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I jerk away. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine,” she says, grabbing my wrist and holding it. “You take off that bandage right now, or I take your car keys.”

She was never the kind of mom who told me Just wait until your dad gets home. Mom brings her own punishments; it’s fast but usually fair. I’ll show her my palm, but I don’t have to tell her that I was attacked in the woods by Pete Wagner, that a deer brought my ring back to me, or that I found an egg we can’t identify in the compost pile . . . and it’s growing. But I’d call it more like stretching than growing. I’d watched it as Widow wrapped my hand, gasped when I saw a ripple of movement under the leathery surface.

“Sorry, I know it stings,” Widow had said as she upended a bottle of iodine over my hand.

“No, it’s the egg. It moved.”

Widow had given me a look, turned in her chair. We’d watched it together for a few minutes, iodine dripping from my hand onto the floor.

“Like it started a kick-line routine, or—”

“No, it . . .” I’d shuddered then, both to mimic the movement I’d witnessed, and because the there-and-gone again pain that’s been in my spine flickered, stabbing down into my hip.

“You need stitches,” Mom says firmly as the gauze falls away. “These butterflies aren’t going to do it.”

I look at the trail of sticky bandages my boss had strung along the top of my hand, the brown stain of iodine still clinging to my skin. “Widow said—”

“I don’t give a shit what Widow said,” Mom snaps. “I grew your body in my belly, and I’m responsible for it.”

I’m quiet for a second, imagining cells clustering together inside of my mom, joining in a very specific manner in order to create this hand, these fingers, my spinal cord and brain. Were the imbalanced chemicals there from the beginning? Or did that come later, after I’d been forced out into the world and separated from the sound of my mother’s heartbeat?

“Can you move all your fingers?” she asks. Mom’s touch trails over the back of my wrist as she feels the tiny bones, searching for confirmation that I am, in fact, still whole. Her thumb catches against a butterfly bandage on the other side, and she pauses, then turns my hand over. I look away, not wanting to see her accusing glare when she realizes I didn’t tell her the glass went through my hand, that the cells she grew had formed a person that doesn’t tell the whole truth—and isn’t going to start now.

“Ava?” Mom asks, but I still won’t look at her.

I can’t tell her that there’s a pit of animal corpses where I work, or that something dies every day there. I can’t tell her that Pete Wagner went after me in the woods, or that a deer brought my ring back to me. I can’t tell her there’s something moving under a red light in the main office, or that sometimes after I turn it, I just sit and watch it, feeling a calm that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

“Ava?” Mom asks again, her voice trembling now.

I can’t tell her these things, because then they won’t let me go back.

And Restoration Acres is the only place I want to be.

“Ava?” Mom says, her voice trembling.

I raise my head, ready to tell her that last thing, at least.

“Honey? Why don’t you have any fingerprints?”

“What?” I ask.

Mom wordlessly turns my other hand palm up, pushes the two together, holds them in place on the table. The puckered, red wound draws the eye, stretching from the center of my palm to the base of my middle finger. But it can’t take attention away from the fact that there are no creases in my skin at the knuckle joints, no whorls and loops at the tips. Around the gash, my palm is bare as well. The lifeline is wiped clean, heart line gone. The head line is a ghost, only visible if I don’t focus. The only line still there is my fate line, and if anything it’s deepened. Filled with dried iodine it stands out darkly against the skin, trailing down past my wrist, extending farther than it should, snaking neatly between the radius and ulna, bisecting the deep blue vein, only ending when it touches the fresh, pink scars from Panda’s teeth.

“Ava?” Mom says again. “What the hell is going on?”

I shake my head, unsure, just as something moves inside me again. The pressure at my spine deepens, and I feel something trailing along my back, seeking a grip from the inside. Nausea hits me in a wave, and I get up from the table, running for the bathroom. I barely make it, tumbling to my knees in front of the toilet just as white bile blossoms from my mouth. This time, it’s not just liquid. Something solid catches in my teeth, and I spit, a wad hitting the water with a splash. It floats, mucus-like, tendrils reaching out from the center.

It twitches.

I stare, horrified, looking for a reason. Because there has to be one. Something growing in an egg is a scientifically established phenomenon, the lines of my palm are probably being eroded by the harsh cleaning chemicals at work, and something moving in my vomit is an illusion created by the ripples of water. All these things have to be true, because they’re the only things that make sense. I flush it away and rest my head against the rim of the toilet, my goat ring clinking against the porcelain, denying an explanation, forcing a question to rise to the surface, the same one Mom is asking again as she leans over me, stroking my hair.

What the hell is going on?

Twenty

Micah