Wet Gray Slush

"Do not look at me with that eye," Olive said.

Her voice was a harsh rasp in the freezing air. She stared at the massive chunk of cloudy quartz that had fallen from the collapsed dome. Inside the thick, milky glass, the face of Elder Mason was perfectly preserved. The gray fabric of his ceremonial robes, the deep wrinkles around his mouth, the exact angle of his sharp nose—all frozen. But his left eye, a solid sphere of white crystal, had just blinked. The slow, deliberate scrape of stone eyelid over stone eyeball made a sound like two heavy rocks grinding together at the bottom of a dry well.

Olive scrambled backward. Her boots slipped in the wet gray slush. She hit the ground hard, her injured ribs screaming in protest. The pain was sudden and violent. It radiated from her side up into her chest, wrapping around her lungs like an iron band. Her breath caught. She could only pull in shallow, ragged gasps. The cold air burned the back of her throat.

"You are a dead thing," Olive said. She kept her eyes fixed on the shard. Her jaw felt tight. She realized she was grinding her molars again, the exact same way she had in the control room. The dull ache in her temples throbbed in time with her racing heart. She forced her mouth to open, stretching the stiff muscles of her face.

The massive crystal shard did not move. It sat in the crater of black mud and melted snow, hissing softly as it radiated an unnatural, freezing aura. But then, a voice came from it. It did not come from Mason's frozen mouth. It resonated from the structure of the quartz itself, vibrating the air around her.

"We have achieved the ultimate stasis, Olive," Mason's voice said. It was smooth, theatrical, and impossibly loud. It echoed through the dense pine trees, bouncing off the wet bark. "You must remain. You must witness the permanence."

"I am leaving," Olive said. She pushed herself up from the slush. Her hands were numb. The scrape on her palm from the hydro-tunnel grating was bleeding again, the dark red blood mixing with the gray mud on her skin.

"You are experiencing the somatic panic of a dying organism," the crystal resonated. The sound made the muddy water in the crater vibrate with tiny, concentric ripples. "Your heart rate is elevated. Your breathing is shallow. Your body is a fragile machine built for decay. We do not breathe. We do not panic. We are the final architecture of this world."

"You are a rock," Olive said. She turned her back on the shard.

She started walking. The Ontario bush was a dense, confusing tangle of old-growth pines and thick, thorny underbrush. The ground was treacherous. It was late spring, the season of the thaw. Beneath the thin layer of fresh snow lay deep, unstable pockets of black mud and rotting leaves. Every step was a physical calculation.

She walked fast. Her heavy canvas jacket was soaked through at the shoulders, the wet fabric clinging coldly to her skin. Her right foot began to tap a frantic rhythm inside her wet boot every time she paused to check her footing. Tap. Tap. Tap. She could not stop the nervous tic. It was the only way her body knew how to bleed off the excess adrenaline flooding her system.

Behind her, the ruined Arbour groaned. The massive geodesic dome was continuing its transformation. She did not look back, but she could hear it. The screaming of the steel support beams snapping under the weight of the growing quartz. The heavy, explosive crashes as more pieces of the structure broke off and fell into the forest.

"The utopia was a flawed premise," Mason's voice boomed.

Olive stopped. The voice was not coming from behind her anymore. It was coming from her left.

She turned her head. Thirty yards away, another massive shard of the dome had crushed a young birch tree. The tree trunk was pinned beneath the glowing white rock. The voice was vibrating from that shard now. The contagion was acting like an acoustic network, turning every fallen piece of the dome into a speaker.

"We tried to control the dirt," the voice continued, echoing through the wet trees with formal, terrifying calm. "We tried to filter the water. We were trying to manage chaos. The quartz does not manage chaos. It replaces it. It is the perfect form. There is no hunger here. There is no cold."

"Shut up," Olive said. She kept walking.

Her legs felt heavy. The mud sucked at her boots, trying to pull them off her feet with every step. She focused on the mechanical motion. Lift the knee. Plant the heel. Shift the weight. Lift the other knee.

She thought about Roger. The memory was uninvited and sharp. She remembered the way he had looked standing by the primary exterior valve in the dark tunnel. The way his canvas jacket had turned stiff and shiny. The way his hands had fused to the iron wheel. Her stomach turned over. She felt a sudden, violent surge of nausea. She leaned against a rough pine trunk and gagged, spitting a string of bitter saliva into the snow.

He had burned his hand on the coffee pot that morning. He had cursed loudly. He had smelled like cheap soap.

"He felt pain," Olive said to the empty forest. She wiped her mouth with the back of her dirty sleeve. "That made him real."

"Pain is merely a biological failure," a new voice said.

Olive jumped, her shoulders hitting the pine bark. This voice was closer. It was David. The hollow, grinding voice of the engineer who had tried to kill her in the tunnels.

She looked around frantically. High above her, lodged in the thick branches of an ancient pine tree, was a smaller shard of crystal. It was the size of a television, wedged tightly between two thick limbs. It glowed with a sickly white light, casting harsh shadows down onto the forest floor.

