“Your turn. Do what I did. Fist closed, nondominant hand.”
The pillowcase was heavy. It felt like a brick in a bag. His stomach turned and, in an instant, he felt both cold and sweaty. A panic rose in his chest, a certain urgency that if he didn’t do exactly what Valentina said at that exact moment, he would never be able to do it.
He did it.
He closed his fist. Squeezed his eyes shut. And stuffed his left arm into the pillowcase.
He felt his knuckles resting against something hard, cool, and smooth like heavy plastic. Then, the rigid surface moved away and an electric shock jolted through his thumb. He sucked in a breath and yanked his arm free.
He held up his left hand and opened his eyes, fearing what he might see. There was nothing. A little redness in the fleshy rise where his thumb joined his palm.
“Ow. Now what happens?”
He looked up at Valentina and felt dizzy from the sight.
Her arm was gone.
No, not gone, made of water with twisting threads of shadow running through it like veins of smoke. The top of her head was the same and the effect was moving, spreading downward. Green watched the line of nothing reach her eyes and the color drain away. It looked as though Valentina had been a tank full of living pigments and now she had sprung a leak. He looked down and made a choked gasp when he saw the leak was literal. Pinks and grays were pooling at Valentina’s feet, glistening wetly on the leaves like spilled paint.
“What’s happening? What’s happening to you?”
“Stay calm, Mr. Green. The venom will not hurt you, but it does affect your perception. Vision especially. It will conceal us, but it also alters our senses in unpredictable ways. Trust my voice. Be suspicious of your eyes.”
Green checked his own arm again and saw the same unpleasant image. Inky branches stretching through dim water. A drowned tree in a rising flood. The sight made his stomach turn.
She tied off the pillowcase and returned it to her backpack.
“We will return this creature to its burrow with our apologies this evening.”
As she stowed the pillowcase with one hand, the other pulled from the bag a section of gnarled log covered in moss. It looked like something she might have just plucked from the forest floor, a joint of punky wood, except it had a polished leather strap attached at each end. She tossed it over one transparent shoulder to hang at her hip, then hoisted on her backpack.
“Follow me.”
She moved on in the direction of the gunshots.
Keeping up with her was a weightless, drunken experience. She was unpleasant to look at, emotionally and physically, a ghost image that his brain was desperate to blink away.
The discomfort was amplified by the fact that Green could no longer see his own limbs, which made him feel further untethered from reality. A phantom following a phantom. Only his heavy breathing and pounding heart kept him feeling anchored and alive.
There were other changes to his vision too. Every tree was outlined in a green shimmer that called to mind night vision goggles. Points of light like living campfire sparks scurried about the underbrush and darted through the air. He didn’t know whether they were insects or inventions of his altered perception.
Thorns and briars tore at his hands and face as they rushed onward. Green pictured himself bleeding rainwater, clear rivulets tumbling into the dark soil. He had no options. Continue to move forward or fall bodily like a mist and feel himself drunk down into the rich, thirsting earth.
His mind groped for handholds. Fragments of memory. Bits of old learning. Essays from college English.
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
He risked closing his eyes for a moment. Mercifully, his eyelids still shut out the light. Then he wasn’tactuallytransparent. It was an illusion.
