The little figure inside Corin's thigh bone was sitting with its knees drawn up. He could see its head resting on them. It occupied a space scarcely wider than a pencil, yet its proportions were those of an adult.
The radiographer turned the screen away.
"Please don't," Corin said.
She looked at him, then turned it back. Her name badge said Vesna. Earlier she had apologized because the room was cold. Now she pulled a chair close enough that they could both see the image without pretending there was another reason to sit together.
Corin had fallen stepping off a bus. His knee hurt more than the fall seemed to justify, and the ache had spread upward during the night. He had come to the clinic expecting advice about rest and perhaps an inconvenient support he would have to wear at work.
The figure raised its head.
He felt the movement inside the bone, a small scraping touch that had no business being possible. Vesna put one hand on the edge of the desk. She had watched the stored image change. There was no live instrument against his leg.
She called a doctor, then emergency transport. She did not leave the room to make either call. Corin was grateful for that. He found himself concentrating on minor courtesies because the larger facts were too difficult to hold at once.
"How long has it been there?"
Vesna said she could not know.
The pain had changed. Something was climbing through the length of his thigh, pulling on the inside as a person might use both walls of a narrow chimney. He could identify each grip. Sometimes the guest paused and rested, and Corin experienced the pause as relief before remembering what would happen when it continued.
The doctor arrived carrying a tablet and stopped beside the screen. He asked whether there had been a problem with the equipment. Vesna pointed to the figure's changed position. The doctor watched it unfold an arm longer than its body and reach toward the top of the bone.
He set the tablet down.
They helped Corin onto the examination couch. He could no longer put weight on that leg. Something passed through his hip with a pressure so deep that his vision narrowed. He heard himself say a word he used at work when a machine failed, and almost laughed at the inadequacy of it.
Vesna asked whom they should contact.
He gave his brother's number. Then he asked her not to use the word accident. His brother had spent the previous year dealing with their father's accident, and the word would make him imagine another set of circumstances in which he should have arrived sooner.
"Tell him I'm awake," Corin said. "Tell him to come here."
The guest reached his spine.
For several seconds he could feel its whole body pressed along the inside of his own structure. It had found a place wide enough to straighten. His back lifted from the couch. The doctor supported his shoulders while Vesna moved the chair out of the way. Both spoke to him, but neither said it would be all right.
Corin could see the thing now without looking at the screen. A narrow ridge traveled beneath the skin beside his ribs. It moved with the unhurried certainty of something following a familiar route.
He asked whether they could take it out.
The doctor looked at the ridge and did not answer immediately. In that pause, Corin understood that the creature was already taking itself out. The doctor drew the instrument trolley closer and tore open a pack of dressings.
The first rib opened with a soft internal crack. Corin shouted. Vesna gripped his hand, then changed her hold when he began crushing her fingers. She let him hold her wrist instead. He could feel a pulse there, ordinary and fast, and tried to stay with it.
The guest's head pressed between the ribs. Its skin was the color of marrow. It had a small closed mouth and no eyes he could distinguish. It did not struggle. The effort belonged entirely to his body, which gave way around it in short, catastrophic movements.
"Stay," he said.
Vesna answered that she was staying. He had not known whether he meant her or the thing. For a moment he wanted the guest to go back inside, to be painful and hidden again, anything that would leave him a little more time in the shape he understood.
It came free onto his chest and stood.
It was no taller than the doctor's hand. Its narrow limbs unfolded until they could bear its weight. Corin waited for it to look at him. He needed some sign that the destruction had been done to a person it could recognize.
The guest stepped down onto the couch, crossed the folded blanket and lowered itself to the floor. It walked toward the open door without turning. The doctor watched it go while pressing dressings against Corin's chest. He called to someone in the corridor to meet the ambulance and bring the crew straight through.
Vesna kept saying Corin's name. She said it as if a name were something she could place beneath him to keep him from falling farther. He could no longer answer, but he could hear her, and the small footsteps leaving the room had already become inaudible.
