars had simply started walking in the direction that wasn't the building.
He walked until the canopy closed over him, and the sound of the orphanage dropped away as suddenly as if someone had shut a door, and the particular silence of a forest that had not entirely decided what it was since the Starburst closed in around him.
He had stopped. Stood there for a while.
Then the dinner bell rang, and he went back in.
He came back the next afternoon. And every afternoon he could manage in the seven years since, which had accumulated into a number he had calculated once and then set aside because the number itself was less interesting than what it had produced.
The forest was different from what the books described as before-the-Starburst forest. He had no personal memory of the comparison, having been three months old when the Event occurred, but he had read enough and watched enough to understand the difference in the abstract: the old forest had been quieter. Not in sound -- in quality. A forest was a system, and the systems that ran through this one had developed since the Event in ways that didn't follow the logic of systems running on ordinary rules.
Growth came back faster than it should when he cleared sections of trail. Not dramatically -- not in the overnight surge of something operating on impossible timescales -- but measurably faster than the same growth in unmodified environments. Things grew in directions that didn't follow the logic of plants pursuing light and water. Two years ago a section of trail had developed a covering of something not quite moss -- low, dense, a dark grey-green that had appeared over the course of a week and continued to expand each day he came back to check.
He had routed around it. Checked it twice. Stopped checking after that, because not all information was actionable, and information about a thing you could neither explain nor control fell clearly into that category.
The animals were different too.
The foxes at the forest's edge watched him with a quality of attention that had nothing in common with the ordinary wariness of foxes -- something more deliberate, more sustained, the attention of a creature that had decided to track something specific and was doing so with intention. Two ravens had started following his trail at a fixed distance roughly eighteen months ago. Always the same interval, close enough to observe clearly but far enough that it wasn't presence exactly. Never approaching. Never falling further behind.
He had done the reading on ravens once, a long evening in the library when the weather had made outdoor work impractical. What he had found: ravens had been considered among the most intelligent non-human animals before the Starburst. After it, the research on corvids had become a specific and somewhat contentious subfield, with a significant portion of the papers arguing for a reassessment of what intelligence meant in the context of a species that had been demonstrably changed by the Event.
He thought about the ravens sometimes while he ran. What he felt, thinking about them, wasn't quite companionship. But it was in the same general direction.
The forest had shaped the training as much as the training had shaped the forest. When he was nine he had started doing pull-ups from the oak at the creek bend, using the lowest solid branch -- thick enough that his hands wrapped around it cleanly, just low enough that he needed a small jump to reach it. By ten he had worn the bark smooth in the two-hand grip position and had started to work on the branches higher up. He had a route through the canopy now, a fixed sequence of jumps and swings and controlled drops that he could run blind, that his hands had learned well enough to trust without the delay of thinking. He had found the sequence by accident at first, then refined it over years until it had the logic of something designed.
Nobody had designed it. It had been built by daily use, incrementally, the way all his best resources had been built.
The trees he used had changed with him. One of the oaks he had spent years working with had grown a second branch off the primary grip branch -- growing in a direction that didn't follow the logic of light-seeking, extending horizontally at exactly the angle that made it useful for a specific part of the upper-body sequence he had been developing the previous winter. He had noticed this in March and had stood at the base of the tree for a while considering it.
He didn't know what it meant. He had considered the possible explanations -- the ordinary kind, the post-Starburst kind -- and found that neither produced a conclusion he was confident in. So he had used the branch and continued to not know.
That was the other thing the forest had taught him. There were categories of information that did not resolve into knowledge you could use, and the practice of sitting with those without demand was worth developing separately from the practice of acting on what you did know. The distinction was important. Acting on incomplete information because the uncertainty was uncomfortable was a different kind of failure from acting on incomplete information because the window for action was closing. The first produced bad decisions. The second was just the cost of operating in a world that didn't wait.
The forest had given him enough examples of both to understand the difference.
He ran the ridge loop every morning in the range of five to seven kilometres depending on the weather and the state of the trail, varying the pace across sections, the incline work on the north face producing a specific kind of load that the flat-ground running didn't reach. In the afternoons he came back for the strength work and whatever he could manage for striking practice -- which, without a partner or a bag, meant the oak tree, padded with layers of cloth wrapped around the trunk at contact height, and the ground for footwork, and the open air for combinations he had pieced together from the three combat manuals he'd found in the library and the recordings he'd watched until the movements transferred from screen to muscle memory.
It wasn't ideal. He knew that. You couldn't learn to take a hit without taking hits, and you couldn't learn to read an opponent from a tree. What he could do was build the foundations -- the conditioning, the mechanics, the muscle memory for positions and angles -- so that when he eventually had something real to train against, he wasn't starting from nothing.
He had lost count of the hours put into that tree.
He had never once considered stopping.
The forest was the only space in his life that had never required him to account for what he was. The building had a constant ambient awareness of his situation -- present in every interaction, in every assessment result posted on the board, in every conversation about futures that didn't include him in any of the obvious ways. The city was worse, on the two occasions he'd seen it. The whole world had been rebuilt around what people could do, and the world's awareness of what he couldn't do followed him through any space that world occupied.
The forest had no awareness of him. Or if it did, it kept it to itself.
Which was, he had decided, the appropriate behaviour.
He walked toward the creek. His tree was where he had left it.