Rootless by Chris Howard

into one. Jawbone walked with her mouth stern and the women gave way as their captain hustled by. But Alpha joked with her compadres, slapping at their outstretched hands.
    In the distance, I heard generators growl and the music started again, guitars crashing and drums surging and each one fighting the other for control.
    “Here we are,” Jawbone said finally. We were right in the middle of the city and on the edge of a clearing, an empty stretch of concrete and mud. And in the middle of that clearing was what they’d brought me to see.
    I stopped dead and felt dizzy just trying to take in the sight of it.
    It was incredible work. Stunning. Even though the years had caked everything in rust.
    A low canopy of copper ferns mingled with cypress. Palm leaves, carved from tin, dangled from crooked spokes. The shortness gave the forest a softness, a sweetness I’d rarely considered, always striving for the biggest, tallest trees, always climbing as high as the scaffold would take me. But the lack of height had another purpose. It served to accentuate what had been built at the center.
    I stumbled as I stared up at the unfinished statue. I fell against jagged shrubs, and Alpha grabbed me, pulling me so I could lean against her.
    “What do you think?” said Jawbone, peering with me at the rusty masterpiece.
    I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t say anything.
    “Can you finish it?” Alpha asked.
    I nodded.
    I could finish it. Or at least I would try. Because there, in the middle of the forest, rising up a hundred feet high, was something prettier than any tree I’d ever seen. A statue of a woman with arms spread wide and one leg lifted like she was dancing. And not just any woman, either. I knew it even though the head was unfinished and the hair was missing. I knew it deep down in my bones.
    The statue was the tattoo woman. Zee’s mother.
    Frost’s wife.
     
    Whoever had built the statue had got the proportions perfect, not selling her short by making the boobs too big or the legs more curvy.They’d been true to the slope of her shoulders, the delicate way she held up her neck. But what really got me, what blew me away, was how they’d captured the tree.
    They’d built a separate installation for it, then woven one statue with the other, bending the steel branches so they gripped the woman’s waist, the leaves hanging loose so they’d turn in the breeze, shimmering where all else was rust. I studied their texture.
    Brass. Of course.
    Thin and shiny and perfect. And I knew I’d have never thought of brass. Not in a million years.
    “Used to light up,” Alpha said. “Switch different colors, till the wiring got messed.”
    “Where’d it come from?” I pushed myself forward.
    “Came from right here,” said Jawbone. “We had a craftsman. An artist. This was before I was born. Back when the pirates were still united. When we fought as the Army of the Fallen Sun.”
    “And this army had a tree builder?”
    “He built the forest here, some others we lost in the lowlands. Swamps, people would have called them. Once upon a time.”
    “But what about the woman?”
    “She was found not far from here, down near the South Wall. Our women say she came from the Other Side.”
    “You ever seen the Wall?” Alpha said, and I nodded, picturing the memory screen. “Then you know that’s impossible.”
    “Myth. Legend.” Jawbone waved her hand in the air. “The story goes that she was beautiful and the tattoo she wore was more beautiful, still. Our tree builder fell in love with her, began building this tohonor her. And I like to think, to honor all women. Just as he’d honored life through his building of trees.”
    “But he didn’t finish?”
    “No. He and his muse vanished. Just before the city was destroyed by the Purple Hand.”
    “GenTech?”
    “It was the end of our resistance. And that’s where the story ends. Until you. Finish the statue, and you’re free to leave the city.”
    I stared up at