Everything was changing now. It was too late to turn back. Maybe it always had been.

Propping my shoulders against the cell wall, I closed my eyes and waited for the morning.

2.

As expected, the scientists were in a tizzy over the sudden expansion of the green patch on my arm. They made me peel away several more strips of papery skin, making me wish I’d spent more time picking at myself in the middle of the night. At least then I could have breathed in the scent of my own body in peace, instead of watching every scrap I removed whisked away for further analysis while people in white coats pressed in to study and record every little thing they could.

When the last of the skin was peeled away, the patch had grown from the size of a quarter to a long streak extending all the way down my forearm, stretching almost to the base of my wrist. A strip of raw, red flesh off to the left clearly demonstrated the demarcation. That wasn’t my fault: one of the scientists had insisted more skin could be removed, and had sliced away a piece that was still pretending to be human.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d just been sorry about it. Instead, she had said something delighted about having a sample of the transitional zone, tucked the bleeding piece of me into a petri dish, and run off, presumably to pick it apart at her leisure. Everything about me was something to put under a microscope.

With a click-clacking of heels against the industrial linoleum floor, my original captor, the still-nameless agent of whatever alphabet agency I currently belonged to, made her return. I raised my head and watched her approach, my eyes narrowed in consideration. This place was too sterile, too featureless and simple, to have been built by accident: real government agencies don’t look like they’re part of Barbie’s Dream Interrogation Complex. This place had been designed. Designed for me, or for whichever lucky member of my species had happened to become vulnerable first.

I had been here for days without being able to access the forest or communicate with my own kind. The forest had to be more than a network for those of here on Earth. I hadn’t even known that it could be used as a network until I’d stumbled over Jeff. So who benefited from my being able to go there? Who, if not the fleet, slowly approaching, needing to know things about the world it was about to take? Cultural literacy. Those were the words that kept haunting me. Something about them held the answer, and as soon as I knew exactly what it was …