It was Vern’s family. It held several lifetimes of secrets, and it was learning hers.
The passenger stretched from Vern’s back around to her front, outlining her ribs. Webbed between the harder sections of carapace was a flexible, leatherlike hide. All of it the fungus’s fruit.
“Mam!”
Vern looked up. Howling was calling to her from far up in a fir, the child swaying back and forth as the wind blew the high branch of the thin-trunked tree.
“What?” she asked.
“I want to see!” he said as he shimmied down expertly. Tall and lithe, he could easily pass for six.
Howling gasped at the sight of Vern’s exposed upper body when he hit the ground. “Damn, boo,” he said, eyes wide. He ran up to her and touched, hesitating briefly before reaching an index finger to the bony exterior overlaying her ribs.
“Don’t be scared,” said Vern.
Howling laughed. “Why would I be scared? Is that gonna happen to me? When? How long I got to wait? Do all grown-ups got that? Can you feel this?” he asked, pressing.
“I can feel it,” said Vern.
He took a stick and poked it into her back. “Can you feel that?”
“Yes.”
“Do it hurt?”
“No,” she said.
“It’s like dragon skin,” he said.
“Where’s Feral?” Vern asked.
“Inside trying to find his binoculars,” said Howling.
“You mean my binoculars.”
“That’s what I said, Mam.”
Next, Howling pressed his thumb into her sides, then staggered backward with a cry at the passenger’s reaction. “Mam!” he shouted, tripping backward into a patch of elk sedge.
The skeleton had unfolded. Expanding, it popped out of Vern’s sides like wings.
“It grew,” Howling said.
“It does that,” Vern said, as she heard the churn of Gogo’s pickup revving up the mountain. She breathed in, and the skele ton furled back into hidden slits in the carapace, just in time for Vern to put her flannel button-up back on.
While the skeletal growth appealed to the aesthetics of a four-year-old, neither Vern nor Gogo had seen each other disrobed. Vern was not ready to reveal her monstrous body unclad. Vern’s passenger had come far from that night Gogo had first laid eyes on it.
Gogo parked in front of the cabin and hopped out carrying a box. “Picked these up in town,” she said.
“You and your damn books,” said Howling, speaking Vern’s mind. “What are these ones about?”
Gogo had mentioned that she wanted to study Cainland’s precedents.
“Precedents?” Vern had asked.
“You know, MKUltra, Project 112, the Edgewood Arsenal human experiments, Tuskegee.”
At least Vern knew about Tuskegee.
Gogo slammed the driver’s door shut with her hip, then headed into the cabin. She balanced the box in one hand and opened the front door. “Check it out,” called Gogo from inside. “Jackpot,” she said, smiling as she emptied the box of books on the coffee table in front of the couch.
“Don’t worry. I’ll read them to you if you want,” said Gogo from where she sat on the arm of the sofa.
But Vern was tired of relying on Gogo. She needed to be able to read on her own. What if she wanted to get a letter to Carmichael, warning him? Now that Ruthanne wasn’t answering the phone, she didn’t have many other choices. What if she found herself alone again, with no Gogo? Vern had made up her mind to fight Cainland, and she wasn’t sure she could do that without every resource at her disposal.
“I want to learn to read them myself,” Vern declared.
“Sure, I can teach you.”
Vern shook her head. Gogo did too much for her already. She’d accept some help, but this she wanted to do by herself. In the following days, Gogo got Vern her very own magnifying glass. A twelve-inch-by-six-inch rectangle, and it had its own stand so Vern didn’t have to hold it. It far surpassed the reading glasses she’d been given as a child, which didn’t offer enough magnification and fell from her face when she tilted her head to get the right angle. With the magnifier, she could focus on flipping the pages of the books, on running her index finger under the letters.
The days Gogo was home, she chaperoned the children outside, and Vern sat at the kitchen table working.
“One … win … ter … mor … n … ing—morning—Peh-ter—Peter … woke … up … and … looked … out the … win … dow,” she read, choosing the book that was a favorite of Howling and Feral’s for her first project.