Claire Summers's Arc

Chapter 6 of 7

The rope creaked above her. Claire pressed closer to the tracker's side, the clawed scraps of her shirt pulled across them like a thin blue shield. Boots scraped stone. A man was halfway down now, a red-lidded kit strapped to his hip, gauze packets glinting through the clear plastic. He had come ready to find her alive. Then his face changed. He stopped on the rope, staring at her stomach. "Don't move," he said. "Claire. Don't move." She looked down. Beneath her skin, something rippled. A slow bulge traveled from her hip toward her ribs, where the creature's tongue had dragged. Her breath caught. She thought of the glowing ring of water, the swirling nest the monster had collapsed back into. Eggs. It had been trying to plant eggs. "Get it out," she whispered. But her hand drifted, instead, toward the river. The water shimmered where the nest had been. A faint glow pulsed back, weak and waiting. Something in her chest pulled toward it. She did not want to leave. She wanted to crawl back to the pool, to lay down in the swirling water, to let whatever was inside her finish becoming. The man dropped the last few feet and landed hard. He snapped open the kit, tore a gauze packet with his teeth, and pressed cold antiseptic against the moving lump. "Stay with me," he said. His hand was steady on her stomach. His eyes were steady on hers. "I didn't climb down here to lose you." Claire turned her face away from the glowing water. It hurt to do it. But she fixed her eyes on him instead — on the man who had not stopped looking — and she nodded once. "Cut it out," she said. "I'm still here."