Avery Rhiannon's Arc

Chapter 13 of 17

By afternoon the cocoon sat on the trailer's padded table again, washed in clean white light. Avery leaned close to the grease pencil mark. The webbing there was not flat. Stiff bristles pushed through it, tapering down into something wet and breathing. She could not tell where the shell ended and the creature began. She stepped outside to think. Tom had staged her tools on a wide wooden stand under the open sky, each blade and clamp laid out in a bright ring. The arrangement caught the sun like a struck star. She picked up the smallest scalpel and turned it in her fingers. "If I cut the fringe, I might cut him," she said. Tom waited. Avery pressed her thumb gently against one bristle through her glove. It flinched. The webbing around it did not. That was her answer. The living tissue pulled. The shell held still. She went back in and worked slow. She lifted each bristle with forceps, traced it to its wet root, and snipped only the dry webbing between. One strand. Then another. Sweat gathered at her temple. An hour passed. The grease mark opened like a seam, and the fracture lay bare beneath, clean and reachable. Avery set the forceps down. The creature breathed under her hand, unhurt by her blade. "Now we can close it," she said. Tom dimmed the lamp. Outside, the staged tools waited for the next step, and for the first time the cocoon was a patient, not a puzzle.