Chapter 1

The beast approached neither stealth nor apology. Its diesel stench tasted like ancient death as it gusted in on the breeze that flipped around my leaves. My residents had no idea what was coming and I had no way of warning them, no way to escape. Vibrations travelled through rock and dirt and shook loose a thousand filaments from where they fed in the soil. When the machine hit, my foundation cracked, but I held on, so the metal blade bit into the ground around my roots and chewed and gnawed and loosened my grip. A section of bark was ripped away, revealing a clearer layer of a much older wound, its chevron pattern a reminder of my sacred duty. My branches shook and the family of ringtails in my hollow squirmed around each other in fear. The beast backed away. But then it revved louder, and when it came at me again, it was as unstoppable as the north wind.

I had failed. The bulldozer was not permitted here. With a silent outcry I was torn free from the earth and left to die as the metal monster continued to devour its way towards the heart of creation … 

A blast from Mr Mason’s whistle drilled a new hole in my skull, and I sat up so fast that my English essay tried to fly away. I snatched at the errant paper and then looked up to see if anyone had noticed me drifting off to sleep. Except I wasn’t sure I’d actually been asleep. One minute I’d been silently laughing at the guys on the soccer team trying to hold their half-squats, and the next I’d been facing down a bulldozer. I’d had daydream visions before, but they weren’t usually so … consuming. Nor had I ever been a tree. That was definitely new.

I leant back against the peppermint gum and extricated a few bits of bark from my messy plait. Perhaps the grassy edge of the school oval was not the best spot for doing homework after all.

On the field, the soccer team were thankfully ignoring me, distracted by a scuffle between two of the players. Noah was trying to break it up, but my friend wasn’t having a lot of success because one of the fighters was flailing his limbs around like he had a spider in his ear. Bane’s dark fringe flicked around as he swung his elbow at his opponent, and Noah almost copped the rebound when he tried to intercept it.

Bane, of course, wasn’t his real name. Ben Millard. Bane of my life. Noah and I had nicknamed him years ago after he’d ‘accidentally’ set my locker on fire. He’d picked on me since kindergarten, and no one could remember what had started it. All I knew was that his tight lips and freaky stare were always waiting for me when I forgot to steer clear of him. He was like a socially inept child who became aggressive every time anyone inadvertently tripped over his schoolbag while carrying four red freezies. It wasn’t like I’d asked him to try to catch me. It wasn’tmy fault one of the freezies had ended up down his shirt. He reminded me of a toddler who couldn’t seem to grow out of the biting-people phase. In fact, were t