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Chapter 3 ~ On Dirt Road

Otter was on Dirt Road for less than an hour when she realized she had made a terrible mistake. Although she had brought her dented cup, she had nothing to fill it with. Her scraps of food, dry and hard, would sustain her for some time, but every bite would worsen her thirst. She tried not to dwell on how desperately she would love a drink as she walked along that bleak and seemingly endless road. As minutes stretched into hours, thirst occupied more and more of Otter’s thoughts.

Through her thirst, Otter kept her eyes on the horizon. When she spotted a cloud of dust or heard the deep growl of an engine from approaching traffic, she scrambled off the road and lay down behind the low mound of earth that ran alongside Dirt Road, waiting for the disturbance to pass. As she repeated this process dozens of times, she slipped into it as an unthinking routine. And all the while, her thirst whispered reminders of itself in her mind, first in the lowest of tones, but persistent, and increasingly harder to ignore. The sun now climbing high in the sky, Otter allowed her thoughts to wander in the hope of momentarily forgetting the slow searing of her throat and mouth.

Otter thought of the other children—not the children working in the factory, but the children on the playground outside her old window. From beside the conveyor within her workspace, Otter had watched them intently many a day. Their parents were important people, the people who ran Junkton. Those important people spent their days squeezing productivity and profit from Junkton’s humming industry and its tiny workers, while their own children played carefree. Someday, the children of Junkton’s important people would grow up to be Junkton’s important people. Did they think of her and the other children, a mere stone’s throw away, toiling invisibly so that important people and their children could wear fancy clothes and spend the days playing?

Otter thought of the other children’s imaginaries. Watching through the haze of her smudged factory window, Otter had seen imaginary friends in such variety that it boggled the mind. Some children rode on the shoulders of gentle giants or on the backs of great elephants. Other children swooped and sored all day, cradled in the claws of monstrously large birds. Still others chattered idly away with vividly colored parrots, bats, frogs, or insects perched upon their shoulders. Some children’s imaginaries looked like hideous monsters, while others were adorable, covered in long, luxuriant waves of soft fur. But despite the extraordinary array of possibilities, Otter had never sensed that the imaginaries she saw were right for her, that they were good enough.

Otter thought of the imaginary she would someday have. Captive in the confines of the factory and the Home, Otter knew she would never find an imaginary worth imitating. If the imaginaries outside her window were unsuitable, those belonging to the other children of the Home were far worse. Few had even a single memorable trait. Gray and poorly defined, they were suitable for picking up what their reals had dropped or otherwise helping with mundane tasks. And little else. The workers’ imaginaries, so lacking in imagination, were hardly more than extra hands to their reals. Those pitiful creatures strained the word imaginary, but they stretched friend much further. Nothing of the sort would do for Otter. That was why she had left the factory and Junkton altogether. At least, that was part of the reason.

Otter refused even to consider imagining a friend until she had seen enough life to imagine one that would be perfect in every way. She could never see that in Junkton. And so she had no choice but to leave, to strike out into the world, to search far and wide for those traits she would someday assign to her perfect friend. Her only friend.

Dragging her tired feet down Dirt Road and trying to think of anything besides her creeping thirst, Otter was briefly overcome, and not for the first time, by the dread that she might not be able to make an imaginary—that she might be a loner. Loners, Otter had heard, were a sad lot indeed. A loner could imagine all day, but no friend would materialize. Because Otter had refrained from imagining a friend, she could not be sure she wasn’t a loner herself. Many times in her short life she had come within a breath of giving in and imagining the best friend she could, just to see whether she could. And every time, she had talked herself down, refusing to give in to the temptation. If she was a loner, Otter told herself, she would find out when she was ready. She would bring to life either the perfect imaginary or none at all, but nothing in between.

Not long after Otter had left Junkton, the grass lost its severe trim and instead grew wild and long. The dull reeds of greenish brown reached to just beneath the girl’s chin. Otherwise the scenery changed little as Otter walked. The sun’s gradual journey across the sky at least proved the passage of time. But the vast countryside through which the winding, narrow road cut seemed an endless reel of grassland and the occasional copse of tall, spindly trees.

