Chapter 2
Three to Five Business Days
Maisie
Three days later, I’m elbow-deep in a batch of rosemary-oat bars and arguing with a kitchen timer that I swear is making time move slower when I hear a truck.
The sound registers in the back of my mind the way most things do during production hours: as a minor disturbance in the atmosphere.
It’s filed behind don’t let the lye water overheat and you forgot to label the curing rack again and your left shoulder is making that clicking noise, maybe deal with that sometime this century.
I’ve got soap dust in my hair, shea butter crusted under my fingernails, and an apron that looks like I lost a fight with the craft store clearance aisle.
The truck’s the least of my concerns.
Except the truck is getting louder.
And closer.
And it’s turning off the main road onto Coyote Springs, which means it’s either lost or coming for me, because there are exactly three properties out here and the others never get big deliveries.
There’s Mrs. Pritchett, who collects ‘55 Chevys in varying states of decay and calls it yard art. Online shopping is still witchcraft to her.
Then there’s Gary, who orders cat food in bulk and looks after Gram’s three alpacas when she’s up north for the summer. His cat food deliveries always come like clockwork every first of the month.
Nope.
The truck is coming for me.
I set down my spatula, wipe my hands on the one clean patch of apron I have left, and walk to the studio window.
A brown delivery truck is grinding its way up my dirt road in a cloud of pale dust.
Oh.
It’s that.
I’d almost forgotten about the purchase.
Almost.
I forgot it in the way you almost forget about a text you sent at 2 a.m. to someone you shouldn’t have, where “almost” means you remembered it with full-body clarity the very next morning as you stared at the ceiling for forty-five seconds, then got up and made coffee and poured an entire day of work on top of it like concrete over a time capsule.
I remember it now.
The truck parks.
Two guys in brown uniforms climb out.
One of them goes around to the back, opens the rear roll-up door, and disappears inside.
The other one grabs a reinforced dolly from a rack on the truck’s side.
The thing they’re unloading is a crate.
An actual, honest-to-God shipping crate, banded with heavy-gauge steel strips and stamped with a logo I’ve never seen before.
It looks like something you’d use to transport a piano.
Or a sarcophagus.
Or a baby grand piano that ate a sarcophagus.
I ordered a vibrator.
I ordered a small, discreet vibrator, and these men are wheeling in a shipping container across my yard.
I’m outside before I’ve made the conscious decision to move, screen door banging behind me, soap dust probably trailing off me like I’m Pigpen from Peanuts.
“There’s been a mistake.”
One of the men checks his scanner without looking up.
“Maisie Hayes?”
“Yes, but—”
“1742 Coyote Springs Road?”
“That’s my address, but I ordered a—I ordered something small. Like, the size of a hair straightener? Or a rolling pin? Or like, those tubes of ready-made orange cinnamon rolls? You know the ones, right?”
He looks at me like he’s got better things to do. “Okay?”
“That”—I point at the crate, which the other guy is already wheeling toward my studio with the calm determination of a tugboat—“could hold a person.”
He turns the scanner toward me like he’s presenting evidence in a courtroom. “Barcode matches the order number.”
There on the tiny screen is my order confirmation number, the one from the cheerful little email that arrived at 1:07 a.m. three nights ago while I was lying on concrete and making bad life choices.
“I understand the barcode matches, but there’s clearly been a fulfillment error. I spent about a hundred dollars. That crate costs more to ship than my entire order.”
“Ma’am, we deliver. Returns and product issues go through the vendor.” He taps the signature pad with a stylus that has teeth marks on the end. “Sign here.”
“Can you just—can you take it back? Put it back on the truck and take it wherever it came from?”
“We deliver,” he repeats in monotone. “We don’t un-deliver.” He holds the signature pad closer and gives me a look.
Behind him, his partner has already maneuvered the crate through my studio doorway with the spatial awareness of a man who moves large objects for a living and has zero emotional investment in what’s inside them.
I look at the crate disappearing into my workspace.
I look at the signature pad.
I look down the dirt road where the dust from the truck’s arrival is still settling in a long, pale plume, and I think about chasing a delivery truck on foot in this apron, in this heat, in front of God and Mrs. Pritchett’s Ring doorbell camera and whoever might be hiking the ridge this morning.
I sign.
He tears off a slip and hands it to me, then both of them are back in the truck in under thirty seconds.
The truck reverses down my dirt road.
I’m left standing alone in my yard holding a receipt for a crate the size of a commercial refrigerator.
I go inside.
