Chương 13: B1 Chapter 12

Joa raised his knife and began to cut. He started at the iguana's throat, drawing the blade carefully between the smaller scales beneath its jaw. The dark hide resisted him at first, forcing him to adjust the angle and press harder. Once the edge broke through, he opened the throat with a steady pull. What we found inside was interesting, to say the least. There was an organ that definitely didn't belong inside an iguana. At first, I thought Joa had opened something he shouldn't have.

The flesh beneath the throat was crowded in a way that made it difficult to understand what I was looking at. Muscle, veins, and the familiar pale tube of the windpipe were all there, but something else had been forced among them. Then Joa opened the iguana farther. The organ continued down. And down. Joa drew his knife through the belly, carefully separating the hide until the cut reached almost to the animal's hind legs. When he pulled the two sides apart, I finally understood how large the thing was.

It took up an enormous portion of the iguana's body. The sac began beneath the throat and descended through the chest before swelling outward inside the belly. Its widest portion rested alongside the stomach and intestines, pressing them toward the sides of the body. Some of the iguana's organs looked crowded together because of it. The liver had been pushed aside. Loops of intestine curved around the strange growth where there should have been empty space between them.

It looked as though the iguana's body had been making room for it. Yet the strangest part was that the organ didn't look finished. Parts of it were thick and fully formed, covered in smooth translucent flesh with pale veins spreading across the surface. Other sections looked raw and incomplete. The membrane became thinner in patches, almost clear, before abruptly thickening again. Some of the veins ended halfway across the surface instead of joining the larger vessels.

Their tips divided into tiny red branches that disappeared into soft, newly formed tissue. Near the bottom of the sac, several lobes had begun to form but hadn't finished separating from one another. They bulged unevenly from the main body of the organ, some large enough to fill Joa's palm and others no bigger than the end of his thumb. One was little more than a knot of pale flesh covered in veins. It looked like something caught halfway between becoming one thing and another.

Even the attachments were different depending on where Joa looked. Some had buried themselves deeply into the iguana's flesh, thick enough that they appeared to have always been there. Others were little more than threads stretching between the strange organ and the surrounding muscle. Whatever had happened to the iguana was still happening when it died. The organ itself was long and irregular, wider through the belly before narrowing as it climbed toward the throat.

Its surface was translucent enough that we could see shadows moving beneath it. Thin branching veins covered the outside, though they didn't resemble the blood vessels surrounding the iguana's other organs. These were too pale, almost white, and they divided again and again into finer strands until much of the sac seemed covered in a delicate web. Light moved through those veins. The pale glow we'd seen beneath the iguana's scales hadn't come from its flesh at all. It had come from this.

Every few breaths, the organ contracted. The movement was slight, yet unmistakable. A slow tightening began near the swollen portion in the belly and traveled upward. The pale substance inside shifted with it, pushed through the sac toward the narrowing tube that climbed beside the windpipe. Then the organ relaxed. The fluid settled again. Joa stopped cutting.

"What is that?" he asked. None of us answered him. I had clean enough animals to know what belonged inside them. Hearts were hearts. Lungs were lungs. Stomachs twisted differently depending on the creature, and intestines could be longer than seemed possible when pulled free, but there was an order to all of it. Everything had somewhere it belonged. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. This had no place. Even its flesh looked wrong.

The surface was too smooth in some places and ridged in others, with narrow bands of muscle wrapped around the sac at uneven intervals. Some of those bands were thick and complete, circling the organ entirely. Others stopped halfway around it, thinning into reddish strands that vanished beneath the translucent membrane. The unfinished bands twitched without contracting properly. The completed ones tightened one after another whenever the organ pulsed, squeezing whatever it contained upward.

Near the bottom, the half-formed lobes disappeared among the iguana's organs, each attached to the surrounding flesh by thin strands. Some disappeared into the liver. Others seemed buried in the muscle along the spine. One had begun wrapping itself around a thick blood vessel, though it hadn't yet completely enclosed it. I couldn't tell where the iguana ended and the strange organ began. Eyowon lowered herself beside Joa. Her fingers hovered over the opened body before she touched the edge of the incision.

"Remove it." Joa looked at her, then back at the organ. There was considerably more to remove than either of us had first realized. He began near the belly. Joa carefully worked his knife beneath the largest portion of the sac. His hand remained steady from years of butchering animals, though he moved more slowly than usual. Every cut exposed another place where the organ had attached itself to the iguana. Fine strands extended from its surface into the surrounding muscle. Some were barely thicker than hair.

