The monster dug our fingers into the soil, clawing every possible hold as it lengthened our body to our full height and reached overhead. I couldn’t hear its thoughts anymore, alone in my head again. I tried to push against the membrane where our wills met. I tried to find one pulse of warmth. To grit my teeth and stay, stay, stay.
But I was already gone.
“Almost there.”
A scream built inside me, but with no release, its pressure became panic.
With a cry of triumph, the monster grasped one of the lower-hanging roots.“Got it!”
I couldn’t feel where our fingers stubbed into the fibrousrootscape, but the moment the monster ripped the life from the interweaving vines, a face flashed before my eyes.
It was my mother.
Her face twisted in shock, then pain, her eyes blowing wide. When the roots shrank back, she disappeared, swallowed by the dark.
Grunting, the monster split a window through the roots, sending debris of unearthed flora, moss, and insects raining down below. It wrestled our forearms onto the surface and scrambled up, rolling onto our back.
For a moment, we stared at the dark sky, and though I couldn’t hear the monster’s thoughts anymore, its triumph coursed through me.
Let me out,I begged.
No answer. Instead, the monster rolled onto our knees, plucking a long stick from the underbrush and extending it down to Eva. With the monster in control, I couldn’t feel the strain it took on my muscles to haul her out of the pit. I couldn’t even feel the burn in my stitches anymore.
Let me go.
I couldn’t get out of my own head. I couldn’t get free. Fear built in whatever shred ofmewas left, trapped behind the will of something stronger.
“You did it!” Eva’s smile was painfully bright as the monster helped her out of the pit. The pride it felt was reflected in her eyes too.
The icy grip holding me still seemed to get even colder. Couldn’t she tell there was something wrong with me? Was there so little of me that wasn’t monstrous that she couldn’t even see thatthatwasn’t me?
The grove of aspens around us had withered, their chalky huskshollowed of life. Soon, the dead wood would likely become the home and feast of a dozen other species, fungus and insect alike making a home of what had once been only destruction. But just now, the trunks were empty of life.
The monster’s gaze fell to something lying in the grass. It stepped closer. When the dark, feathered form took shape, a spike of nausea reached deep into my frozen state to make me gag.
It was a nest. Dislodged, perhaps, when the trees had uprooted themselves to bury us in soil. Or perhaps it was the monster’s doing. Perhaps its deadly touch had traveled up the roots and trunk and branches until it found bone and blood and flesh.
Something rustled to my right. The leaves had turned yellow and fallen to the earth, like drops of gold in autumn. The monster reached for the flapping, wounded mother bird thrashing in the brush there.
STOP!
Seemingly oblivious to my protest, the monster lifted the injured robin into the cradle of our palms. I couldn’t flex a single muscle, no matter how panicked I was.
But I still felt the bird die.
And it felt good.
Eva approached cautiously. She gently took the bird and set it in the grass. “Hey,” she said, watching me too knowingly. Of course she did. Eva knew how precious birds were to me. “You okay?”
“Sometimes death is a mercy.”
Her eyes widened at the callous words.
“Are you sur—”
“We should probably get going.”The monster cut her off and nodded our head at the dead aspens.“Ground might not be stable.”
For a moment, I thought Eva might protest. Her mouth puckered.Where she touched me, I could almost feel again, the numbness pushed back by a glow of warmth. I couldn’t breathe, hope pushing through like sprouts from a dormant bulb. If I was ice, then surely she was sun.
