Throat burning, Anya gripped Perrine’s hands. “I’m already dying, Perrine.” Her friend’s face crumpled. “Please.Go.” Anya smiled tearfully, squeezing her hands tight. “When you open your restaurant, name something sweet for me.”
Sabina, who had been watching Anya carefully, grabbed Perrine by the elbow. “Come.”
“Fuck,” Perrine gasped, squeezing Anya’s hands back. With one last look and a clipped sob, Perrine relented, heading east as quick as she could without losing Sabina.
Anya stood where she was, waiting. She needed to ensure the swarm followed her, and not them. Moments passed. She could hear them, now, the buzzing in her ears joining the buzzing under her skin. Then, she saw it – a glistening black cloud, the size of a man.
And it saw her, abruptly shifting in her direction, forming in the shape of a giant horn.
Without stopping to think or orient herself, she took off at a sprint. She must lead the swarm away – away from the river, away from the others. She didn’t have time to question where she went. She ran the way her feet carried her, trusting them.
The swarm grew closer.
Her path took her through a small clearing in the thick pines. The sudden brightness of the sun nearly blinded her. For a few moments, she could stand it, but soon tears were streaming down her face and her eyes began to burn. Wincing, she threw her arms over her face. As she did, her foot caught in a tangle of mountain rose and she tripped. When she landed, she was overwhelmed by the cloying scent of flowers and the prick of tiny thorns against her exposed wrists, by the buzzing behind her, cacophonous, disorienting. She rose to her knees. They were almost upon her. There was nowhere to run.
She ducked her head into her hands and braced for death. The swarm engulfed her.
She couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. She felt them crawling over every inch of her body, under all her clothes, in her ears, up her nose, trying to slip past her sealed lips. Microscopic tongues tasted every inch of her skin. She waited for the biting. Waited.
Waited.
All at once, almost as suddenly as they had subsumed her, they clambered off her and flew away. The glistening black cloud vanished into the trees.
For several panting minutes, she frantically scanned the direction they had flown, waiting for them to return. Gradually, the sound of the buzzing faded. Her heart leapt for joy. But it didn’t make any sense. Did something she wore mask her human scent?
She felt the swarm’s buzzing long after the sound had faded. It took her a moment to remember that, while her senses were sharp, this was not a sense she had ever possessed.
And then she remembered, like a punch to the gut.
Buzzard beetles only ate mammals.
Her leaping heart sank as the only logical conclusion swallowed her like sickly sleep.
She had become more insect than human.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In the black, he dreamed.
He was in the forest, on his back in a patch of dirt, beneath a circle of trees – not the pines he had been put to sleep under, but a ring of silver birches. The golden light of late afternoon bathed him, but no wind blew, no leaves whispered.
Roots, like worms, poked up from the ground, growing longer and taller as he watched. They touched him, tickled him, tried to crawl into his skin. He felt the pinch of one digging in beneath the cuff of his sleeve, and he plucked it free. He pulled, and its stem came up higher, shedding crumbling dirt; the source of it stayed buried underground. Deep. Incomprehensibly deep. He pulled the tip of the root closer, peering at it. Red and coursing, sticky and wet. It looked more like a vein.
As he held it, it slithered beneath his fingernail, puncturing the skin and slipping inside his flesh. He could see it just below his skin’s surface. Panic engulfed him as he watched it travel up his palm, up his wrist, disappearing under his sleeve. It burrowed through his arm, under his shoulder, into his chest. Into his heart. Suddenly, his panic dissipated like dust, and he felt flooded, and all at once, he knew.
In the air was the breath of the trees – their laughter, their sighing, their speech. In the earth were countless creatures, too small to see. Networks, like veins, like roots, like the branches of trees or the cascade of rivers, of streams, of trickles across leagues toward the sea, of fungus and mold and things in between. It was alive, as alive as the air above it, or more, and the knowledge of it was like a volcano erupting, like a seacovering the entire earth. The knowledge was bigger than him and took him out of his body.
But then the root-vein, still rooted deep underground, pulled and twined, and he was back in his body, his dream body. Red leaves began sprouting from his skin, all over, coating him. He could feel them growing like wet fur in his lungs, in his guts, inside of his mouth.
Directly across from him, a ten-foot tall, gilded mirror, like something from a duchess’s sitting room, appeared from thin air.
In the numbing, golden light, he stood and walked toward it, the root-vein leaving a trail of cracked earth behind him but never ripping free of the ground. When he reached the mirror, his reflection showed him not as he was in truth, nor as he was in this dream, but a third self – a self made of clear glass, filled with churning red liquid.
Behind the reflection stood not silver trees or golden light, but crumbling plaster walls and a wooden floor, covered with scattered blank white pages. On an impulse, he reached out to touch the reflection. The instant the red-leafed finger and the glass finger connected, the glass-self shattered. Tiny shards of glass sprayed against the surface of the mirror. Blood flooded the floor, staining the wood floor dark, the scattered pages red.
Blood seeped out of the base of the mirror, soaking into the dirt until he stood in a muddy puddle of it. As it did, he felt the leaves on his body sucking him dry. He tried plucking one free from his hand. It hurt like peeling off a fingernail with pliers. Like he was awake. Nauseated, he abruptly released the leaf. There was nothing he could do. It seemed to take ages. The sun never moved. His skin clung to his bones, then even his bones turned hollow.
The wind stirred. The leaves were all that was left of him. They fell, one by one, and blew away, dripping red fragments scattered among the silver trees.