"It is a warning system for fragile machinery," David's voice resonated from the crystal in the branches. "We have no need for warnings. My arm was broken, Olive. But it did not bleed. It did not hurt. I am perfectly whole."

"You are a geologic parasite," Olive yelled up at the tree. Her voice felt thin and weak compared to the booming resonance of the stone. "You are speaking through a rock. Do not lecture me about machinery."

"The meat rots, Olive," David's voice said.

"I prefer the rot," Olive said. She pushed away from the tree. "I prefer the dirt."

She forced herself to move faster. The forest floor was beginning to slope downward. The trees grew closer together, their branches overlapping to block out the gray, overcast sky. The sleet started falling harder. It hit the frozen ground with a sharp, hissing sound. The tiny pellets of ice stung her bare cheeks and caught in her eyelashes.

She needed to reach the old highway. The Arbour had been built twenty miles off the main grid, isolated on purpose. The founders had wanted a buffer between their eco-commune and the collapsing infrastructure of the old world. Now, that buffer was a death trap. If she could reach the asphalt, she could follow it south. Away from the dome. Away from the contagion.

Her left boot sank deep into a hidden pocket of mud. She pulled hard, but her foot slipped out of the boot entirely. Her socked foot landed squarely in the freezing gray slush.

The cold was absolute. It felt like a physical blow to her foot. She cursed loudly, dropping to her knees in the mud. She dug her bare hands into the freezing muck, grabbing the heel of her boot and pulling it free with a loud, wet sucking sound.

She sat back in the snow, her chest heaving. Her ribs throbbed relentlessly. She pulled the wet, muddy boot back onto her freezing foot. Her toes were already numb. This was how people died out here. Not from monsters, not from crystal plagues, but from wet socks and a drop in core temperature.

Her hands were shaking. She could not stop them. The tremors started in her fingers and moved up her arms, rattling her shoulders. She clenched her jaw again, grinding her teeth so hard they squeaked.

"Look at yourself, Olive."

The voice was Sarah's. It came from a cluster of small, jagged crystals growing out of the mud near Olive's knee. The contagion was spreading. It was not just the falling shards anymore. The mineral infection was leaching into the groundwater, crystallizing the mud itself.

Olive stared at the glowing rocks.

"You are shivering," Sarah's voice said. It sounded like chalk scraping on a blackboard, but the tone was sickeningly sweet and formal. "Your core temperature is dropping. Your cells are dying. You are fighting a war against the elements that you cannot win. The earth does not want you to be warm. The earth wants you to be still."

"Get out of my head," Olive said. She kicked the cluster of crystals with her heavy boot.

The rocks shattered with a sound like breaking glass. The white light inside them flickered and died. The voice stopped.

Olive stood up. Her wet left foot felt like a block of wood. She ignored it. She had to keep moving.

She pushed through a thick cluster of thorny bushes, ignoring the sharp branches tearing at her canvas jacket and scratching her face. She emerged into a small clearing.

In the center of the clearing lay a dead deer.

Olive stopped dead in her tracks. Her breath plumed in the cold air.

The animal had been caught in the early stages of the spring thaw. It was half-buried in the melting snow. But it was not rotting. It was changing. The biological horror of it made Olive's skin crawl. The deer's brown fur was stiffening, turning translucent and hard. Its massive antlers were no longer bone; they were jagged, unpolished quartz, catching the dull gray light from the sky and refracting it in harsh, bright glares.

Veins of glowing white light pulsed faintly beneath the deer's frozen ribcage. It was exactly like Roger.

Olive gave the deer a wide berth, pressing her back against the trees on the edge of the clearing. She did not want to look at its eyes. She knew what they would look like. Solid, milky stones.

She reached the far side of the clearing and kept walking. The slope of the ground became steeper. She was heading down into a ravine. During the summer, this would be a dry ditch. Now, it was a rushing channel of spring runoff.

She heard the water before she saw it. A loud, aggressive roar.

She reached the edge of the ravine. The bank was steep and slick with mud. At the bottom, a torrent of brown, freezing water rushed over sharp rocks. The water was choked with chunks of gray slush and broken tree branches.

The crossing was twenty feet wide. There was no bridge. The only way across was a massive pine tree that had fallen over the ravine years ago. Its thick trunk spanned the gap, its bark stripped away by the weather, leaving the wood smooth and gray.

Olive stared at the log. It was wet with sleet. It looked incredibly slippery.

"A minor obstacle for a perfect body," Mason's voice echoed.

Olive looked down. The banks of the ravine were dotted with glowing white crystals. The contagion had reached the water. The edges of the rushing stream were beginning to freeze into solid quartz.

"For you, it is a mortal threat," Mason's voice continued, projecting from the rocks below. "Your balance is compromised by your fatigue. Your muscles are weakened by the cold. If you fall, the water will drown you. Your lungs will fill with mud. It is an undignified end."

"Watch me," Olive said.

