Before they had walked two hundred yards from the landing shingle, Pip sat down in the wet sedge and did not get up.
All four women reached into their pockets and brought out the small portions of clean quarry limestone Pip had asked them to carry the night before. Pip ate every piece from their palms—first Ashaun’s, then Chaska’s, Osha’s, and Ysabet’s—crushing the pale stone quickly between its blunt tooth plates. Yet the moment the last crumb was swallowed, a cold wind rolled down off the northern ridge, a hot bubble burst with a loud glop in a nearby pool, and the faint lights inside Pip’s chest flared bright white through its skin.
The creature shivered hard, its six legs trembling under its weight.
Ysabet knelt in the warm mud beside it and laid her useful left hand across the translucent shelter shell on Pip’s back.
Where the shell had been hard as horn at the Fortress of Sleeping Wings, her fingers pressed an inch inward as if she were touching soaked boot-leather or soft cheese rind. Along the old Little Harbor seam, the pale mineral tissue had gone spongy and thin, peeling back slightly at the lower rim where the fine sensory filaments met the hide. Those quartz-cave lights were burning through mineral faster than four pocketfuls of dry limestone could replace, and the acidic bog water splashing its belly was leaching what little lime remained in the plate.
