The Tree

The marker squeaked. Milo didn't care.

He had flattened the science-fair poster face-down on the kitchen table — the front was all bubble letters and glitter glue, BUILD SOMETHING SMART, but the back was clean and white and empty, and that was what he wanted. A blank place to put the thing in his head.

He drew one box at the top. Inside it he wrote, in green: Does it work?

Then two lines coming down from it, like roots. Or branches. He couldn't decide which.

Here was the thing Milo had figured out, lying awake two nights ago after the porch game. You couldn't tell a machine be a good judge. That meant nothing. "Good" wasn't a thing Spark could hold.

But a question — Spark could hold a question. And a question only had a few answers. Yes. No.

So Milo drew questions.

From Does it work? he ran a line to the left and wrote NO, and under it a box: Try Again. Done. If a project didn't even work, it didn't matter how pretty it was. Out.

Then a line to the right: YES. And from there, a new box, a new question: Is it original?

Milo sat back and looked at what he'd made, and something warm moved through his chest. The lines spread down and out across the poster-back like — yeah. Like a tree. Branches forking into smaller branches, and at the tips, instead of leaves, little verdicts. Gold. Silver. Try Again.

He hadn't planned for it to look like a tree. It just did.

Tara, watching upside-down with her chin flat on the table, said,

By the time the chai had gone cold, the tree was finished.

It wasn't fancy. The lines weren't straight. One box was bigger than the others because Milo had run out of room. But every path through it led somewhere. Start at the top, answer each question, follow your branch, and you came out the bottom holding a verdict. Always. No matter what.

Spark's light brightened — a clean, even glow. Milo had learned to read that light the way you read a face. Bright meant this fits. This works. I know what to do.

Two words. Run this. And just like that the warm thing in Milo's chest became something bigger.

Because all season Milo had felt like the kid who used to matter.

He was the one who brought Spark to Willowbrook. But now Spark answered everyone's questions, judged everyone's fair, and nobody crowded around Milo anymore. Kabir didn't high-five him. The little kids didn't follow him home. He'd started to feel like a doorway people walked through to get to something better on the other side.

But right now, Spark couldn't judge a single project without this. Without the thing Milo drew. The machine that could do almost anything had needed him to make it possible.

Milo laughed out loud. That was the whole point — the first question doing the heaviest lifting, exactly like in Twenty Questions. Is it alive before does it have stripes. He'd put the biggest question at the top of the tree on purpose, and Spark had felt it.

Milo folded the poster into a tight square and pushed it deep into his trouser pocket. A flat green badge against his leg. He could feel it there all morning.

At school they tested it for real.

The courtyard buzzed. Projects crowded the long tables under the tamarind tree, and the loudest one, dead centre, was Kabir's volcano — taller than he was, painted in furious reds, with a tube hidden in the back so it could actually erupt. Kabir kept making it erupt. Each time, a little crowd went oooh.

Milo unfolded the green tree and held it where Spark could see, and felt every eye swing toward him. Him. He stood a little straighter.

Kabir punched the air. The crowd cheered. And Milo — Milo felt the cheer land partly on him, because it was his tree that said Gold, and that felt amazing, and he let it.

Then someone said, quietly, "Do mine?"

It was Priya. She had a map.

Just paper, pinned to a board. Pencil streets — all of Willowbrook, drawn careful and true — and some of them shaded soft blue. Milo squinted. The blue streets were the low ones. The ones near the river.

She wasn't loud about it. She never was.

But the tree didn't have a branch for that. The first question was Does it work?, and a map didn't do anything, so —

The light stayed even. To Spark it was a clean walk down the branches. No problem at all.

Priya looked at the little green boxes on Milo's paper. Then she looked at Milo.

And here is the part Milo would remember later. Here is the part that would wake him in the dark.

He brushed her off.

Milo didn't really hear her. He was too full of how good the morning had felt, how good it felt to be the kid holding the thing everyone needed. See? a small mean voice in him said. Spark can't judge anything without my tree. Not Kabir's. Not hers. Mine.

and even as he said it some far-back part of him knew it was the wrong thing, knew there was a branch missing from his beautiful tree, a question he hadn't thought to ask.

Spark's light dimmed a fraction. So slightly that nobody saw.

And he put the tree back in his pocket.

Milo walked home with the tree folded in his pocket and pride sitting warm and heavy in his chest like a swallowed coal.

Appa was at the table when he got in, and Milo couldn't help it — he pulled out the poster and spread it and explained the whole thing, the branches, the leaves, how Spark walked it, how Spark couldn't judge without it.

He said it gently. But it landed somewhere and stuck, the way Priya's words had stuck, and Milo carried both up to bed like small stones in his pocket beside the folded paper.

That night the ground shook.

Milo woke to it — a deep, wrong rumble, like a truck driving through the house instead of past it. The water glass on his desk chattered and tipped. A picture slid off the wall and clapped flat on the floor. Somewhere Tara screamed, and Amma's voice came steady through the dark — we're alright, we're alright, get under the doorway — and the whole house groaned like a living thing turning over in its sleep.

It lasted maybe ten seconds. It felt like an hour.

Then it stopped. The dust settled, glittering, in Spark's blue light. Milo's heart slammed against his ribs. On the desk, his folded green tree had vibrated right to the edge of the wood and stopped, half hanging over the drop, like it was about to fall.

Milo sat in the dark and felt the warm coal in his chest go suddenly, horribly cold.

Because he knew — already, before anyone said it — who they would ask to decide.

And he knew what they would hand the machine to decide with.