Dark Company Read Online Free PDF Page A

frustrated again. She wanted to sit up but the effort still proved to be too much. She wilted back down onto the bed. “I feel so sick.”
    “It is a very important time,” the being said. It shimmered and began to fade.
    “Please, don’t go,” she begged, the pain arcing in her body and drawing her back into the dark.
    When Meg resurfaced, she felt as though she’d been gone a thousand years. She couldn’t remember anything coherent. She wondered who she was and what she was doing. Her thoughts were slippery and ephemeral, as shapeless as the atmosphere in the room. There were images, like snapshots, and attendant emotions, but their significance and connection were lost to her. There was the boy. His face struck her with a longing so profound she thought she would cry, though his name she’d long since forgotten. She fought with all her strength to hold onto him, focusing on his face and the memory of his lips against hers. She wouldnever let him go, ever—she promised herself that. She would fight her transformation to the very end. And then she would find the boy, no matter what it took, and uncover the mystery of her past and her life with him.
    “I will not forget,” she vowed.
    Meg blinked at the white atmosphere around her, listening. She was feverish and sick, but the pain had mercifully subsided, leaving a throbbing ache in its place.
    “It’s not what I imagined,” she said.
    “What did you imagine?”
    It was the Incubator. It had returned.
    “How long have I been here?” Meg asked.
    The being drifted in and out of focus. “We don’t measure time here. Everything that ever was and everything that ever will be exists simultaneously.”
    Meg thought about this. “If everything exists simultaneously, then why can’t I just snap my fingers and transform instead of going through all this suffering?” She attempted to make her point by snapping the fingers on her bad arm. It flopped insolently around, the same drunk fish as before.
    “Process is necessary,” the being said.
    Meg tried to follow it as it swirled around the bed. “So, there is an order of operations.”
    “If you want to think of it that way, yes.”
    Meg bit her lip. There were so many questions to ask. Only she was finding it difficult to grasp the words. Something important had happened to her. She just couldn’t put her finger on it. Her mind was a shoebox of old photos, a jumble of untethered images. She couldn’t make sense of any of it. One thing she did know, she hadn’t always existed in this weird cloud world. Her memory of the boy was proof of that. She missed him so much.
    “Why do I have to be alone?” she asked. “I don’t like to be alone.”
    “You must be quarantined until you are fully formed.”
    Her longing for the boy made her bold. Meg raised herself awkwardly. “What if I don’t want to be …”—she searched for the right word but came up empty-handed—“whatever it is I’m becoming? What if I just want to go back to the way I was … before all this?” She made a gesture across the room with her good arm.
    “Not possible.”
    “But, why?”
    Her question hung in the air unanswered. The being had already left.
    In the ensuing void, Meg remained alone. It was impossible to trace how long she had been in the white room. Mysteriously, she was no longer bored but was fixated on the slow and deliberate changes that were taking place in her body. Something was definitely happening. Her floppy arm was still floppy, but the pain that had overwhelmed her for so long had nearly vanished. She floated directionless in the ether, her mind releasing memories that fluttered beyond the understanding of words. She knew that she was forgetting great chunks of things, that her memories were slowly eroding as surely as her body was changing. But it wasn’t a clean process. Some memories were stubborn, clinging to her subconscious like burrs, eventually leaving only the barbs behind—just enough to