Joss stopped because she thought her bootlace had caught. Ferel was several yards ahead, trying to find the path on a map already damp from being unfolded too often. Behind them the bracken moved in a long shallow wave, although the wind was blowing the other way.
"Give me a second," Joss said.
She had been saying that all morning. A second to take a photograph, a second to drink, a second to remove a stone from her boot. Ferel had teased her about getting old. Now she turned, ready with another unkindness they would both understand as affection.
A pale strip crossed the toe of Joss's boot. It looked like bark shed from a silver birch, except there were no birches on that slope. When Joss lifted her foot, the strip lifted with it. More pale material drew from beneath the ferns on either side of the path.
Ferel knelt to pull it away.
It was warm. The underside adhered to her fingertip, and she jerked back hard enough to lose a little skin. Tiny clear beads appeared along the place she had touched. Each bead opened in the middle, revealing a dark pinhole.
"Don't touch it," she said.
Joss tried to step out of the boot. The strip climbed over the leather and closed around her ankle. Beneath the bracken something flattened itself against the ground, drawing her foot toward it without disturbing the roots.
Ferel took hold of Joss's arms. Together they pulled backward. A second strip slid across the path behind Ferel's heels. It had been laid so gently that she felt it only when it tightened over her own boot.
They stopped pulling.
The movement beneath the ferns stopped too.
Joss looked along the path. There was bare rock above the next bend, perhaps thirty yards away. Beyond it the path crossed open grass toward the car park. They could see the roof of the toilet block where they had complained about the smell less than an hour before.
Ferel tried her phone. No signal. She held it higher, moving her arm without moving her feet, and watched the blank bars remain blank.
Joss said her leg was burning.
The strip had widened around her calf. Its pinholes were joining into a seam. A little section of the seam opened, showing a wet fold that worked slowly against the fabric of her trousers. There were no teeth. Ferel found herself wishing there had been teeth, something recognizable enough to resist.
She used a sharp edge of stone against the material crossing her own boot. The thing contracted. A long movement passed through the bracken, exposing patches of the same pale body beneath it, broad and almost flat. It filled the ground between the ferns without rising higher than their stalks. A narrow edge had worked down inside her boot and caught the skin above her sock.
Her foot came free of the boot. The strip kept a patch of skin. She was on one knee, gasping, before she understood that she could move.
Joss had been pulled sideways while Ferel struggled. The seam had reached her thigh. Something beneath it moved upward in slow mouthfuls, leaving the trouser leg collapsed behind it.
Ferel grabbed her shoulders again.
"Stop," Joss said.
Ferel pulled harder.
Joss screamed, then used the small breath left afterward to say it again. Ferel let go. The mouth stopped moving. Joss's face was gray around the lips, and blood had spread through the fabric at her hip.
They had known each other since a rented flat with no working oven. Ferel remembered Joss sitting cross-legged on the floor, balancing a plate on a newspaper. She could remember the pattern on the plate more easily than she could understand the leg in front of her.
"Go up there," Joss said, looking toward the rock.
"I'll bring someone."
"Tell them not to pull."
Ferel took her spare jacket from the pack and put it beneath Joss's shoulder. Then she left the pack between Joss and the open seam. The pale material folded around it. For a moment the pressure on Joss eased. Ferel could have mistaken that for a chance to try again. She saw Joss close her eyes in relief and knew what another attempt would do.
She climbed to the bare rock in one boot and one bleeding sock. New strips moved through the low plants beside her, trying to reach the path ahead. They could not cross the stone quickly enough. When she gained the open surface, the nearest strip flattened and remained where the bracken ended.
Her phone found a signal. She gave the location and described the boundary, repeating that nobody should enter the plants or pull at anything caught in them. The operator kept her speaking until a team was on the way.
Below, her pack had become a flat rectangle. Joss asked something Ferel could not hear. She called back that help was coming, and hated the ordinary sentence as soon as she had said it.
By the time people reached the rock, the voice had stopped. Ferel gave them Joss's name before they asked. Her spare jacket moved once on the path, dragged inward by a slow mouthful, and she made herself stay where she had been told it was safe.
