Raven bones's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Raven ran her thumb along her left forearm and felt bone where skin should be. Three fingers of her hand gleamed white and bare. The thing that infected her town had done this, and she meant to find it and end it. First she had to get out. She stood in her doorway and stared at a house she didn't recognize. Her house wore a coat of fungus now. Pale mushrooms bulged from the walls. Purple stalks curled over the windows like fingers. The roof had gone black, and ravens hunched along its edge, watching her. She knew the shape of her own home, and this wasn't it. "Asher!" Her voice cracked. She hated that it cracked. He stood in the road, turning in a slow circle. His black jacket hung open over a shirt with a ribcage printed on it, which would have been funny any other day. The silver streak in his hair caught the gray light. His red eyes found hers, wide for once. The boy who never cared about anything looked rattled. "This isn't my street," he said. "I walked out my door and it isn't my street." Raven crossed to him. She wanted to grab his sleeve and didn't. "It's still our street. It's just covered." They turned together toward the road out. Raven's stomach dropped. A thick carpet of fungus had grown across the only way out. It climbed the walls on both sides and met in the middle, sealing them in. Spores drifted off it like dust. "We're trapped," Asher said. He stepped forward to test it. "Wait—" Raven lunged and caught his jacket. Too late. His boot came down and the ground gave. He pitched forward with a shout. Below him, half hidden in the fungus, a cluster of plants snapped open. Red jaws the size of dinner plates lined each stem, ringed with teeth. One mouth was already closing on a dead crow. Raven hauled back on his jacket with both hands. Her skeletal fingers locked like a hook. Asher's face stopped inches above the nearest jaw. It clamped shut on empty air with a wet crack. She dragged him back onto solid ground and they both fell. They lay there, breathing hard. "Okay," Asher said. "Not that way." Raven studied the sealed road and the hungry plants guarding it. The fungus was thickest here, right where they stood. Running at it would only feed those jaws. She thought about the bone in her own arm, how the infection had grown into her. Maybe it could be cut. Maybe it could be burned. She pointed past the snare of teeth, to where the fungus thinned near a leaning dark house wrapped in mushrooms. Ravens and vultures circled its spires. "The wall's weaker over there," she said. "By that house." Asher followed her finger and went still. "You want to go toward that thing." "I want to get out," Raven said. "That house is the way."