As the day wore on, Otter’s thirst found a comrade in hunger. Her stomach began to grumble and cramp with each lurching step forward. The hunger gnawed at her, consuming the strength from her legs and back even as they carried her deeper into the hunger’s maw. Hungry as she grew, though, she knew she had to conserve her scarce supplies. She had no idea when she would next have a chance to stock up. And she knew eating would make her thirst all the worse. According to Surviving in the Wilderness, a person could go for days without food. But water, the book had made clear, was another matter. Thirst would end her journey long before her hunger had taken a serious toll.

Once or twice she considered flagging down one of the intermittently passing cars and asking a driver for help. But so far Dirt Road had run directly from Junkton without splitting or meeting another road. So anyone driving on Dirt Road was either going to or coming from Junkton. Otter would not let the fate of her odyssey depend on anyone who had business in Junkton.

Otter’s thirst and hunger grew together as the sun crawled high overhead and then, cresting, began its slow retreat. More than half a day had passed, and the endless rhythm of Otter’s footsteps had begun to slow as her mouth dried and her belly rumbled. And the sun’s unrelenting heat beat down on her harder with her every leaden step. Exhaustion, hunger, and thirst had become her constant traveling companions.

As the sun slowly descended toward the horizon, things grew worse. Swarms of tiny biting insects leapt up from the grass and buzzed about Otter’s head, occasionally humming shrilly in her ear but nearly always escaping as her hand rose to intercept them. She attempted to swat the bugs away as they took aim at the dark skin of her exposed neck and face. But many more made it through her defenses. Soon, small swollen bites itched her from head to toe. Her arms grew tired of swatting. And her legs grew tired of walking. A dull ache had crept into her feet, legs, and back as she walked, and her hip had grown numb with the constant bouncing of her pack banging in synchronicity with her stride.

As fatigue began to dull Otter’s will, she no longer bothered to defend against her tiny flying attackers. Otter wished for somewhere to hide from the swarm. And she knew—swarm or no swarm—she would need shelter before night fell.

Otter made a decision. She turned sharply to her right and waded into the tall grass that banked Dirt Road. She made her way to a spot ahead where the waves of reeds appeared somewhat less dense. She eventually came to a spot where a small island of rock interrupted the grass, jutting from the earth like the peak of a mountain whose bulk was hidden beneath the ground. With a deep sigh, she mustered her strength to climb the island and put some distance between herself and the biting swarms. At the top, she sat abruptly, and let out a heavy, exhausted breath.

The sun seemed to pick up speed as it sank. The lengthening shadows reminded Otter that she had but a short time to rest. But her stomach’s growling complaint convinced her that, thirsty or not, waiting to eat was no longer an option.

For only the second time since her escape got underway, Otter pulled out a few tiny pieces of hard cheese, which she slowly chewed as she pulled the knife from her pack. Her belly still groaned, unsatisfied by these meager morsels, but she dared not eat more freely until she found a place to replenish. Somehow, Otter thought involuntarily. She wondered for a moment whether this had all been a terrible mistake. The faces of her tormentors Greeble and Blotch—and Crim, her brief compatriot—floated across her mind, and she gathered up her resolve, banishing her unwanted doubts.

Knife in hand and jaw set, Otter slid down from her perch to brave the hungry swarms once again.

Her feet marking out a path of expanding circles in the grass, Otter gathered the reeds in great handfuls, and with a hissing pffp, she quickly cut each handful loose from the ground and set it aside for the next one. Pffp, pffp, pffp, her knife worked deftly through each successive bunch faster than the one before. Although her hands were unaccustomed to this task, they were no stranger to work. Her years of toiling in the factory, until she could have pieced libertyslippers together in her sleep, had made repetitive manual work almost second nature to Otter. Before long, she had amassed a considerable stack of the long blades of grass.

Satisfied at last that she’d gathered enough, and sparing a brief glance for the fast-receding sun, Otter sat down on the lowest edge of the rocky outgrowth and let her fingers begin their dance across the grass reeds, weaving them expertly together. As she worked, the reeds, which at first had splayed out uncontrollably in every direction, grew into a mat, her hands imposing discipline on the long, green blades, beginning in one corner and then radiating outward, until the small mat was fully formed. Then she set it aside and began another. The words of Surviving in the Wilderness flowed across her mind like libertyslippers gliding down the conveyor. Her mats were not as neat as those described in her beloved text, but they were more than passable, especially for a first try.

