Page 44 of The Bleeding Woods

This EHKI cell is no different, save for the addition of an IV drip administering a heavy dosage of Mom and Dad’s vitamins.

It is taking more than a singular pill to keep my human genes dominant.

I’ve built up a tolerance because now I’m stronger.

I barely fit inside the glassy rectangle, and very few can stand to watch my anatomy as it writhes through each biological shift.

Dr. Hemlock—Dr. Gwendolyn Warner—does not avert her gaze.

“How did it happen?” The unspoken mention of Grayson sends a ghastly succession of stings up my protruding spinal column.

I remember the way his jaw had hinged open, muscles so suddenly relaxed, it looked like the bones beneath had vanished.

I remember his warm blood on my back and his cold body in my arms. She presses on, her springtime eyes frosted over. “Was it painless?”

In this form, I know better than to scowl. I know better than to bare my teeth, now the size of forearms.

“Yes . . .” My voice crackles, all crunching leaves, snapping twigs, and ghostly howls. “It wasn’t me. I’d never—”

“I know.” I’m relieved she’s observant enough to know I’d never let Grayson die willingly. Still, for a woman who just lost both of her children, she looks unsettlingly calm. “And JS-7R?”

“He’s dead.”

But not before he’d miraculously turned human. Not before the brutal touch of our melding matter allowed him to spend his final moments in soft Homo sapiens flesh. Questions hang off my tongue like an uncontrollable surge of saliva. I ask only one of them.

“Was it worth it?”

She purses her lips. The skin around them is pale and paper thin. I suspect she was sobbing, vomiting, or both. The sharp angles of her neatly pressed suit look like the brutalist architecture of a dam struggling to keep roaring waters at bay.

“The few for the many.”

Her pointedly dismissive tone conjures another question from me. I make sure to punctuate it with a few well-deserved ounces of venom. “Did you grieve for them?”

She stiffens, her spine a metal rod propped at ninety degrees. The severity of her presence spreads like spores, moving through the microscopic spaces in the glass that divides us.

“When there is this much blood on your hands, Miss Lovecroft, it tends to blend together.” I stare at her, demanding more, demanding something indicative of a human heart beneath that ivory dress shirt. “But for the record, yes. I’ve grieved for them all.”

Only partially satisfied, I fall into a seated position.

My knees no longer possess the ability to hinge both backward and forward, so doing so requires that I sift through some files of muscle memory.

As time passes, my body shrinks. It shrinks with the seconds.

I never realized how incredibly small humans are, and how terrifying smallness is beside statuesque monarchs like Gwendolyn.

“I did what you asked.” I have a real voice again. It is soft, feminine, and familiar. “When can I go home?”

No matter how insistent I am on grabbing her gaze, she does not offer so much as a sliver of it.

It is fixed on my IV drip, on the pink liquid too gelatinous and translucent to be blood.

It is fixed on my limbs, each one covered in newly formed flesh.

Only a few unfinished pockets remain, and the muscle that shines through them is nearly burgundy in hue.

She refuses my eyes because they are still sunken.

They are still the eyes of Specimen AV-7D.

“Miss Lovecroft, I’m afraid there’s been a change in plans.

” The air in my unit becomes thinner, stripped of precious oxygen.

“After further assessment of your physiological and psychological circumstances, it has been deemed irresponsible to release you back into the public. I’m certain you understand. ”

Thinner.

Pulling in a full gulp of air becomes incredibly challenging.

Each breath is shorter than the last. My lungs pulsate.

My heart, my damned human heart, races. Every part of me screams out in survivalist fury, but on lurching forward to slam my fists against the glass, I find that I have no strength to do so.

I can barely manage a few steps without being swept up in a swirl of vertigo.

“Y-you said—”

“Some promises expire, Miss Lovecroft. I cannot be held accountable for statements I made before the situation . . . evolved.”

“You’re afraid of me,” I croak. “You won’t let me go because you’re afraid of me.”

“Correct.”

I crawl to the wall between us. It is cold and unforgiving against my palms, which burn terribly as I force them to support my weight.

