Nessa Reed's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Nessa stepped out of her greenhouse at dawn and stopped cold. The specimen table inside had been knocked sideways. Jars lay smashed across the floor. Her record cards drifted in the leaf litter like dead moths. Six weeks of work for the elixir, the one meant to finally tune her ear to the forest, sat scattered at her boots. She knelt at the outdoor plots and searched the soil. Something had torn through the beds in the night. At the edge of the deepest gouge, she found a knot of black bramble snagged with shed fur. The strands were stiff and dark with dried blood. Not hers. Not a deer's. Nessa pressed the fur between two slides and made a note. Then she went to work. She gathered broken mirror glass from the shed and staked the shards along the plot border in a low ring. Any movement would flash. Any movement would wake her. She sat in the dark with her notebook open and waited. Past midnight, the shards caught moonlight and threw it back in a hard white blink. Nessa lifted her lantern. A brown rabbit stood in her ruined bed, small antlers curving from its skull, one ear torn. It chewed a stalk of her rarest specimen and watched her without fear. She did not move. The rabbit did not move. For a long second the static in her head thinned, and something underneath it leaned closer. Then the rabbit slipped into the trees, carrying her last good sample in its teeth. Nessa wrote one line in her book: it is not a pest. It was sent.