Others were substantial enough that Joa had to saw through them with the tip of his knife. Each one recoiled slightly after being severed, curling toward the organ. Joa noticed. So did I. He paused. Neither of us said anything. He continued cutting. Slowly, the enormous sac came free from the belly. Without the surrounding organs holding it in place, its weight pulled downward, stretching the remaining attachments toward the throat. The tube leading toward the windpipe was more difficult.

It ran upward through the chest, pressed tightly against the windpipe before curving beneath it. There, it narrowed to something no thicker than Joa's smallest finger and continued toward the mouth. Joa followed it carefully. The tube had grown directly into the flesh beneath the iguana's tongue. There was an opening there. Small. Round. Almost perfectly formed. Joa stared at it. I did too. The organ hadn't simply appeared inside the iguana. Whatever it contained had somewhere to go.

Once Joa cut the final connection free, he lifted the entire organ from the body. It was larger outside the iguana than I'd expected. Joa needed both hands. The swollen lower portion sagged heavily between his fingers while the long upper section hung beneath it, trailing toward the severed tube. Pale fluid shifted inside as he raised it, and the network of veins across its surface brightened. The unfinished portions became even stranger in the light. Some were nearly transparent.

Through them, I could see thin structures suspended inside the sac, branching toward places they hadn't reached yet. Tiny vessels ended blindly in the flesh. Half-formed ridges floated beneath the membrane like muscles that hadn't decided what shape they were supposed to take. For an instant, the entire thing glowed. Then the light faded back to a dull pulse. Joa held it away from his body.

"This wasn't in any iguana I've ever cleaned for the cook pots."

"It wasn't in the iguana yesterday," Eyowon said. Joa looked toward her.

"How could you know that?"

"Because yesterday, there was fire in the sky." The sac contracted in his hands. Joa nearly dropped it. The movement traveled through the organ exactly as it had while inside the iguana. The thick bands tightened around the lower sac, one after another, pushing the glowing liquid upward. The unfinished bands twitched uselessly between them. A thick drop gathered at the severed end of the tube. It glowed faintly as it swelled. Then it fell onto the packed-earth floor. The moment it struck, the earth began to smoke.

For several long moments, we watched the pale vapor curl upward from the place where the drop had fallen. Then the smell reached me. I knew that smell. The river sometimes smelled that way when the black blood of the earth spilled up from beneath it. It happened in places where the riverbank split and thick black liquid seeped from cracks in the earth. Most times, it floated on the water in dark patches until the current carried it away.

Sometimes lightning struck the black blood floating across the water, and the river caught fire. The smell carried for miles. Thick. Bitter. Oily. It clung to the inside of the nose and coated the tongue until even water tasted wrong. The substance from the iguana smelled like that. Fainter, perhaps, but close enough that the memory came immediately. I watched the pale vapor curl upward. The earth beneath it hadn't blackened. No flame appeared, and the dry reeds nearby didn't catch fire.

Joa leaned closer, careful to keep the glowing sac away from his body.

"It isn't fire," he said. I understood what he meant. What we were seeing wasn't smoke. The substance was evaporating the instant it touched the ground, like rain striking a stone that had baked beneath the sun for an entire day. The haze came from the liquid itself as it vanished into the air. The earth remained unchanged beneath it. Whatever the organ held, it wasn't acid. It wasn't fire either, and no great conflagration would begin from the few drops remaining inside the tube. At least, not yet.

Not that I could tell. Joa set down his knife and took a thin length of cord from one of Eyowon's tables. He folded the severed tube over itself before tying it tightly, then bound the opposite end of the sac as well. The pale substance shifted within its prison. The organ contracted once more. Joa tightened the bindings. Only then did he hand it to Eyowon. She accepted it with both hands. Even in her grip, it looked enormous.

The lower portion hung beneath her palms, heavy enough that she had to cradle it against her forearm while the narrow tube dangled between her fingers. The glow illuminated the blood drying across her hands. Eyowon turned the sac slowly, feeling along its surface. Her fingertips traced the pale veins, then moved across the ridged bands of muscle wrapped around it.

She lingered over the places where the tissue became thin and unfinished, feeling the abrupt ends of structures that seemed to have stopped growing halfway through their formation. Her expression changed. Her brow tightened, and her lips parted as though she'd finally understood something. She turned her blind eyes toward me.

"E'ru," she began. Then the screaming started.