In my reflection, I catch my face. It is human again, although a darkness lingers in my eyes that no amount of gene suppressants can subdue.

I see something more than me in that darkness, something far greater and far angrier.

It is ancient and forbidden. I am ancient and forbidden.

And I am dying.

“Grayson wouldn’t have—w-wouldn’t have wanted . . . wanted this. He tried to . . . s-save me.”

“And it cost him his life. I thought I could trust him with this mission, but clearly he wasn’t strong enough.

I will not repeat his mistake. I am going to tie up the last of Project Undergrowth’s loose ends, once and for all.

” She turns, and from this angle, all I see of her is the silver fabric of her pointed stiletto pumps.

“I am going to atone for the last of my sins. You have around five minutes of oxygen remaining. When you get to the land beyond this life, find them. Give them my apologies.”

With that, she leaves me alone with that same light blinking cyclically above my head. The strength required to look up at it has left me, so its reflections on the floor beyond my box are all I can make out. It blinks on each second, giving me around three hundred red pulses until I reach . . .

A few hours ago, I thought Jasper’s red light would be the last scorched across my irises.

This anticlimactic, incandescent bulb is much less exciting.

Perhaps I should have let myself dissolve into his delusions.

We could have been something after all. We could have accepted our monstrous traits, spread beyond the particle barrier, and lived as ourselves regardless of the consequences.

Neither of us asked to be created, yet both of us paid the ultimate price for it.

We were forced into a world that would never accept us, then forced out of it with just as much fury.

Two hundred pulses left.

If there is a place parallel to this life, I have some business to attend to there.

I’ll find Joey and apologize for my hand in how short his life had been cut.

I’ll urge him toward a whole new timeline and remind him to speak to every cute boy in class once he gets there.

I’ll tell him to go after his wildest dreams no matter who calls them unrealistic.

Joey was a dreamer. Dreamers invent all that is real.

No more fear, Joey. Dream dangerously; you’re stronger than you think.

I’ll race into Jade’s arms and thank her for everything.

I’ll thank her for loving me even when she thought she couldn’t.

I’ll thank her for teaching me love, even when I thought I was incapable of it.

I’ll tell her she was a good sister, the best I could’ve asked for.

It wasn’t her fault she got tied up in some of the worst circumstances our world could offer.

It wasn’t her fault there was just too much pain.

In her new life, she should get to be exactly who she wants to be.

A president, a detective, a globally revered boxing champion, or a sister to someone worthwhile.

You deserve a happy life, Jade. Don’t stop until it’s yours.

And Grayson . . . oh, Grayson . . . in another time, another place, another life, I’d be me, with you.

I’d be neither human nor monster. I’d be my own branch of infinite chaos, and I’d trust you to love that chaos as you loved it—against orders—here.

I’d give us the chance to experience one another in a world safe from the maladies of this earth.

We’d have a lovely life, a soft life, a peaceful life.

Grayson, you are worthy of a peaceful life.

You’re no one’s soldier; put down the sword.

One hundred pulses left.

If there is another time, another place, another life .

. . perhaps I’ll try living it for me. Perhaps I’ll pick a whole new story for myself.

The form I choose will be molded by my hands, not by the hands of preexisting people with their hearts set on selfish matters.

Everything about my next life will be mine.

It will be for me and nobody else. I will know love because I will be love, and I won’t just love me . . . I will love being me.

I close my eyes. The sacred abyss within them feels warmer and more welcoming now.

It is not filled with terror and dread. I have no desire to procrastinate.

These twenty-four years were an experience worth having.

There were difficulties, challenges, and obstacles.

There was pain, fear, and suffering. It all feels so small and far away, though.

They were windowpanes in an infinite sea of glass to look through.

I’ve never been my body or my mind. I’ve always been an observer, gazing through panels to create the progression of linear time.

It was all so small. It was all so momentary. It was all so perfectly, pleasantly insignificant.

As a tendril of red smoke falls from my lips, it ends . . .