Avery Rhiannon's Arc

Chapter 12 of 17

Morning came gray over the cabin. Avery sat by the cocoon with her stethoscope warm in her hand. The heartbeat was there, but muffled. Something inside the webbing had shifted in the night. Her tools could not reach it. She needed eyes she did not have. Tom found her staring at a cracked mirror propped against the wall. Its surface caught the cocoon's pale glow and threw it back in broken blues and pinks. "I can see the light bend," she said, "but not what's under it." She tapped the stethoscope against her knee. "If it's bleeding, I'll miss it." Tom was quiet a long moment. Then he said, "There's a trailer parked behind the barn. Belonged to a traveling vet who owed me a season. Imaging table inside. Cameras. Better than what we have." Avery looked up. She had not known. They carried the cocoon down the slope together, slow and careful. The trailer's interior was bright and clean, a small clinic on wheels. Avery pulled on a pair of worn leather gloves and laid the creature on the padded table. She powered the scanner. A soft hum filled the room. On the screen, a shape appeared inside the webbing — curled, breathing, and bleeding from a hairline split along one flank. She found it. A thin dark line on the monitor, exactly where the muffled beat had warned her. Avery marked the spot with a grease pencil on the cocoon's surface. Tom watched the screen and nodded once. Outside, past the trailer windows, a ring of tilted poles stood crowned with old camera housings, vines curling through them. Tom said he'd wire them tonight. They would not lose sight of this one again. Avery wrote the new finding under Specimen One in her head, to be copied to the hearth notebook later. The injury was real. It was also reachable now. She peeled off the gloves and set her hand on the cocoon, light as breath. "We can treat this," she said. For the first time since she found it, she believed her own words.