Otter put the finishing touches on the fourth mat as half the sun was swallowed by the horizon. A cloud of dust, indicating traffic on Dirt Road, kicked up into the sun’s half disc and spread out across the line that separated the ground from the sky. Otter’s eyes followed the dust warily. The dust’s motorized source passed reluctantly out of sight, but not before the sun surrendered another quarter of its surface to the horizon’s hunger. Knowing she had little time left with the daylight, Otter returned her attention to the grass mats.

Otter dragged the reeds up to the highest flat surface of rock island. Using the few remaining reeds, she joined the mats together to form a simple lean-to tent. Two mats formed the floor; one mat formed a wall on each side. In one spot, the reed joints refused to hold, so she used a couple of her rubber bands to do the job. She stood back and looked down at her handiwork. Otter allowed a small, satisfied smile to briefly soften her face.

Her task complete, she scanned the island’s surroundings one last time before the horizon completely consumed the sun’s orb and, with it, the final rays of daylight. In the deep twilight she saw a few copses of trees that lay scattered about the otherwise featureless grass plains. And, of course, to one side, there was Dirt Road.

And then the light was gone.

Otter lay curled up on the woven grass floor in her simple shelter and shivered. Despite her exhaustion, sleep came slowly. She shook slightly as the night’s chill settled over the land and crept softly into her body, causing her dark skin to prickle with bumps. As dreams finally overtook her, Otter thought she heard the sounds of wild animals stalking through the grasses. A final shiver shook the girl’s tiny frame at the thought of what might be lurking around her. And then there was only sleep.

* * *

Like a paddle on a waterwheel, the sun slowly emerged from the surface of the world opposite to the one into which it had disappeared. The songs of birds and crickets accompanied its graceful ascent. Otter’s eyes fluttered open as the sun’s rays insinuated themselves between her eyelids. And so ended a short (and poor) night of rest. What with the scuffling of unseen beasts, the night’s pitiless nip, her belly’s growling and cramping, and the throbbing in her back and legs imparted by the day’s long walk, sleep had been fitful and shallow.

Her thirst had only grown worse during the night. And the aching discomfort in her muscles had blossomed into something significantly more than discomfort.

Trying to ignore the thickness coating her mouth and the protests in her back and limbs, Otter pulled her dented cup from her pack, which she had been using as a poor and lumpy pillow. She set the cup down on the rocky floor. After disconnecting the panels of her tent, she lifted each tent section and lowered one of its corners into the cup and, with the edge of her flattened free hand, painstakingly scraped the dew down the woven reeds and into the tin receptacle. Once she had captured every retrievable drop, she put the cup to her lips, upended it and, tapping the bottom, greedily sucked down all the cup’s meager contents. The water was too little, but Otter sighed deeply as it cut through the dryness in her throat.

Otter again pulled out her knife and then, blade and cup clasped firmly, she scrambled down the rock’s edge and waded into the grass. On the ground, she noticed patches of broken reeds and patches of ground that had been torn bare as if by claws. She shuddered involuntarily to think of what might have been prowling so close as she slept. But she forced her mind to more pressing concerns, knowing that dwelling on such disturbing ideas would do her no good.

As she had the night before, Otter began the work of separating reeds from the earth with her knife. This time she didn’t cut them in great bunches; instead, she grasped each individually, cut it at its base, and then slid her fingers along the reed to scrape its collected dew into her cup. She spent nearly the first chill hour of daylight on this task and amassed scarcely more than half a cup of water when she was done.

Once again Otter scaled the stone outcropping. She rewrapped her supplies, sparing only a momentary, wistful glance at the shelter she would have to leave behind. She quickly swallowed several bites of cheese and washed them down with the few gulps of water she’d gathered. It was, the girl thought, the most refreshing drink of water she had ever tasted.

Her tiny breakfast done, Otter once more hitched the pack to her belt, this time on the opposite side in the hopes of not aggravating—or at least of distributing more evenly—the throbbing in her back. Her gaze settled once more uneasily on the bare patches left by whatever unseen animals had lurked about in the night. Forcing her eyes away and up to take in the horizon cutting across the landscape, she stepped forward through the grasses. Exhaling with determination, she returned to her trek along Dirt Road.

As Junkton was left ever farther behind her, Otter again wrestled her thoughts away from any reminder of her hunger, her aches, and her thirst. She recalled her earliest memories, in which she “played” in the Home’s drab and musty nursery alongside the other children who were too young to work. Toys were scarce at the Home, even for its youngest residents. Most of what passed for playthings were in fact odd ends of fabric saved from the trash, or worn-out parts from the factory’s aging machinery. Small children in threadbare rags stacked cogs and bolts to build rusty castles of scrap. As the kids grew, their attendants encouraged them to assemble pieces or to cut scraps. These “games,” even the children recognized, were little more than training for the day when they would leave this dingy sanctuary and join their older peers on the factory floor.

