An anguished cry pulled Ashlynn's attention back to her sister.
A branch had pierced Jocelynn's chest.
It didn't stab her like a sharpened stick. Instead, it pushed slowly, the way a root pushes through stone, finding the soft places and widening them. Jocelynn's cry was thin and high and short, and then it stopped, and the silence afterward was worse.
Around the branch, her skin began to change. The color drained out of it, leaving it grey, then the mottled grey-brown of a log left too long on the forest floor. It split along fine lines like old bark. Something pale and frilled pushed out through the cracks. The soft, ruffled shelves of fungus that grew on dead trees in the wet season, blooming across her collarbone in a ring of pallid, rubbery flesh.
Then it crumbled.
