The Angel of the Harvest wished it knew what season it was.

Not that it mattered for California, the land without weather. The trees are no guide either - everblue Eucalyptus trees long ago murder-suicide-arsoned all their competitors. Ghostly white bark peels from their sides in massive cascading sheets, maximizing burnable surfaces, while a constant rain of broken branches and fallen leaves render the ground as flammable as a carpet of tissue paper. The Angel had no internal clock, and the idea of checking its chronological state against Pope Gregory's numbering system felt quaint and small minded. The world was what it was. 

But still, the long arc of its existence bent towards wanting to know when the flowers would come back.

Surely at least some of them had made it.

But...

But...

But! First! But first! 

But first it ran!

That crouch-curtsey-bow, one leg back, tensile spring coils bent to tension setting 05, the other leg up and crooked like a ballet dancer - then launch! Touching down for just a second, and skipping! Skipping at speed, multiple short jumps, each gentle brush of toetip communicating a mechanical pulse of energy. Hitting a tree branch and pirouetting up, across to the next, reaching up to grasp branches. She flips upside down like an unlucky cockatoo, adjusting away from the dry rot, swinging across to a huge clustered parasitic branch and scrambling up. So many branches were dead or dying, grave goods for future funeral pyres, but the core of the structure was as solid as oak, and it was that she made her way up. Every movement brought risk, swimming through a haze of structural calculations and constantly adjusted route mapping, a fog of thought that took a second priority to strength, to speed, to height. Up. Up. Up. The world through the wicker mask glowed in the light of that long distant sun. Enough of maps, of lore, of calculation, of digital updates and bloodless factoids. She wanted to climb as high as she could and see the world through her own eyes. She wanted to see the colossus through her own eyes. She had a thousand years of rust and regret weighing her down, but it was not enough to outweigh the buoyancy of getting to meet the sun again.