Aspen woke up, forgot where her mouth was, and stretched. Her arms reached farther than the yawn lasted, elbows opening with a soft pull that should have stopped sooner, and her fingers brushed something silky above her head. The silk had grooves in it, four long channels where fingers had curled there before.
Then her lungs ignited. Not all at once. The burn started low, under the sternum, and climbed in gritty little sparks until every inhale felt packed with fireplace dust. Her cough came up in one dragging scrape, the back of her throat expanding around something too thick for breath.
Black sludge slid from her mouth in warm, broken clumps, threaded with gray flecks that stuck to the silk instead of soaking in. When it hit the pale sheets, it held the shape of her mouth for a second before sagging flat. It smelled like wet fur pulled from a drain, with the milk-sour edge of something that had curdled inside stomach acid.
Her head snapped back so hard the silk pulled at her hair, one hand clamping over her mouth while the other swung left for the water bottle that should have been sweating beside her desk. Her fingers closed on nothing. No plastic crackle. No stupid cap she always forgot to twist shut.
The rest of her followed the empty grab. Her shoulder went first, then too much of her back, heavy in a place her body did not have a name for yet, and she tipped sideways off the silk with one hand still clamped over her mouth. Her elbow hit the floor. Then her chin.
"Owwwww! Oh God, it hurts!" She tried to curl around the pain and only succeeded in rolling halfway onto her pinned arm. Her legs bicycled uselessly in the silk. Why must I have to throw up in the morning?
Eventually, she stopped moving. She lay there until she remembered that the arm underneath her was still attached. She started to pull it out.
Her arm came out in sections. First the wrist, with faint blue pulses where bone pressed the skin thin, then too much forearm, then the bend of the elbow dragging free from under her ribs like the joint had been folded in like origami. She pulled harder, and the skin between wrist and elbow drew tight in two long, muscular cords that rose under the skin before sinking again. That was not muscle.
She held it up. The arm looked borrowed from a person who forgot to eat for a year, all narrow wrist, sharp knuckle, and long fingers with one extra joint to bend. But she had nuggets yesterday, she always ate well.
Where did my arm go?
The wrist rotated too smoothly, blue pulses sliding under the skin in little bends, and the extra joints in her fingers folded one after another like someone closing a paper fan. Her eyes stayed on the fingers too long, following the wrong hinges as they opened again. Behind them, out of focus at first, were two pale feet on the wood.
An intruder! Her heels scraped for distance before the thought finished. The back of her skull knocked against something hard, not a wall, not her desk, and she kept kicking anyway, silk bunching under her calves while the pale feet stayed exactly where they were.
She twisted around. There was no desk. No bed. No blue fitted sheet with one corner always coming off. Just a cradle hollowed into the living wall, half-bed and half-shell, with silk packed into the bowl of it so tightly the folds still held the dents of her knees and shoulders and two broad fan-shapes beneath the shoulder dents, their edges dusted orange against the pale silk. This was a seedpod, or a cocoon.
She turned back in pieces. First to the pale feet. Then higher, too fast. Green moth-wings filled the space behind them, flung wide and stiff, each veined panel held so flat it looked pinned there. Aspen's eyes caught on the wings before they found the girl between them: pale face, mouth parted around a gasp that had not finished, blonde hair hanging in thin strands with faint blue-green light leaking through it like glow behind paper.
The girl did not move. One hand was lifted toward Aspen and stalled there, two fingers crooked as if they had expected to touch a wrist, not a stranger.
Aspen blinked, shot to her feet, wobbled, and put her hands up.
"What the hell are you?!"
The girl gave no answer. Her mouth stayed open around the same unfinished gasp. Aspen's right hand stayed up. Her left hand lowered by inches and began searching the air beside her, palm flat, fingers spread, sweeping for a bottle, a book, a lamp, anything with a corner. She found silk. Then wood. Then a warm patch of blue sap. Ewwwww!!!
The girl's eyes did not follow the hand. Aspen stopped breathing through her mouth. She shifted one foot to the side. The girl's glassy stare stayed fixed on the place Aspen had been—the cocoon.
Is this a scare tactic? "We aren't playing redlight, fucking, greenlight. Move! Say something!" She slid another step sideways, knees bent, one hand still pawing at the wall behind her. The gray wood rose in long swollen grooves, each one curling into the next in tight spirals, like the whole room had fingerprints and she was touching the ridges.
A black comb hung from a wall-hook, its teeth spaced too wide for hair and dusted faintly green at the tips. No weapon. No normal object. Not even that katana she bought off amazon.