As she often did, Otter wondered where she had come from. She had never known her parents, and she did not know how she came to be at the Home. Why had they left her there? she thought. Why would anyone condemn their own child to the Home? Why hadn’t they wanted her?

That last thought sat suspended alone in her head like an echo in a great cavern. It was an uncomfortable, lonely thought. Not for the first time, she wished the question hadn’t occurred to her.

As she plodded on, Otter grimly realized she could not withstand many more days like the last one. She stopped walking and looked off to her right. Shielding her eyes from the sun that still hung low in the midmorning sky, she scanned the unending miles of reeds and the copses of trees that intermittently punctuated the vast waves of vegetation. She let her eyes settle on the nearest copse.

From this distance she could tell little about the trees except that they stood high above the tops of the grasses swaying beneath them, and that their bushy, green tops hung gracefully from the heights of tall, slender trunks. Trees, Otter had read, tend to grow near water. Otter hesitated for a moment, but she knew she had no other choice. So she turned from Dirt Road and, wading once more into the grass, angled toward the nearest island of trees.

Otter’s hands led the way, parting curtain after curtain of grass. Once in awhile, the thin green blades were so tall she lost track of the trees and had to jump to assure herself that her direction was still true. As her head would emerge momentarily above the grass, she would catch a glimpse of the trees’ languidly hanging tops. Having confirmed her course, she would set off once more.

For the first time in two days, Otter hardly noticed her thirst. Even the aches in her muscles seemed to fade beneath her newfound determination to reach the trees. Having an immediate goal within her grasp did more to take her mind from her woes than had all her deliberate efforts at self-distraction. From somewhere deep within herself, Otter felt a small but warm comfort in this idea, but she could not have said for sure why that should be.

Suddenly, the reeds thinned away, and Otter found herself only a few paces from one of the gracefully ascending trees. Their foliage, which bore a distant but distinct resemblance to the leaves of grass engulfing the terrain around them, stood between Otter and the sun, washing her in splendidly cool shade. She stood still for a moment, basking briefly in the satisfaction of this minor accomplishment.

Now, she thought with renewed determination, to find water.

Otter squinted for a moment as her eyes adjusted to the shadows of this tiny, self-contained forest. The trees’ long fronds had the feel of warm weather about them, and their tall boles seemed to her mind designed for leaning against while napping. Squinting, she thought she saw fruits clustered among the trees upper reaches. On some of the trunks, vertical marks suggested that clawed animals sometimes made their way into the treetops. Remembering the claw marks she’d found around her campsite this morning, Otter tried not to think too hard about the claw marks’ owners. She set her gaze back to the ground and commenced her search for water.

She didn’t have to look long.

Near the center of the copse, amid spongy mounds of dense green weeds rising nearly to her knees and adorned all over with tiny, inconspicuous flowers, a modest spring bubbled up from a small, rocky bed and babbled pleasantly as it dispersed without particular direction into the surrounding woods. Dappled sunlight worked its way through the shade of the forest’s canopy and sparkled off the liquid life before her. The earth around the spring was rich with vegetation and dark with dampness, and the fingers of water disappeared as they crawled away from their stony source. All this Otter noticed in an instant as she broke into a short, limping run and fell to her knees in front of her salvation. The wetness splashed into her eyes and nose as her hands scooped one great draught after another into her mouth. She thought she might have been crying, although she couldn’t have said why, but she could not tell the tears in her eyes from the splash of the spring. Otter lost track of time as she cried and drank. At moments she forgot herself completely and slurped the cold liquid right off the rocks where it issued. Otter had never tasted sweeter, colder water than that spring’s bounty. Part of her even recognized that this sentiment was not simply the effect of her thirst being broken.

At some point, Otter felt she could not comfortably hold more water, and her frenzied guzzling slowly subsided. Crawling clumsily backward, she scrambled away from the spring on her bottom, hands, and feet, the water sloshing oddly in her belly as she went. She stopped a few paces away when she reached the nearest tree and rested her back against it’s bumpy surface. Wiping the tears and springwater away from her eyes, Otter sank into the ground beneath the tree and sighed deeply. For the first time since her escape, she felt truly free. The feeling seemed fragile and slippery, and she was afraid she might accidentally disturb it if she didn’t sit perfectly still. So she sat there awhile longer and listened to the wind whispering in the fronds high above her.

