LITMIR.BIZ

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      1

      My first thought upon waking was that maybe I was dead. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how accurate that initial, intuitive and seemingly irrational notion was. It popped into my consciousness as soon as consciousness itself appeared. It made no sense. It was based upon no reason. It was just there.

      I must be dead.

      And just as quickly as it had come, the thought was gone again.

      I wasn’t dead. I was cold. But it was an odd kind of cold, because it didn’t make me shiver or feel uncomfortable, it was just an awareness of the fact. I was cold. And I was wet, too.

      I opened my eyes slowly and blinked to wipe away the blur of sleep, for I must have been asleep. It was dark. Newborn darkness, though. It had that sense to it, though I wasn’t sure at that moment how it was I could sense newborn darkness from any other kind. It wasn’t something I would have thought came naturally to ordinary people. And it was certainly nothing I’d ever noticed before.

      Or had I?

      Oddly, I didn’t remember, but I dismissed the slightly queasy feeling that notion brought to my stomach and focused instead on my surroundings. The immediate ones first. Beneath me, dirt. Solid packed, damp, but not muddy. A few scraggly patches of crabgrass and dandelions struggling for survival here and there, and looking proud of their triumph in such inhospitable conditions. All right, then. I was on the ground. Not flat ground, but a hillside that sloped precariously downward to a stretch of pavement at the bottom. And on the other side of that pavement, another patch of ground, sloping upward—a mirror image of the one on which I lay. And above them both…a ceiling?

      A bridge.

      I was on the sloping ground beneath a bridge.

      On either side of the bridge, rain poured from heaven’s open spigot, soaking the road at the bottom, except for the part of it that was sheltered.

      Why, I wondered, am I lying outdoors, on the ground, under a bridge, in the rain, at night?

      Naked.

      Refocusing my attention on the things in closest proximity, I noted the damp sheet of cardboard that lay over me, like a makeshift blanket, and noted further that, aside from that, I wore nothing. It had that wet-cardboard smell to it, and as I flipped it off my body, I thought my skin did, as well.

      I started to shake. Not from the cold, because the cold didn’t bother me and that had me worried. Maybe my nerves weren’t working just right, but at any rate, I was scared and I could feel panic creeping like ice water through my veins. I closed my eyes, firmed my spine, held my breath, then told myself, “Easy. Just take it easy. Just take it easy and figure this out. It can’t be all that difficult to figure this out.”

      Nodding in response to my own advice, I opened my eyes again, and this time I looked down at my own body. I was long, and I was thin. Perhaps athletic, I thought, and it scared me that I didn’t know if that was true or not. Maybe I was just sickly. Although I didn’t feel sickly. And my body seemed more lean than skinny.

      In fact, I felt…

      Strong.

      I opened my hands to see if they worked, then closed them again. I studied my slender arms, lengthy legs, small waist and hips nearly the same size, and my compact, round little breasts, as if I’d never seen them before. And then I noticed a lock of hair hanging over my shoulder, and I grasped it, lifting it to look and feel and smell it.

      It was copper in color, the kind of hair they call auburn, I thought, and it was curly and long, long, long, just like the rest of me. But also like the rest of me, I had the feeling I’d never seen it before.

      I stood up to see how long my hair was, and also to move around a bit. Maybe if I woke up more thoroughly, this fog in my head would clear and I would know who I was and what I was doing here in the middle of nowhere on the cusp of night, naked and alone.

      So I stood there, noticing that my hair reached to the tops of my hipbones, until a sound jerked my attention away from it. Something running, scampering off in the distance. My head snapped toward the sound fast, and I felt my nose wrinkling and realized I was scenting the moist air. My eyes narrowed, and my mind thought, Rabbit. And then I saw it, scurrying from one clump of brush to the next, far in the distance. Perhaps as much as a half mile from me.

      There was no possible way I could see a rabbit a half mile away in the dark, in the rain, much less identify it by smell.

      And yet I had, and I realized, as my senses came to life one by one, that I could hear many things and smell even more—the flitting of a little bird’s wings and the scent of the leaves in his nest, the hushed flight of a moth and the smell of the fine powder on his body, the bubbling of a stream somewhere beyond sight and the smell of its water

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