James Broussard's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

James knelt beside the dying toad on the wet ground near his camp. He had come to Venommire to build a sanctuary, a place where these creatures could live alongside the new settlers. He lifted the spiked, saddle-shelled body onto his stone-and-wood field bench and reached for his leaf-bound notebook. The feather pen scratched fast across the green page. He checked the water. He checked the mud. He pressed gentle fingers along the barbed shell and watched the toad's chest stutter. Nothing in the swamp matched the symptoms. No bite. No fungus. No rot bloom he recognized. Then he saw it. A thin, oily sheen clung to the toad's belly, faintly blue under the canopy light. He swabbed it and held the cloth to his nose. Machine grease. Refined, processed, nothing born of this place. His jaw tightened. He wrote one word in the notebook and underlined it twice: people. The toad shuddered once more and went still. James sat back against the bench, hands smeared with the proof. The sanctuary wasn't only a design problem anymore. Someone out there was already poisoning the ground he was trying to save.