The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 by Joe Hill

erupted out of the Joshuas. Pineapple-huge, they crown every branch.
    â€œNow there’s an education for a couple, huh? Charles Darwin agrees with me. Says it’s the most remarkable pollination system in nature. ‘There is no romance more dire and pure than that of the desert moth and the Joshua.’”
    â€œDire?” the girl asks. And learns from the ranger that the Joshua trees may be on the brink of extinction. Botanists believe they are witnessing a coordinated response to crisis. Perhaps a drought, legible in the plants’ purplish leaves, has resulted in this push. Seeds in abundance. The ancient species’ Hail Mary pass. Yucca moths, attracted by the flowers’ penetrating odor, are their heroic spouses, equally dependent, equally endangered; their larval children feast on yucca seeds.
    â€œIt’s an obligate relationship. Each species’ future depends entirely on the other,” the ranger says, and then grins hugely at them. The boy is thinking that the math sounds about right: two species, one fate. The girl wonders, of their own elopement, who is more dependent on whom? What toast might Charles Darwin make were they to break their first vows and get married?
    So they obey the ranger, drive the Charger another quarter mile, park at the deserted base of Warren Peak.
    Angie says she has to pee, and Andy sits on the hood and watches her.
    They set off along the trail, which begins to ascend the ridgeline east of Warren Peak. Now Joshua woodland sprawls around them.
    This is where the bad graft occurs.
    For the rest of her life she will be driven to return to the park, searching for the origin of the feeling that chooses this day to invade her and make its home under her skin.
    Before starting the ascent, each pauses to admire the plant that is the park’s namesake. The Joshua trees look
hilariously
alien. Like Satan’s telephone poles. They’re primitive, irregularly limbed, their branches swooning up and down, sparsely covered with syringe-thin leaves—more like spines, Angie notes. Some mature trees have held their insane poses for a thousand years; they look as if they were on drugs and hallucinating themselves.
    The ranger told them that the plant was named in the nineteenth century by a caravan of Mormons, passing through what they perceived to be a wasteland. They saw a forest of hands, which recalled to them the prayers of the prophet Joshua. But the girl can’t see these plants as any kind of holy augury. She’s thinking Dr. Seuss. Timothy Leary.
    â€œSee the moths, Angie?”
    No wonder they call it a “pulse event”—wings are beating everywhere.
    Unfortunately for Angie, the ranger they encountered had zero information to share on the ghostly Leap. So he could not warn her about the real danger posed to humans by the pulsating Joshuas. Between February and April, the yucca moths arrive like living winds, swirling through Black Rock Canyon. Blossoms detonate. Pollen heaves up.
    Then the Joshua tree sheds a fantastic sum of itself.
    Angie feels dizzy. As she leans out to steady herself against a nearby Joshua tree, her finger is pricked by something sharp. One of the plant’s daggerlike spines. Bewildered, she stares at the spot of red on her finger. Running blood looks exotic next to the etiolated grasses.
    Angie Gonzalez, wild child from Nestor, Pennsylvania, pricks her finger on a desert dagger and becomes an entirely new creature.
    When the Leap occurs, Angie does not register any change whatsoever. She has no idea what has just added its store of life to hers.
    But other creatures of the desert
do
seem to apprehend what is happening. Through the crosshairs of its huge pupils, a tarantula watches Angie’s skin drink in the danger: the pollen from the Joshua mixes with the red blood on her finger. On a fuchsia ledge of limestone, a dozen lizards witness the Leap. They shut their gluey eyes as one, sealing their lucent