Mist hung over the swamp that night.
It was thick and green, and it never really moved. It sat on the black water like a lid.
Beneath a tangle of roots, a clutch of eggs clung together in the dark. Each one was smaller than a pea. Each one held a tiny, simple life.
One of them held something that didn't belong there.
.
.
I couldn't breathe.
That wasn't new. I'd had asthma since I was six. I knew what a bad night felt like. A tight chest, a whistle in my lungs, a slow climb I could usually ride out.
My name was Evan Mercer. I was seventeen. Average grades, average friends, a bookshelf that was starting to buckle under the sheer weight of books it contained.
It was Tuesday night. I was in my room, pretending to study for a chemistry test. The heater had just come on for the first time that month, and the air smelled like burning dust.
By midnight, my throat was scratchy.
By ten past, there was a constricting felling in my chest.
I grabbed my inhaler and took two puffs. Nothing.
I pressed it again. A dry click.
I flipped it over and checked the counter on the back. Zero.
It had said zero last Thursday, too. I'd meant to ask Mom for a refill.
Okay. Okay, okay. Don't panic.
My spare was in my school bag. My bag was downstairs. Downstairs seemed like a world away.
I stood up too fast. The room tilted. I made it two steps before my knees gave out, and I slid down against the side of my bed.
My parents were on the other side of that wall. I slammed my palm against it. Once. Twice. Three times.
Dad slept with a white noise machine. Mom had taken a sleeping pill that night.
I hit the wall again anyway.
I grabbed my phone and found Mom's name. I could hear it ringing faintly, then I realized I couldn't hear her phone at all. She always left it on silent. On the kitchen counter. Downstairs.
I tried to say "help."
What came out was a jagged breath.
The edges of the room started to go gray. My lamp. My posters. My shelf of paperbacks. All of it got soft and far away.
The strange part was how calm I felt. I always thought I'd be more scared.
On my desk, a paperback lay open and face down, a receipt for a bookmark. Page 212.
I really wanted to know how that ends.
That was the last thing I thought.
.
.
It was warm.
That was the first thing I noticed. Not the hospital kind of warm, with scratchy blankets and beeping machines. A soft, heavy warmth that held me from every side.
I was floating.
I tried to move my hands. I couldn't tell if I had any.
It was dark. It was quiet, but a muffled kind of quiet, like there was a thick wall between me and everything else.
Am I in the hospital?
It made sense. People who suffocate end up in hospitals. Tubes, drips, machines. Maybe this was just what all of that felt like.
Then why can't I hear the machines?
No answer.
My thoughts came slowly. They drifted up like bubbles from the bottom of a pond, and by the time one reached the surface, I'd forgotten what I was worried about.
I slept. I woke. I slept again.
There was a slow pulse somewhere in the middle of me. A faint, bitter, green taste in whatever I was breathing, if you could even call it breathing.
I couldn't count the days. There was nothing to count them with.
Later, when I could count, I'd work out that it had been about nine.
Then the wall started to get thin.
The muffled world got louder. Soft clicks. A low throb like a bass note through a floor. A dim green-brown glow leaked in from somewhere far above.
Something in me squirmed. It wasn't a decision. My whole body just wanted out.
I pushed. I twisted. I wriggled against the soft walls until one of them gave way.
The world rushed in.
.
.
The first thing I understood was that there were a lot of us.
Dozens of tiny shapes tumbled around me in the murky water. Each one was about the size of a grain of rice, almost see-through, with two huge dark eyes and a thin green line down its side.
Huh. That's kind of cute.
What are they?
My brain gave up on that question pretty quickly. Larvae, maybe. Tadpoles. A school of really small something.
My mind was still foggy, and some part of me seemed fine with that.
I moved. I didn't think about how. It was like walking without thinking about your legs. When the others turned, I turned. When they stopped, I stopped.
It felt safer.
The water was the color of weak tea, thick with silt and bits of plant. Ribbons of green haze drifted through it in slow curls. When I passed through one, my skin tingled, like touching a nine-volt battery to my tongue.
It wasn't painful. It wasn't not painful either.
I noticed something else after the first few days. The school of larvae or tadpoles never went down.
We stayed in the upper water, where the light was. Whenever the current pushed us toward the bottom, the whole swarm flinched back up together, like a hand pulled off a hot stove.
Below the roots, the brown turned to black.
I didn't know what was down there.
I just knew I never wanted to find out.
I saw other things, too.
A cloud of see-through shrimp, each one the size of a fingernail, scuttled along the muddy shallows. Their veins glowed a sick green through their shells.
A snail the size of a coin crawled up a drowned stem. Little crystals stuck out of its shell like mold.
Something long and black and boneless hung from a log, with a ring of tiny teeth around its mouth. It had two mouths. One at each end.
I stared at it for a while.
Then I very deliberately looked somewhere else.
Once, far below us, something huge slid along the bottom. I couldn't see its shape. I only saw the mud shimmer as it passed.
Every small body around me squeezed together. I squeezed with them.
When it was gone, I realized I was trembling.
That was something big, I thought. And it lives down there.
The days kept passing. The little shapes around me grew larger and more solid. A silvery shine crept along their sides. Their eyes turned pale gray. Their fins sharpened like blades of grass.
They flashed in unison when they swam, tiny silver sparks in the murk.
They looked, I thought slowly, like very small fish.
I stopped.
It felt like walking into a room and finding a thought that had been waiting for me the whole time.
That's a weird kind of tadpole, my brain suggested, a little desperately.
But it wasn't. I knew it wasn't.
And right in the middle of that thought, something moved in the shadows.
The school scattered.