Otter didn’t know how long she sat with her back against that tree. But it wasn’t long before the need to keep moving nudged her, making her restless and impatient. And so she rose to her feet and took stock of her situation.

Looking for water near the trees had saved her. Now she knew she would have to hike from one stand of trees to the next if she hoped to survive until she could find some way of carrying water with her. But after her desperate rush into the reeds and then the woods around the spring, Otter wasn’t sure she could tell which way Dirt Road now lay.

Turning her head, she surveyed the woods around her. One of the trees sloped up at a lazy angle, rising gently to its dizzying height. She approached its diagonal trunk, tilting her head slightly in consideration. She placed her hand on the tree’s strange bark, which rose along the trunk sides like a single layer of ridged skin perforated here and there by groups of indentations like hollowed claw marks. After a moment of sizing the tree up, Otter untied her pack from her side and laid it on the ground where the tree’s trunk gradually ended in tiny hills and valleys and plunged with an iron grip into the rocky soil below.

Embracing the tree with her knees and arms, Otter slowly inched herself up its height. Her grasping fingers found extra purchase in the bark’s deep notches. The tree’s girth was not so great that the climb was difficult, but it certainly wasn’t leisurely. She climbed so that the front of her body faced roughly toward the earth, so she had little fear of falling. But the higher the girl rose above the ground, the less inclined she felt to let her eyes wander to the forest floor.

Gradually she worked her way up to the lowest leaves. The front of her body was tingling and raw from scraping against the trunk. But now she could clearly make out the tree’s lumpy fruits, and her tiny pack was a mere speck below. The fruits seemed somehow familiar, but she had no desire to climb higher still to examine them more closely. Her view extended from the top of the canopy, and she could see for many miles on all sides from her perch. Most important, from here the serpentine trail of Dirt Road was visible as it cut roughly northward. From this vantage, she could also see the scattered copses of trees that dotted the landscape along the way.

Surveying the land gave her an excuse to rest and catch her breath. The clusters of trees were more plentiful than Otter had realized at first, and the sight of them gave her new hope that her plan of making her way from one oasis to the next would work. Better still, the wooded areas grew more frequent along the way until eventually they merged into a great forest that reached out to the right and eventually met the sky. These woods were every bit as green and dense as Oakwood at its thickest, but Surviving in the Wilderness had not mentioned them. Either way, the sight of the woods was a relief. A forest meant water and a place to hide from other travelers. And Otter needed both.

To her left, which was westward, Dirt Road curved lazily north. If she continued to follow it, Otter could easily reach the woods at any time along the way.

Following the road with her eyes, she found a point far distant where Dirt Road split from its irregular meandering into three tidier, straighter roads. A small shack sat watch over the intersection’s nearest corner. A thin and listless trail of smoke rose from the squat building’s chimney.

To the west, Dirt Road widened into a smartly kept boulevard that ran through a small town. The town looked pleasant enough. But the thought of going among people so close to Junkton tied knots in Otter’s empty stomach.

Except for its straightness, the northern road looked very much like the road behind her. It reached far ahead and eventually disappeared beyond the horizon. But in the sky above that unseen distance, gray smoke billowed and dissipated—just as it did from the smokestacks of the libertyslipper factory. Escaping one factory just to find herself in another was not an option.

That left the eastern road. Banked on its near side by the forest and the shack’s far wall, that route also shrank away into the distance. What Otter could see of its far side from over the forest’s treetops was dotted with occasional signs of human activity. But those sparse pockets were few, and they were farther away than the town to the west. And there wasn’t so much as a wisp of the belching smoke so reminiscent of Junkton’s humming industry. The eastern road was the clear choice in Otter’s mind.

Her gaze returned warily to the shack smoking languidly at the fork.

Otter knew her quest would not let her avoid other people forever. But she remained cautious of human contact this close to the place of her former captivity. The tiny shack, still far away, represented a risk she would rather avoid. And the smoke told her the shack was occupied. So she had already determined to steer clear of whoever lived there. If I can, she thought.

