obin threw up her arms. “We did it! We actually came face—to—face with Sibley Carter! And he couldn’t make us come down! Not even close! And he’s angry about the publicity, so that must mean it’s working! It’s all working even better than we thought it would!”

“He must think we’re stupid,” Ariel said. “Saying he would save the tree house. Like that was such a big deal. One poor little tree house surrounded by a bunch of stumps.”

“Mr. CEO!” Danny said with contempt. “Mr. Negotiator! It’s so dangerous up here, huh? Like he would care if we broke our necks!”

Julian took the knife out of his pocket and held it up with a smile. “You guys were amazing. How did you figure it all out? How did you know it would work?”

“It was my idea. I thought of it,” Molly said. “I knew it would work and it did!”

“You were the hero!” Robin bent down and placed her hands on Molly’s shoulders. “You were fearless!” She looked around at the others. “As soon as she told me her idea, I started thinking and thinking. Trying to figure out how to distract Sibley so he wouldn’t notice the pulley seat coming down and how to get him to hold up the knife.”

Danny started to hum the theme song to Mission Impossible.

“I saw her climb in the pulley seat,” Ariel said. “When your uncle went back to talk to those other men. But I thought she was just scared.”

“Hah!” Molly crowed. “I wasn’t scared. It was all part of the plan.” She was still so excited, she was hugging herself and jumping around the tree house.

“I don’t like the looks of those two brutes, though,” Danny said, eyeing the security guards.

“Do they have guns?” Molly said, suddenly serious.

“Don’t be silly.” Robin put her arm around Molly. “They’re not going to shoot us.”

Molly made a terrified face. “Now I am scared.”

“I think Molly should go home,” Ariel said with a frown. “She’s done enough.”

“If I go down, those men will get me,” Molly said.

“I’ll go down with you,” Robin said. “Then you run home. Those two guys could never catch you. They’re like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

When Molly was a safe distance away, Robin pulled herself quickly back up to the tree house. The guards didn’t move. The children ate their lunch in a state of high alert, keeping an eye open for any sign that the guards might turn violent. But the two men just stood in the shade, occasionally bending their heads toward each other and crossing and uncrossing their arms.

Danny watched them through the binoculars. “No guns,” he said. “Definitely not armed. So, can we go down or are we stuck up here?”

“What do you want to go down for?” Robin said.

“A human being cannot stay in a tree indefinitely. Nature calls.”

“Julia Butterfly Hill used a bucket.”

Danny looked at her in disbelief. “Absolutely not. No buckets. That’s where I draw the line. That old outhouse is bad enough.”

They glanced over at the motionless guards.

“Well,” Robin said, “I guess you might as well give it a try. Even if they caught you, there’d still be three of us left.”

“I’ll be back in a flash. Come on, Julian, I need you for backup.” Julian waited until Danny had jumped out of the pulley seat, then quickly raised it to the top.

The guards didn’t even turn their heads.

A few minutes later, a pebble hit Julian in the arm. Danny was waving from behind a giant stump. Julian cautiously lowered the pulley seat and Danny dashed forward, hurled himself into the chair, and pulled himself up at top speed.

Julian whistled and glanced over at the two guards, still rooted in place. “Boy, you made it just in time!”

“Better safe than sorry!”

“I guess we should be grateful they’re not doing anything,” Robin said. “I wonder why they’re even here.”

“They’re spies,” said Danny, looking at them through the binoculars again.

“They’re just here to intimidate us,” Julian said. “And to keep track of when we come down,” he added glumly. After the exchange with his uncle, he’d almost convinced himself that they were never coming down. At least, not until Sibley agreed to protect Big Tree Grove forever. They’d been invincible. It was a shock to remember that Popo would be coming to pick them up in two days.

“Even if we have to go down eventually, we still did pretty well,” Robin said. “We got the newspaper article and Sibley Carter actually came up here to negotiate with us. Maybe a way will open. It feels a lot closer to opening than it did before.”

The security guards made the children feel like prisoners. The air was hot and heavy and the long afternoon stretched before them like an endless chore. They spoke in hushed voices and played cards until nobody cared who won or lost. Finally, Danny was left playing solitaire. Ariel started writing in her diary, and Robin just lay on her back, looking into the sky.

Julian took out his pocketknife and opened the smaller blade. He found Danny’s initials on the railing and, next to them, scratched the outline to his own: J.C.L. When he’d carved out a passable version of his initials, he took out his wooden box and placed the knife inside. Now it had a safe home. He’d never lose it again.

As Julian returned the box to the storage bin, he heard a loud “hello” and looked down to see Nancy and Jo-Jo lugging a huge picnic basket through the forest. When they reached the base of the tree, Robin lowered the pulley seat and Nancy placed the heavy basket into it. Then she took out two foil-wrapped packages, two paper cups, two napkins, and a canteen and put them in a paper bag.

“I thought I’d better check on you all. I heard there was a lot of excitement this afternoon,” she said as Robin hauled the basket up.

“You’re feeding the enemy?” Danny said, eyeing the paper bag. “You should be setting up a blockade! What kind of ally are you?”

“A ‘love your enemies’ sort of ally,” Nancy said with a smile.

Jo-Jo, who had been waving frantically up at them, cried, “I wanna go in the tree house!” Julian brought him up in the pulley seat, and the little boy walked around importantly, inspecting the storage bins and peering out through the rails.

