Kat's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Kat woke as bones. No skin, no muscle, no face they recognized. Someone had stripped their flesh in a single night and left them a skeleton in a blonde wig with crooked teeth. They wanted it all back. They wanted the family that vanished with it. But when Kat tried to remember that night, they found nothing. No faces. No place. No name to hunt. So Kat searched their own body for a clue. They ran finger bones along each rib. Something was lodged inside the cage, pressed tight between two ribs near the spine. Kat reached in and pulled. A flower came loose. Pink petals, layered and fresh, the stem still green. It had no right to be alive inside a dead ribcage. Yet it looked freshly cut. Kat held it to where a nose used to be. The smell hit hard, and a picture cracked open behind their eyes. Wet ground. A voice they loved, screaming. Hands pulling this same flower from a garden and pressing it into Kat's chest. "Keep this," the voice said. "So you find your way back." Then the memory shut like a door. Kat gripped the flower and forced the picture wider. One more detail surfaced. A shape had watched from the edge of that garden. Low and slow, built from twisting vines and leaves, with a rounded shell and calm eyes. A turtle grown from living plants. Kat had seen it that night. It had been there when their family was taken. The memory ended. But now Kat had two things they did not have before. A flower from that garden. A witness that could not have gone far. Kat stood. Their bones clicked into place. They still could not remember who did this, or where the night happened. But the flower and the vine-turtle both came from one garden, and gardens do not move. Kat tucked the bloom back between their ribs, gently, the way the loved voice had done. Then they began to walk, following the only trail they had: the smell of wet earth and cut petals still clinging to the flower. Somewhere ahead sat a garden that had watched everything. And in that garden, if Kat was right, a living turtle of vines still remembered the faces Kat had lost. Kat did not know who to hunt yet. But they finally knew where to start.