Avery Rhiannon's Arc

Chapter 16 of 17

Avery walked back from the records building with the diet log fresh in her mind. The creature would eat. The fracture would knit. But a colder question waited in the dark yard. Once it healed, where would she send it? She had no map, no name, no home address for a thing nobody had ever seen. She stopped near the clinic, where a tall crystal shard stood planted in the soil. Tom had dragged it from the riverbank the morning after the cocoon arrived. Its angled faces threw broken colors across the grass. No book matched the stone. No book matched the creature, either. Both had come from somewhere off every page she owned. Inside the clinic, a small cracked mirror hung above the cocoon's basket. Avery had set it there to watch the bristles without leaning too close. Now the splintered glass showed the creature in pieces, each fragment pointing a different direction. Healed here. Lost everywhere else. She pressed her palm flat against the cool surface and made her choice. By dawn she had paced out a rectangle on level ground above the gathering hall. Glass walls. Metal frame. Glowing vines climbing the panes for any creature whose road home had gone missing. She wrote the plan in her notebook and underlined the name twice. The cocoon would not be returned. It would be kept.