— Day 1 —
Parksville, Erbaine
Palisade National Park
There was an eerie silence when Terra awoke later to find herself splayed across the ground, her cheek cradled in the dirt.
I must have hit my head on a rock when I fell, she thought, confused.
When I. . . when I fell. . . .
The entire, bizarre experience came back to her like lightning.
She scrambled to her knees, and looked up. The world seemed normal. The sky was pure blue, and there was only one sun shining in its depths. How long had she been out? Had she hallucinated it all? She felt normal. . . almost normal.
Was it all a dream? She thought uncertainly.
. . . No.
Her clothes were still sopping wet, and she was covered in mud and scrapes and bruises. Something had happened, even if she couldn't figure out a logical explanation for it yet, even if she had no idea what was reality anymore.
Think, Terra. Think.
She leapt to her feet, and began running up the river. Maybe this was a stupid thing to do after the kind of experience she'd just had, but right now, Terra wasn't thinking in those terms. She had to see the spot where she had fallen.
She skidded to a stop twenty paces from the oak tree she had been sitting in before. She almost expected to see a twisted, melted monstrosity in its place, remembering the sickening feeling she had felt when the tree suddenly gave way like goo.
But it looked perfectly regular. Better than regular; beaming with health, even. Its leaves were very bright green. . . almost oddly vibrant.
She walked up to it, tentatively placed her hand on the trunk, and gasped as she felt a tingling sensation—stronger, fuller, stranger than the brittle shock of electricity—go all the way up her arm and into her body.
She looked up. Even the thick branch she had been sitting on was still there, and she would have sworn it had broken or fallen. She never remembered letting go of it, and yet she had slipped right through it as if it had been liquid.
How. . . ? She glanced at the ground beside the tree, expecting to see a deep furrow in the ground where she remembered tumbling into the river. But all she saw was normal, though unusually bright green, grass.
It must be a trick of the light, she thought, shaking her head as if that would make it stop.
She was about to start convincing herself she had had a seizure and hallucinated the entire thing, when she glanced back up at the oak tree just as a cloud moved in front of the sun. The forest was suddenly bathed in shadows. And that was when she noticed.
The tree's leaves were glowing.
She reeled a step back, gasping sharply. This was not natural. This should not be happening. She had spent all of her life in the woods, and never had she seen anything like that. She must be dreaming. She must be going mad. She stared at the tree, agape, stumbling backwards.
She slipped in the mud on the riverbank, falling to her knees, and catching herself with her elbow.
A dull pain rippled through her forearm as if she had irritated an abrasion.
She bit her lip, and hauled herself over to the shallow water along the riverbank, and plunged her right arm into the current, washing away the layer of mud with her other hand.
At first she could only see her reflection in the water, turned opaque by the dirt she was scrubbing away. And she looked a mess. Her face was streaked with mud, and her dripping, curly hair was full of twigs and leaves. But all those other details faded away as she stared into her eyes. They had always been green, but more of a clear, seaglass shade.
Now they were gleaming the same strangely radiant shade as the oak tree's leaves.
She began to pull her arms out of the river to cover her eyes, to block out her own, alien reflection, to silence the scream that was pressing against her lips. But instead she froze.
Terra stared at her wrist in horror.
A coil of glowing green skin was wound around her forearm, starting at her wrist and ending a few inches below her elbow.
It wasn't oozing. The skin wasn't damaged. It was just there, embedded in her arm and radiating like a firefly on a summer night.
"The rope," she whispered, her eyes widening.
Except it hadn't been a rope. But admitting to herself that a vine had shot out of a tree, wrapped itself around her arm, and kept her from plunging over a waterfall was too ridiculous.
Nothing was making any sense.
She reached into her small, waterproof backpack, and pulled out a roll of bandages, and slowly, mechanically began to wind it around her arm.
Something told her that this was better kept a secret.