In the autumn of 1997, Luna's car died on a forgotten stretch of Pender Hollow Road in Balsam County, where the air smelled of wet pine and something metallic. The only sign of life was a sawmill whose lights blazed at two in the morning, its blade still singing through wood that seemed to bleed a dark, sticky sap. The night foreman, a gaunt man named Darrow, spoke in a low, careful voice about a contract the mill had with the woods themselves — a debt that had to be paid in timber and something more. When the saw hit a knot and the blade shuddered, she saw what came out of the log: not sawdust, but hair and teeth and a sound like a man trying to scream underwater. Luna ran, but the mill's lights followed her down the road, and when she looked back, the trees along Pender Hollow had begun to shift, their roots dragging closer inch by inch. A quiet, slow-burn story about the price of taking from the land, and the debts that outlast us.