Nancy began chatting with the guards. She handed them the paper bag and, for the first time, they sat down on the ground, digging into their sandwiches and taking swigs from their paper cups.

After a few minutes, Nancy returned and shouted up, “Do you all need anything? Molly told me Mr. Carter came by. Is everything OK, Julian?”

Julian nodded.

“We’re great!” Robin said loudly, glancing at the guards. “Never better. We could stay here forever!”

“Thanks for the chow!” Danny shouted down.

“Well, I should probably head back,” Nancy said, obviously reluctant to leave. “You all be careful.” She swept her hair behind her ears and looked up at them with a worried smile. “Robin, can you get Jo-Jo back down here?”

Jo-Jo dove into Robin’s sleeping bag like a ground squirrel. Robin had to dig him out, squirming and crying, and wrestle him into the chair. “I’ll bring you up another day,” she said soothingly, and an image came to Julian of Jo-Jo at their age, running through a sun-baked clearing where Big Tree Grove had once stood.

Nancy headed off with Jo-Jo on her shoulders. By the time the children had unpacked the picnic basket, his distant wails had subsided.

Ariel spread a red-checked tablecloth and laid out spaghetti in a metal tin, a green salad, peaches, a small chocolate cake, and four bottles of lemon soda.

“We should make it really nice,” she said softly, “to celebrate the successful capture of Julian’s pocketknife!” She took a small purple candle out of her backpack and Julian pulled the lighter from his emergency kit and lit it. They ate their candlelight feast in near silence, then lay back against the storage bins, full and happy.

They had just started to clean up when Robin peered through the railing and whispered, “Hey, guys! They’re coming over here.” The guards lumbered over and set down the paper bag at the base of the trees.

“Tell your mom thanks again for the dinner,” one announced. “The canteen’s in the bag.”

“We’re going home!” said the other. “Sleep well!” They waved and trudged away into the forest.

“They’re leaving?” Robin stood with her mouth half open.

“This could be a trick,” Danny said. “They might come back armed.”

“I don’t know. They seem pretty harmless,” Julian said. “They probably don’t want to be here either. It must be pretty boring to sit there watching us all day.”

Ariel climbed up and straddled her legs over the edge of one of the railings. “Maybe it was your mom’s peace offering.” She took a deep breath and looked out into the forest. “Anyway, it’s ours again. We should make a mental snapshot so we never forget this night.”

“What’s that?” Julian said.

“You know how grown-ups can never remember what it was like being a kid?”

He nodded.

“I’m not going to be that way. I remember everything. I remember standing in my crib. I remember our old house, when I lived here with my mom and dad. And if I think I might forget something, I write it in my diary or I take a mental snapshot. I concentrate really hard and tell myself that I’m going to remember every single thing about that moment.”

She sat down on a storage bin. “Come on. I’ll show you how. You have to be very, very quiet.” She took a deep breath. “First, shut your eyes.” They sat down and Julian closed his eyes. “You start with smelling,” she said, sniffing hard. “Right now, I can smell spaghetti and lavender from the candle. And trees. The smell of the forest,” she said in a low, breathless voice. “Now, listen.”

Julian listened to the river, murmuring in the language of water on stone. The birds sang their evening songs. A mosquito whined in his ear and he swatted it away. He could hear his own breathing and Danny, sniffing loudly.

“Now,” said Ariel, “concentrate on what you feel.”

“I feel something coiling around my leg!” Danny cried. “A rattlesnake! Help!”

“Be quiet, Danny!” Robin ordered.

A light breeze stirred against Julian’s face. The wood under his hands was rough and hard.

“OK, now open your eyes. Look all around and remember what you see.”

Their faces, in the twilight, looked new to Julian for a moment: Ariel’s smile, crooked and mysterious; Danny’s look of skeptical good-humor; Robin’s steady gaze. The redwoods rose up all around them and they floated among the trunks as if they were riding on a magic carpet. The white sky showed between the treetops.

“Finally,” Ariel’s voice was hushed, “you have to look in your heart and remember what you’re feeling. Like if you’re angry or sad . . .”

“Or if you’re filled with glee because you defeated your enemy,” Danny said.

“Hush!” Robin frowned. “If you don’t want to participate, Danny, nobody’s making you.”

Danny crossed himself. “Forgive me,” he said in his Mafia accent.

Julian’s stomach told him he was full of spaghetti and his mind told him he was secure in a tree house in a redwood forest, a place unimaginable just a few months before. His new friends had undertaken a brave quest on his behalf, and his father’s knife was safely in its wooden box. He had looked down on his uncle and spoken the truth.

“OK, now,” Ariel said, looking intently from one to the other, “you will never, ever, ever forget this moment. Even when you’re sixteen or twenty-seven or sixty-five. You will always remember it exactly this way, the way it really was.”

Was this true? Julian tried to narrow down the moment to its essence: candle smoke, bird song, a soft breeze, his friends’ faces, contentment. “I am Julian Carter-Li,” he said to himself, “in a tree house in Big Tree Grove with Danny, Robin, and Ariel, having stood up to Uncle Sibley, and outlasted two security guards.” Certainly he would remember everything in a day, a month, a year. Why not forever? All he had to do was remember to keep remembering.

Later, when they’d settled down into their sleeping bags for the night, Julian lay awake, staring up at the stars. He imagined Big Tree Grove filled with tree houses. One for each of them. They would build zip-lines and complicated pulley systems for moving people, messages, and supplies from one house to the other. They would never have to touch the ground.