Page 79 of Satisfied By the Slime
Maisie
Iwake slowly, the way Ido now, completely different from how I used to. Two years of bolting upright, heart already hammering with the to-do list, and now my body wants to uncurl like something dormant finally getting sun.
His fault. Allhis fault.
Oz is warm beneath me, his surface rising and falling in that slow pulse he has when he’s been holding me all night. I stretch against him, catlike, smug, and that’s when I register it.
The color is wrong.
His usual iridescence, that shifting teal-to-violet that I’ve started to associate with home, has dulled. Muted, like someone turned down the saturation.
I prop myself up on one elbow. “Hey. What happened?”
He’s quiet for a moment. That particular stillness he does when he’s deciding how to say something.
“I sent a piece of myself to the ridge last night. While you slept.”
I blink. “You can do that?”
“Yes. It costs something, but I can separate off a small portion. Feel through it. Speak through it.”
The casual way he says this, like it’s obvious, like everyone can just split off a body part and go wandering…
I choose not to think too much about it. Just more slime biology I’ll have to get used to. “And?”
“I found the Ridge Walker.”
The name lands heavy. The green light in the cave. The presence that made Oz go still with something like recognition. The thing Mrs. Pritchett has been organizing orange vests about.
“He spoke to me,” Oz says. “He confessed to me about the cat, about the car, about decades of watching this town from the dark. He never meant any harm. He’s simply old and alone and doesn’t know if there’s a place for him here if he reveals himself.”
Something in my chest tightens. I know that kind of loneliness. The kind that makes you do strange things just to prove you exist.
“There was a message,” Oz continues. His colors flicker, trying to brighten, and the effort it takes is visible. “At the end. Something he needed to say. Something important. But my offshoot dissolved before I could holdonto it.”
“You lost it.”
“I remember just a little. But not who it’s for.”
“What did he say?”
“‘I’m still here. I never stopped waiting.’ I just… I wish I could remember who it was he wanted me to tell this to.”
His voice carries a weight I haven’t heard before. Like someone reached out across the dark and he couldn’t quite catch their hand.
I lie back against him. “So we figure out who it was for,” I say.
Oz’s surface warms beneath me. Gold threads, faint but there, threading through the dimness.
“You’re not upset.”
“About what? That you went investigating without me? Yes, obviously, we’re having a conversation about that later. But the rest of it?” I trace a slow circle on his chest. “Someone out there is lonely, just the way you were. That’s a problem we can solve.”
“A problem we can solve,” Oz repeats.
I push myself upright, already running through the mental roster of who might know something. “This town talks if you know who to ask.”
“I’ll stay here,” Oz says. “While you—”
