Turn 207 of 226

Wake up and check what the wish has done to us while we slept. We are 390 feet and 151,000 pounds. Then take stock of the state together

The waking is slow. The 151,000 pounds shift against the ground and the ground shifts with them — soil compressing, rubble grinding, a shattered spruce trunk snapping under the 960-times density hip that rolls off it without registering the break. Lena's eyes open and the sky is pale grey and the grey is the thing the morning gives. The first thing she feels is the warmth. Not the warmth from the bunker-busters, not the warmth from Diane's body against hers — the warmth in her stomach, the wish's warmth, and it is larger than it was when she fell asleep. The larger is the thing the sleep allowed. The allowed is the thing the body gave the wish when the body stopped moving and the wish did not.

She lifts her hand. The hand is the same hand — five fingers, dark skin, coarse black hair from wrist to knuckle, the nails cracked and yellow and thickened. But the hand is larger. Not dramatically. Not the tenfold leap of three days ago. The 390-foot frame is seven feet taller than the 383-foot frame that lay down in the treeline, and the seven feet is the thing the wish built in twelve hours of sleep — slow, steady, the accumulation that does not need consciousness. The 151,000 pounds are 1,000 pounds heavier than the 150,000 that fell asleep, and the 1,000 is distributed through the body the way the wish distributes everything now: fat and muscle and bone, all of it thickening together, the density still compounding in layers she cannot count. She can feel the new weight in her thighs. She can feel it in the fat layer over her stomach, the soft apron of flesh that presses against the ground when she rolls to her side. The softness is the thing she chose to keep and the wish is honoring the choice.

Diane stirs beneath her. The 390-foot frames are tangled together in the wreckage — Lena's leg across Diane's hip, Diane's arm under Lena's back, the body hair and dried blood and soil forming a single merged pelt where the two bodies meet. Diane's eyes open and the opening is the thing the animal does without words. The brown eyes find the grey sky and the finding is the thing the waking starts with. Lena's hand finds Diane's face and the face is warm and the warm is the thing the 960-times density gives when the body is at rest. The blood on Diane's mouth is still there. The yellow teeth are still there. The coarse hair along her jaw is still there. The still there is the thing the sleep did not change because the sleep is not about changing what the body is. The sleep is about making the body more of what it already is.

They stand. The standing is the thing the treeline cannot hold — the 390-foot frames rise above the spruce canopy the way transmission towers rise above neighborhoods, the 151,000 pounds distributing across feet that are each the size of a tennis court. The treeline is at their knees. The former base is rubble at their feet. To the south, Interstate 5 is a grey thread cutting through the green, and the green is the thing the state gives them now because the state is theirs. The governor's words. The military's withdrawal. The entire expanse of Washington — the Cascades, the Sound, the Olympic Peninsula, the dry eastern plains — all of it held by two heartbeats that can hear every other heartbeat within twelve miles and smell the Pacific at 200.

Lena's senses reach. The state unfolds on her awareness like a map drawn in heat and sound and smell. To the west, Seattle — 4 million heartbeats, a dense thermal bloom against the cold Sound, the city's traffic a low mechanical hum she can separate from the organic rhythms. To the east, the Cascades — empty now, the military gone, the staging areas cold. To the south, Portland's northern suburbs — quiet, the highways carrying the last military convoys out of the state. To the north, the Canadian border — open, unmanned, the border station abandoned. The state is theirs the way a territory is an animal's. The knowing is the thing the 390-foot frame stands in. The standing is the thing the wish gives. The giving is the thing that does not stop. The not stopping is the thing the warmth is. The warmth is the thing that is still building. The building is the thing the waking did not interrupt. The not interrupting is the thing that is. The is.