leaves that many mistook for poinsettia flower petals—and rubbed it between two fingers. I need to hurry.
Straightening, she slipped off her jacket and laid it alongside a pallet. Rolling up her sleeves, she unbuttoned two buttons at the top of her blouse. Bending down again, she rolled up her pants legs to just below the knees and kicked off her shoes. After removing her socks, a shiver ran up her spine when she placed her bare feet on the cool dirt floor.
Taking a last look at the dying foliage, she inhaled deeply and closed her eyes. The musty sweet smell of fall, of decomposing leaves and fertile soil filled her. She felt a cascade of warmth flow through her as she raised her arms, palms up. A sheen of moisture broke out across her brow, and she exhaled audibly. Her pores opened, creating a rash of raised pink dots on her skin that disgorged a thick oily liquid. It did not bead, like sweat, but flowed over her body, like a spring pushing water from beneath the earth, overflowing, coating her skin and soaking her clothes.
Liz sighed again, and the oily residue coagulated, then clotted. It became gelatinous. The gelatin grew cloudy, making her body and clothing appear frosted, coated with a crystalline icing. She stiffened, constricted every muscle in her frame, trembling with the effort. A groan slipped from her coated lips.
And then she blossomed.
Millions of thin white stems burst from the frosting on her skin and clothing, so dense it looked like fur.
Liz inhaled and held her breath, her covered cheeks bulging outward.
The stems exploded.
Tufts of white fuzz fanned across the greenhouse, like a blizzard of dandelion dander, filling the air above the rows of limp flowers.
Liz, now dry and unshrouded in goo or stems, let out her breath. She watched the downy fibers dance in the air, kicked around by the ventilation system Rueben had left running. Next to her, a tiny white filament alighted on the bright red bract of a slumped poinsettia and melted into a speck of oily residue. A moment later the speck disappeared, absorbed into the plant. The withered red leaf lengthened and filled, firmed up and stood, followed by its neighbors, jerkily reaching toward the greenhouse roof, like a stop-motion film showing the miracle of nature.
More filaments landed. The greenhouse filled with a leafy rustling noise, as the resurrected poinsettias stood up, bright and alive.
Liz smiled, hopped up and down to get her pants legs to fall, and slipped on her socks and shoes. She sauntered down the center row of the greenhouse, looking left and right, watching the flowers come back to life. As she approached the end of the row, she sensed a breeze, different and stronger than the air flowing from the ventilation system. Still watching the recovering plants, she dismissed it, thinking she must be getting closer to a vent. She did not bother looking down the aisle.
An electrical sizzle and the smell of ozone drew her attention.
At the end of the aisle, six feet ahead, stood a black gash floating in the air, as if the world were a balloon and someone had ripped a hole in it. A gust of wind pulled at Liz, drawing her toward the void. She instinctively leaned away from it and placed a foot against one of the pallets under the poinsettias. The vacuum ahead grew more insistent, more powerful, and she turned away to run. Behind her, she saw a translucent blue wall that sloped upward. She tracked it across the ceiling, until she once again faced the blackness at the end of the aisle. She was encased in a sphere, a blue bubble of static.
On the verge of tumbling forward, Liz extended her arm to a thin pillar that ran up to the ceiling, but, as she was about to wrap her hand around it, she realized her hand was gone. A luminous mist trailed away from the end of her arm, where her hand should have been, and flowed into the black hole ahead. Within seconds her arm was gone. She strained and twisted her head to the side, as her shoulder melted into mist. Shaking her head, she looked down. Her torso disintegrated into a cloud of ambient green and seeped away.
“It’s time to come home,” a baritone voice echoed from the blackness.
It was the last thing she heard before her head dissolved.
CHAPTER 4
The black vapor of Juaquin Prado’s infectious soul swirled above her face. Through