Colorless by Rita Stradling

Author:Rita Stradling [Stradling, Rita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rita Stradling Books
Published: 2017-08-07T22:00:00+00:00

12

The Power to Destroy

Annabelle

My heart beat quickly as I hooked the three fingers I had left on my hand around the ladder rung.

I was diminishing. No, that wasn’t exactly right. I was vanishing.

For hours, I had lingered in the workshop, not quite able to force myself to leave. I’d needed to study the creations that my father and uncle had died to create. I needed to memorize Fauve’s lines and shading. Though I knew I was running down Joseph’s thinning fuel supply, I turned up the flame so I could fully inspect every nuance of each pamphlet.

As I leaned a hand on the counter beside one of the pieces of art, my glove had collapsed a little more, exposing another transparent finger. I’d stared, not quite understanding what I was seeing for a second. The invisibility had slowly crept up my hand without me noticing. I felt nothing.

Finally, it was all too easy to make myself leave, and I rushed to set everything right before extinguishing the lantern. I needed answers, needed to find out what was happening to me and how to reverse it before the invisibility crept up further. Faint light rested on me as I climbed up the shaft to the house above.

On the final rung, my hand moved into a grayish illumination. The smallest refraction of the light moved over where my fingers should have been. I flexed the digits and again saw the light move, but I felt absolutely nothing in the movement.

My stomach twisted.

Hands shaking, I climbed halfway out of the stove and grabbed onto the iron lip at the base of the doors. Between my heedless run, the traumas of the past day and a half, and the tensing in my muscles every time I thought of my hand, my entire body was sore.

“I was wondering if you were going to come out today,” Sophie said from a foot away.

My injured hand slipped, and my wrist banged against the edge of the stove. A jolt of pain ricocheted through my arm as I lost my balance. Scrabbling wildly for the ladder, I caught the wooden rung, jamming my fingers against it. Gripping hard, I looked into Sophie’s composed face as she peered in. “You scared me,” I breathed on a harsh breath.

“I see that.” She leaned into her spare wooden rocking chair. Slowly, she rocked in and out of my window of view, framed by the stove’s innards.

“All right, well then, I’m going to climb out now,” I called before gripping the outside of the stove with my uninjured hand. Keeping my other hand at my side, I clambered up the rest of the ladder and through the hole. As I stood, I tucked my injured hand behind my back.

My gaze skipped around us, finding the space empty save for the old woman.

A line of light speared into the shack through an open window, frenzied with thousands of moving dust particles. Otherwise, little illumination managed its way into the space. Faint outlines of light and shadow differentiated the features of the furniture and walls.

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