They were miles up the Harlow Ridge trail when the sky came apart.

Dan had been mid-sentence about the trail mix, something about how Erica had bought the kind with the yogurt-covered raisins again, and how that was a crime against hiking, when the light changed. It didn't dim or brighten. It went gold. Everything went gold, the firs, the granite, the sweat on Erica's forearms, all of it washed over in a color that had no business existing.

"Dan," Erica said, and her voice had gone strange and thin.

The sky had a seam in it. That was the only way he could describe it. A long vertical tear in the blue, and behind the tear, light was pouring through in a slow sheet, and it was moving. Not falling. Moving, like a tide, and it was coming this way, and there was a sound with it, a low hum that he felt in his teeth and his sternum and the little bones of his feet.

He grabbed her hand. That felt like the right thing to do. They stood there on the switchback with the whole valley going gold beneath them, and then the wave hit.

It didn't hurt. That was the thing he kept coming back to later, that it didn't hurt. It was like stepping into a hot bath that went all the way up through your skull. His spine unzipped. His hips moved without him. He had the sensation of being poured out of a cup and into a bigger one, and somewhere in the middle of it he heard Erica shout his name and then heard her voice break in half and drop an octave and come back up again all wrong.

He was on the ground. He didn't remember falling. His hands were in the dirt and the dirt was very close and also very far, because there was more of him than there had been, a lot more, and it was arranged differently.

He lifted his head.

The first thing he saw was Erica, and the first thing he thought was oh no, and the second thing he thought was oh.

She was standing over him, and she was enormous. Her upper half was still her, mostly, her dark hair, her freckles, her sharp brown eyes gone wide, but she'd been rebuilt. Her shoulders were broad as a swimmer's and then …