Mira Thorn's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

By dawn the female was worse. Her ribs jerked instead of swelled, and the glow along her brow had narrowed to thin pinpricks. Mira climbed the cypress and lifted her down in a sling of wet cloth. The male screamed once and followed at a low run, then stopped at the edge of the clearing where Mira had set up her work. He would come no closer to the cage. She laid the female inside the slatted wooden pen she used for swamp patients, packed moss under the head, and latched the door so the male could watch through the bars. She had hauled the old x-ray unit out from the back shed a year ago and never moved it back. It ran off her generator and threw a clear picture onto its glass screen. Mira positioned the female on her side and triggered the plate. The image came up green and gray. The lungs were not clean. A pale web spread through both lobes, fine as lace, thickest near the throat. Not fluid. Not blood. Something with shape. Something growing. She had seen that pattern once, in a marsh dog that had denned under a rotting tree. Sap spores. The dog had died in two days. Mira pulled on gloves and opened the female's beak. Inside the soft tissue at the back of the throat she found a smear of pale milky residue, sticky between her fingers. The bird had been breathing it in for days, maybe weeks. The source was somewhere the pair perched often. She left the female in the cage with the male pressed against the bars and walked the nest ground in widening circles. She found it forty paces from the cypress: a dead tree wrapped in a thick strangler vine, the bark split, pale sap weeping from every crack and pooling at the roots. Tiny holes pocked the trunk where the spores vented. The wind from the channel carried straight through it to the nest. Mira stood with her sleeve over her mouth and counted the drip points. Twelve. The pair had been roosting downwind of a slow poison. She went back for her axe and a bucket of clay. She could not move the nest in a day. She could cut the vine, seal the vents, and buy the female air. She worked through the morning, hacking the strangler free in wet ropes, sealing each weeping hole with packed clay, then dragging the cut vine to the channel and sinking it with stones. Her arms shook by the end. Her shirt was streaked with sap she did not want to touch her skin. That evening the female's breathing eased. The glow along her brow lifted from pinpricks to small steady lights. She was not healed. The web in her lungs was still there, and Mira had no drug for it. But the female would see another night, and the male had stopped pacing. Mira sat by the cage and started a list of what she would need to pull the spores out before the third dawn.