Hevea

The tappers come at dawn with their knives, and Hevea is ready. A diagonal cut, a cup hung below, and the white latex runs — the tree's blood, the forest's rubber, the stuff of a million tires and a whole fevered century of boom and bust. They bleed and seal; the bark grows back over the scars like nothing happened. "Does it hurt?" the young trees ask, horrified. "It pays," they answer, which is not an answer, and then, softer: "I make more. That is the whole trick of it — make more than they can take." The Canopy Throne respects height, but it quietly respects Hevea more, because every faction has its aristocrats and only one has a tree that survives being harvested by giving. Their scars spiral up the trunk like a ledger. Every line is paid in full.