I walk around it once.
Up close, the logo stamped on the side is even less recognizable—two overlapping spirals, or maybe a wave. It looks hand drawn.
And below that: Handle with care. This side up. Do not expose to direct sunlight before activation.
Direct sunlight.
I ordered a vibrator.
Didn’t I?
I get the crowbar from the hook by the door—the one I keep for prying open bulk supply shipments—and weigh it in my hand. The steel is cool against my palm. My back is already sending a preemptive complaint about whatever leverage work is about to happen, but I ignore it like I always do.
I wedge the flat end of the crowbar under the nearest steel band and push.
The band groans.
My shoulder makes a sound like someone stepping on a bag of chips, and a bright wire of pain runs through my neck, which is my body’s way of saying remember me? The thing you’ve been ignoring the past couple of years?
“Yeah, yeah,” I mutter, and push harder.
The first band snaps free with a metallic ping.
I move to the second one.
This one’s tighter, seated in a groove that’s been routed into the wood itself, and I have to reposition the crowbar twice before I find the right angle.
The wood smells like something—cedar, maybe, but sweeter, with a resinous undertone.
It reminds me of the balsam fir absolute I splurged on last winter for a limited holiday line that sold exactly eleven units.
Second band off.
Third band off.
Sweat beads across my forehead, mixing with the soap dust that has settled into my hairline. But eventually, finally, the bands are done away with, and now the front panel is being held in place by nothing more than habit.
I give it a little pull, and the panel lists, heavier than I expected. I scramble backward and let gravity send it crashing to the floor.
Inside the crate, nested in a custom-molded cradle of dark foam, is the object I purchased.
It’s big.
That’s the first thing I notice.
The second thing I notice is that it’s shaped like a person.
Sort of.
The form resting in that custom-molded foam cradle is roughly humanoid.
There’s a torso, broad and tapering.
There are limbs, four of them, neatly slotted into the cradle’s contours.
There’s a head, or what I’m going to call a head, because it’s the rounded mass at the top where a head should be, slightly tilted, slightly bowed, like something asleep.
The whole thing is iridescent.
Deep teal bleeding into dark warm purple, the colors shifting as the fluorescent light hits from different angles.
The surface is smooth and wet-looking but not wet, and it has the organic gleam of something pulled from a tide pool on an alien planet.
It looks grown, not manufactured.
I take three steps back and hit my worktable with my hip.
“Okay,” I say to myself. “Okay. So there’s been an order mix-up. Has… Has to be.”
I ordered a vibrator.
A small, discreet, very fancy $99 vibrator.
And they sent me a body.
I stare at it.
The studio hums with the low drone of the overhead fluorescents and absolutely nothing else, and for maybe five full seconds I just stand there with my hip pressed against the worktable and my hands hanging at my sides like I’ve never used them before.
Then…
One of the fingers moves.
Or it doesn’t.
Or the light shifts.
Or my eyes, which have been staring unblinking at an iridescent surface in bad fluorescent lighting for too long, are simply doing what tired eyes do.
Because what I think I see is: the faintest ripple traveling across the surface of one hand.
A micro-shift from teal to a thread of gold surfacing and sinking in the space of a heartbeat, and one of those smooth fingers curling inward by a fraction of an inch.
I try to take a step back and end up banging into my worktable again.
My heart is slamming.
Full cardiac event energy.
The kind of heartbeat that shows up on fitness trackers as Are you okay? Should we call someone?
I don’t blink.
I don’t move.
I watch the thing in the crate with every cell in my body tuned to a frequency I didn’t know I had, and it is perfectly, completely still.
Teal and purple and not moving.
Not even a little.
Just sitting there in its foam cradle like a very expensive, very large, extremely person-shaped item that has never moved in its life and is, frankly, offended by the accusation.
“Okay,” I whisper.
My voice comes out thin and scraped.
“I’m just seeing things,” I say, less as a fact and more as wishful thinking.
The crate doesn’t respond.
The thing inside the crate doesn’t respond.
My fingers are white-knuckled on the worktable and my pulse is in my ears and the studio is dead quiet except for the fluorescents, which have never sounded more like a horror movie sound effect in all the years I’ve worked under them.
I don’t look away from the crate.
I don’t look away from the crate for a very, very long time, because if that thing moves again, so help me God…
It moves again.
The head lowers—slow, deliberate, unmistakable—and a swirl of luminous gold seems to develop into eyes that are looking directly at me.
I open my mouth, but I can’t even find my voice to let out a scream.