Alistair’s head was bowed in concentration and effort, her face pressed to the edge of the bushes, and in the flickering light she could just make out the roots of the nearest berry bushes in the dirt. And the typeset letters and words climbing up the bark from the frozen soil, onto the branches, into the leaves.
F. Q. A. Falling. Meadow. Thornmouth.
Printed on every part of the bush, as if someone had pulled the plant through the bail of a typewriter.
threshold
That’s where the word on her finger had come from. Not the newspaper. From the berries themselves.
The island had words growing out of the ground.
The sound of fluttering wings first snatched at Alistair’s attention, but it was the thorned branch swatting down on her bare arm that finally shattered her fixation on the words.
