He stands. He rolls up the sleeves of his hoodie.

“Touch me,” he says. “I dare you.”

His own voice frightens him. The audacity to dare a creature.

Whatever it is, it’s stopped. It’s near the wall. Just as Tom is.

“Touch me,” he says again. “Prove Mom wrong.”

He raises his bare arms to it.

All he has to do is open his eyes. All he has to do is look. Once. See what it does to you. Then he’d really be able to invent something, to make real change. Because if he doesn’t know what they do, how can he stop them from doing it?

He knows all the theories. Most people, like Mom, believe the creatures are beyond human comprehension. That seeing one is like glimpsing the void, infinity, or the face of God.

But Tom wonders…what if they’ve changed? And what if it’s just a matter of accepting them?

He thinks of his glasses in his bag in the barn. He thinks of Athena Hantz.

The creature isn’t moving. Dark wind blows, and Tom imagines it blowing his eyes wide open. Blame it on the night. The night came and lifted his eyelids the way people once raised the blinds in their homes in the morning. Malorie’s told him and Olympia about those days, when her own parents would fill the house with light, how it felt so much bigger because you could see, see, SEE the world outside. And how you felt like that was yours, too, the world outside your home.

Tom begins to open his lids. He’s actually doing it. His eyes roll back in his head so that only the whites are showing. He hasn’t looked yet. But he’s standing before a creature with his lids parted.

The feeling is incredible.

He doesn’t speak. And the creature doesn’t move. Arms extended, eyes rolled back, Tom feels invincible, like he’s going to be the first person on the planet to capture a creature.

Something brushes his arm.

Tom closes his eyes. The bird in the barn loft takes flight. Tom ducks at the sound. He swipes at his arm. Swipes again. Malorie’s words, Malorie’s worst fears, come rushing at him in the darkness of his own imagination. The flapping wings echo in the barn, loud. For a moment he mistakes it for the creature rising into the sky.

Neither Malorie nor Olympia speak from within.

Is the creature still in front of him?

Was he touched? Is he going mad?

“Where are you?”

Tom isn’t able to articulate how he knows this, but it doesn’t feel like the creature is standing where it was. Is it closer now? Farther? Did it flutter away, after all?

Or did it step right to him and…touch…

He goes cold. All over.