The woods grew so close to the house’s back side that it almost seemed to be growing out of them. Or maybe that the woods were slowly devouring it. She also noted that the forest was too vast to go around. And if she could lose her bearings just walking through tall grass, traveling through the woods seemed foolhardy.

So she had to take the road. And she could not avoid the shack. All she could do was to stay as hidden as possible on her approach and hopefully pass the house quickly without its owner seeing her.

Having regained her breath, Otter began her descent. She inched slowly back down the slanting tree’s trunk, and her feet once again met the earth after what seemed like an hour of scraping and scooting.

The pack fastened to her side once more, Otter set back out for Dirt Road.

* * *

Progress was slow. Leaving the road during the day for water and at night for shelter did not permit quick travel.

The journey to the intersection took three days, and all the while, the shack loomed ever larger in Otter’s imagination, just as its tireless smoke trail loomed ever larger in her sight. Several times a day she took cover beside the road as anonymous vehicles coughed and roared by. But she could not dodge the shack the same way. And so her quiet dread grew as she gradually approached the inevitable.

Even with her mounting anxiety, Otter’s spirits were lighter than they had been since she had escaped. Stretching her rations meant her hunger was still always with her, but having water had made all the difference. Her supplies would last another several days, and she stretched them further by foraging in the woods whenever she recognized some wild plant as edible from her reading. The fruits perched high in the trees tantalized her, but she never found them lying on the ground, and none of the fruit grew any closer to the ground than those she had first encountered. She could not risk expending the energy on another climb for a fruit she had not seen up close enough to identify it as safe.

The closer Otter got to the shack, the closer she clung to the trees beside the road, trying to stay out of sight. The stands she retreated to for sleep seldom had the sort of rocky island she had found that first night on Dirt Road. Each night, the girl shivered from within her improvised shelter as the mysterious scuffling animal sounds returned. But the creatures making those noises never showed themselves, and every morning Otter awoke untouched.

By the time twilight had overtaken the light of the third day, those trees had already merged into the single deep forest Otter had seen from her treetop vantage. She could spend the night in the woods just this side of the house. That would leave her just enough time to piece together her nightly shelter before night fell completely. But it would also mean trying to skirt the small structure in the daylight of morning. Or she could make her way around the shack in the dusk’s failing light. That would leave her shelterless for the night, but it might improve her chances of not being seen.

She decided to risk a night without shelter if it meant avoiding people for just a little longer.

Otter drew close to the shack’s nearest outer wall and dropped to her hands and knees.

From this close, the tiny structure itself looked to have once been a charming and smart little cottage, but it had long since fallen into disrepair. The paint was badly peeling or gone altogether. The windows were foggy and laced with scattering cracks. The shutters that remained were dangling from their hinges at odd angles. The smoke, which had come to symbolize her dread as it rose in silent menace from the shack, had coated the area around the shack in a sharp, unpleasant odor that clung to the wall just as Otter herself now did.

Crawling quietly alongside the shack’s grimy wall to stay below the hazy windows’ decaying sills, Otter stealthily made her way across the shack’s meager length. If a car passed at that moment, she would be forced to rise for a hasty retreat, and her sneaking would have been in vain. The dim evening’s silence.

Having reached the end of the shack’s front wall, Otter steeled herself to round the corner of both the house and the intersection. One more wall, and she would be in the clear. She kept her head down low and poked her head around the corner.

On the ground in front of her nose, was a pair of old and cracking high-heeled shoes that seemed to have once been pink but were now more like only a shadow of their former color. Otter’s dread exploded in her chest and a frigid chill gripped her entire body.

Moved against her own will by her fear’s firm hands, Otter craned her neck to lift her head, and her eyes found the shoes connected to legs in holey white stockings; the legs led to a washed-out pink dress with a hem of tattered lace; the faded dress led up to a slender neck; and at the top of the neck was a young woman’s head. The dark blue eyes she found there were oddly wide and angled slightly upward, and the mouth below them smiled too broadly, showcasing the many straight, white teeth it housed.

When that mouth opened, the voice that emerged seemed a pitch too high and a touch too eager as it crashed down on the prostrate trespasser at the speaker’s feet. “Hello, little girl!” it said. “What are you doing? I’m Eliza.” The words faded into the encroaching night, and Eliza’s mouth resumed its too-broad smile, which seemed to grow broader still now that it had said its peace. Otter’s fear grew right along with it.

Next Chapter: Chapter 4 ~ Eliza