She stepped onto the log.

Her right foot held firm. She brought her wet left foot up. The rubber sole squeaked against the slick wood. She threw her arms out to her sides for balance. Her ribs sent a sharp spike of pain through her chest, making her gasp.

She took a slow, sliding step forward. The rushing water below was loud. The sound filled her ears, drowning out the theatrical voices of the crystal. She focused entirely on the rough texture of the wood beneath her boots.

Step. Slide. Breathe.

She was halfway across. The wind picked up, blowing a harsh gust of sleet directly into her face. She squinted, her eyes watering. Her right foot tapped involuntarily against the log. Tap. Tap.

"Stop it," she muttered to herself. She forced her foot to stay still.

She took another step.

Suddenly, a loud crack echoed from the trees above her. Olive looked up.

A heavy shard of crystal, lodged in the canopy during the dome's collapse, had finally broken free. It fell through the branches, tearing through pine needles and wood, hurtling directly toward the log.

Olive threw herself forward.

She hit the far end of the log hard on her stomach. The impact knocked the wind out of her completely. The crystal shard smashed into the wood exactly where she had been standing a second before. The log shuddered violently under the impact. The shard shattered, sending sharp fragments of glowing stone flying in all directions.

Olive felt a sharp, burning pain slice across the back of her left hand.

She scrambled off the log, digging her hands and knees into the muddy bank of the ravine. She crawled away from the edge, gasping for air, her chest heaving. The iron band around her ribs felt tighter than ever.

She sat back in the mud and looked at her left hand.

There was a deep gash across the back of her knuckles. The skin was sliced clean open. Blood welled up from the cut, thick and dark red.

Olive stared at the blood. She felt a sudden, overwhelming wave of panic. Her heart hammered against her sternum. Her breath came in short, frantic gasps.

She had been cut by the crystal.

She remembered the way the contagion had spread through the hydro-tunnels. The way it had consumed the steel pipes. The way it had fused Roger to the iron wheel.

Was it in her blood now?

She watched the cut intently. The blood was red. It was warm. It dripped down the side of her hand and fell into the gray slush. It did not turn white. It did not turn into dust.

"Not yet," Olive whispered.

She grabbed a handful of clean snow from the base of a nearby tree. She pressed it hard against the cut. The freezing cold burned like fire, but she held it there, grinding her teeth against the pain. She needed to clean the wound. She needed to bleed it out. She scrubbed the snow into the cut, washing away the blood and any microscopic dust that might have entered her skin.

She wiped her hand on her wet jacket. She tore a strip of fabric from the hem of her shirt, her fingers fumbling clumsily with the material. She wrapped the makeshift bandage tightly around her hand, pulling the knot closed with her teeth.

She was shivering violently now. Her whole body shook. Her jaw clattered. She could not stop it.

"You are destroying your own covering to bind a temporary wound," Sarah's voice echoed from the ravine behind her. "It is a pointless gesture. The cold will take you before the infection does."

"I am not listening to you," Olive said. Her voice was shaking so badly she could barely form the words.

She forced herself to stand up. Her legs felt weak, like they were made of water. She turned away from the ravine and started walking up the slope.

The forest was beginning to thin out. The massive, ancient pines were giving way to smaller, scrubbier trees. The underbrush was less dense. She could see a gap in the canopy ahead.

She checked her wrist monitor. The screen was cracked, but the green digital numbers were still visible. Her heart rate was at one hundred and twenty. Her core temperature warning was flashing a steady, rhythmic yellow light.

She ignored it. She kept walking.

The ground leveled out. The mud gave way to patches of gravel and dead grass. The smell of the air changed. The sharp scent of pine and ozone faded, replaced by the faint, metallic smell of old oil and wet asphalt.

Olive broke through the final line of trees.

There it was. The old highway.

It was a wide, flat ribbon of black asphalt cutting straight through the forest. It was cracked and weathered, overgrown with weeds, but it was solid. It was man-made. It was a path out.

Olive let out a long, shuddering breath. Her shoulders dropped. The tight grip in her jaw finally relaxed. She took a step forward, her heavy boots crunching on the loose gravel at the edge of the road.

She walked onto the asphalt.

The surface was flat. It was the easiest step she had taken in hours. She stood in the middle of the empty road, the sleet falling around her, and looked south. The highway stretched out in a straight line, disappearing into the gray mist of the distance.

She took a deep breath. The air still tasted cold, but the panic in her chest was beginning to subside. She had made it. She was out of the bush. She was away from the Arbour.

She looked down at the road beneath her boots.

Her tapping foot froze. Her breath caught in her throat. The tight, painful grip returned to her jaw instantly.

The old highway was marked with faded white lines down the center.

But as Olive stared at the road, she realized the white lines were not paint.

They were thick, jagged veins of glowing white quartz, pulsing with faint light, spreading rapidly down the center of the asphalt toward the horizon.

She stared at the asphalt, realizing the white lines were not paint, but veins of glowing quartz spreading toward the horizon.