Overview
From the Branch is a short story in Quarterlives. It follows Jocy Elden and Martin Hartford, two former students of MindTree, as they meet in Toronto as adults and confront the institution that shaped their childhoods.
The story is set mainly in contemporary Toronto around New Year’s 2024. Its final section presents branching outcomes from Jocy and Martin’s decision about whether to attack MindTree, a private educational institution that continues to take in young children.
Plot
Jocy Elden and Martin Hartford first encounter each other in 2003 as toddlers at MindTree. Jocy is being carried into a room for carbogen gas exposure while Martin is being carried out. The program directors have told the Eldens and the Hartfords that their children need the exposure to cure psychic disturbances caused by the invasion of Iraq. Their hands briefly touch before they are separated.
Around New Year’s 2024, Jocy is twenty-five and living alone in an East End Toronto studio apartment. She works remotely in SEO, maintains a strict body and food routine, and spends New Year’s Eve posting to social media before taking the 501 streetcar toward Queen Street West.
Elsewhere in Toronto, Martin is also twenty-five and living in University of Toronto graduate housing. After a failed interaction at a party and a panic episode, he leaves and ends up at The Comrade, the same bar where Jocy has stopped after getting off the streetcar early.
Jocy receives an embarrassing message from Kyle, a casual romantic contact, and Martin comments from a nearby seat. Their conversation turns into flirtation, argument, and mutual testing. They talk about alcohol, food, exercise, philosophy, literature, work, and their shared sense of discipline.
When Martin uses the phrase “ego nexus,” Jocy realizes he attended MindTree. She says she was there from preschool to junior year and escaped after court emancipation. Martin says he attended from pre-k through eighth grade. They toast their rejection of the institution but initially avoid discussing it in detail.
Outside on Queen Street, Jocy becomes emotional after talking about pain and fear. She tells Martin she believes she is too damaged to be good for a person who would be good for her. Martin rejects therapeutic language and MindTree’s logic of improvement through suffering, but Jocy points out that his own rhetoric resembles MindTree’s.
Jocy then says Dr. Khurana is still running MindTree and that a new pre-k cohort has recently entered. Martin asks whether Khurana abused her; Jocy confirms it, and Martin says the same happened to him. Martin proposes killing Khurana. Jocy expands the idea into bombing the twentieth floor where Khurana and the MindTree team gather before the children arrive.
The story then describes three possible branches. In the first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police find bomb precursor materials in Jocy’s apartment after customs officials swab the shipment en route to Toronto. Jocy and Martin are arrested, refuse to blame each other, and receive twenty-year prison sentences.
In the second branch, Jocy and Martin complete the attack. On April 3, 2024, they enter the Banning Capital tower disguised as service workers and leave a large bomb in a twentieth-floor supply closet. The explosion kills thirteen MindTree staff and maims six more. Jocy and Martin flee through Paris and Prague into the Czech countryside, where they eventually live without documents after the trail is lost.
In the branch they choose, Jocy and Martin do not attack MindTree. They go home together to Jocy’s studio apartment, begin a relationship, and build a life. Martin drops out of his master’s program and later works in tech. They do nothing to stop MindTree or help the current cohort, and a documentary crew exposes the institution only many years later. The story ends with Jocy and Martin waiting for the next 501 streetcar, having chosen that branch together.