Aspen kept moving until she reached the girl's side. From there, the wings looked thinner, green stretched over veins, too big for the narrow back holding them up. The face still pointed forward. The eyes still did not turn.
She's crazy. Run. Best plan. Only plan. She bolted for the opening in the wall and hit fabric instead of a door. A curtain wrapped around her face, soft and heavy and smelling faintly of fresh mulberry. Something stitched into it scraped across her cheek: three raised lines around an empty middle. She tripped through the curtain, dragged half of it down with her, and hit the floor outside on one knee and both hands.
"Ow! Man, are you serious?!" She scrambled up, hair in her mouth, and looked back. The girl had not moved. Not one wing-beat. Not one finger. Aspen stared at her from the other side of the fallen curtain, chest heaving, then looked at her own too-long hands.
Is this Earth? The curtain-ring still hung from her elbow, and one thread had looped around the extra joint in her finger.
Her knees softened under her before the thought finished. Breath sawed through the sludge taste in her mouth, quick enough to make her ribs ache. She dug her toes against the wood, feeling the wrong joints in them flex, and looked back at the girl still standing there, still frozen in stupid fear. Then it clicked.
I'm still asleep. A giggle slipped out of her with no permission. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, but another giggle shook through her ribs anyway, half laugh, half almost-vomit. My brain must hate me. What am I hiding for?
She stepped over the fallen curtain instead of running. Quietly. Stupidly quietly, because dream or not, those wings were still bigger than her, and her feet kept choosing the parts of the floor that did not moan. She did not know there were such parts until she had already stepped on them. The girl's eyes stayed forward. Aspen came around behind her, both hands lifted like she was reaching for a light bulb in the dark.
She slammed her fists into her head.
The girl folded forward all at once, wings tilting after her. She hit the floor shoulder-first, then cheek, one wing trapped half-open beneath her in a way that crumpled more than crunched. Aspen's own back twitched in answer, like something was pulling tight there. For a few seconds, the girl stayed like that.
Then her trapped wing twitched. Not big. Just one green edge dragging against the wood. The girl blinked hard, sucked in a ragged breath, and pushed herself up on one elbow.
"D-Did you hit me?"
You aren't dead? Aspen took a step back. "I-I'll do it again if you don't start talking!"
The girl's wings flared as she rubbed her head. "What? Why did you hit me? What are you talking about, Lyra?"
The name brushed past Aspen without catching, but something under her tongue warmed like it had heard a sound it should know. "Who the hell is Lyra? Actually, what are you talking about?! What is going on?!"
The girl's mouth worked wordlessly. Then her eyes slid past Aspen's shoulder. Her face changed. Not fear this time. Not exactly. Her lips parted, and her hand lowered from her head as if she had forgotten the bruise.
"Lyra," she whispered. "What happened to your wings?"
Aspen's mouth stayed open. "Wings?"
The word did something to her back. A hot little wire pulled tight between her shoulder blades. Then another, lower, closer to the spine. Her skin jumped in separate places, left-right-left, like someone tapping fingers under the meat. She tried to turn, but the movement tugged from somewhere behind her ribs, and the weight at her back answered a half-second late.
No.
Aspen reached over one shoulder. Her fingers found nothing at first but air, then a thin edge that flicked away from her touch. Not cloth. Not hair. Something dry and soft, with a powdery give that left orange dust on the tips of her fingers. Her neck turned farther than it should've.
Two wings rose from her back. Not bird wings. No feathers. These were broad and scorched orange, folded wrong from the fall. Their lower edges dragged near the floor, trembling in uneven little shivers. Aqua veins ran through them in branching lines, too bright under the thin scales, pulsing in time with the ugly, beating cords in her arm. The wing-veins and wrist-veins answered each other, not matching, but taking turns. Along the edges, the orange faded into black speckles, like someone had held the tips too close to a candle and stopped right before they burned through.
The powder on her fingers was the same orange dust that had marked the silk where she woke.
One wing shivered. She felt it the way she'd feel a finger twitch. But this pulled from her back, from inside her back, from a place that wasn't there last night.
"No, no, no, please," she said.
The room tipped sideways.
The girl moved toward her, wings snapping half-open. "Lyra—"
Aspen's knees folded. The orange wings curled in after her as she dropped. One edge scraped the wood with a soft, dusty hiss.
Aqua light jumped from mushroom to mushroom along the wall-grooves, following her down.
Everything went blue.