“You need me!”it called out, fainter now as I smothered it in pure resolve. This wasn’t a long-term solution—I knew that. I wasn’t even sure it would last the day, especially with the fever and infection worsening. Maybe the monster would keep clawing away, hungry to devour my pain, as the wax moths had done to the honeycomb, until only a brittle shell of me remained.
But for now, for as long as I could, I wanted to be my own.
My knees gave out, the weight of my body sinking down into the soft earth below. I sagged against the abandoned hive box, eyes closing. “I don’t need you.”
Another storm was brewing across the dark and frothy sky. The instant the first drop fell, I felt the monster’s desire to wipe it off our cheek, but I fought that too.
This body was still mine.
The clouds opened just as the plonk of Eva’s walking stick and the shush of her feet sounded in the grass behind me. In seconds, the slow dribble quickened to a roar.
“Arthur?”
A stream of raindrops was already cooling my too-warm skin, making a shiver roll over me.
“Arthur!” Strong hands gripped my shoulders and shook. “You’ve got to get up!”
“Bee girl,” I whispered, eyes fluttering.
Eva hauled me to my feet and nodded to the other side of the meadow. “I think that’s a shed.”
To my bewilderment, she was right. Beyond the sea of rippling violet flowers, there was a simple wooden door, smothered in a mound of green ivy. Eva dragged me toward it, leaning heavily on her walking stick. All the while, the monster’s hunger for the life around us swelled and built inside me. These flowers were different. They seemed to glow with life. My mouth watered, the monster’s thirst stretching through me. It wanted to take the tender petals between our fingertips. It wanted me to get on my knees and rip the plants up, to sink my teeth into the roots and suck the meadow dry.
Mortified, I clutched my shirt with my free hand to keep it still, and together, Eva and I hobbled up to the door of the strange abandoned shed. Bug followed close behind us. As we came nearer, my gaze fell on a circle of stones arranged in what had clearly once been a fire pit, though now the protective ring was covered in a rime of moss and lichen, and wildflowers bloomed where the flames had once burned.
The shed had been built on the flat ground at the bottom of a slope. Wedged between its back wall and the rising hill sat a pile of chopped wood, covered in a tarp that had frayed and been eaten away to nothing more than a scrap now.
Eva tried the door. “It’s locked.”
Of course it was.
She nudged me. “Check the top of the doorframe.”
Wind whipped the rain sideways, throwing skeins of ivy into our faces. Water dripped down my chin as I ran my hand over the top of the doorframe. “No luck.” I pulled away, watching the ivy shrivel back at my touch, green leaves crisping to brown remains. I should have felt shame. I did feel shame, somewhere under all my exhaustion.
Eva crouched, picking up stones near the base of the door and turning them over.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
“Looking for—aha!” Eva pulled a smooth-looking stone from the dirt and brushed it off. Mud streaked her fingers. Eva’s face lit up in fierce triumph as she held up a ceramic figurine. “The turtle!”
She flipped a panel on its belly, slid out a hidden key, and unlocked the door.
We spilled into the tiny room. It was thick with must, the scent of ozone filling my nose and the press of humidity clinging at once to my skin. The shed was windowless, only the barest of slivers of light coming through the cracks between the planks of wood siding. I could make out only a few details in the dim. The decor was stark, leaving little but a camping cot stripped of its bedding at the far end of the room. Bug darted past our ankles, straight for the hollow beneath the cot, with a yowl that spoke to her displeasure at getting rained on.
The second I stepped in, a trapped, panicky feeling twisted inside me. I froze in place. Eva paused too, and her eyes flicked to the open door.
“Tight spaces?” she whispered.
I swallowed hard and nodded once, embarrassed that she’d clocked my reaction. The room was small, but it was also dry, and that was a vast improvement.
The onslaught of rain picked up a notch as Eva’s gaze moved past me to the field we’d abandoned, her expression wilting into the same despair I’d seen as she’d torn frame after frame from the empty hive boxes. “I can’t believe it’s gone.”
“I know.”
Crying made her blue eyes brighter. When she looked at me, a frisson ran a current of awareness over my skin. “What do we do now?”
It was a far more vulnerable question than any other she’d posed since my return to Audrey. Somewhere up this mountain, we’d inadvertently slipped back into former versions of ourselves, clinging to something familiar, as though that would help us survive.
