Doria Sullivan rolled onto her back and inhaled deeply.  She wanted to cry.  She wanted to scream.  She wanted to curl up in her blanket and giggle uncontrollably.  The one thing she did not want to do was close her eyes.  She stared at a tree limb as it swayed above her.  She focused on it until her eyelids twitched and her cheek muscles flexed involuntarily. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she let herself blink.

            As soon as her eyes shut, everything rushed back.  The mud.  The smoke.  The crash of a tree branch behind her.  She felt the weight of a gloved fist as it fell on her shoulder.

            Doria’s parents had taught her lots of stuff about “stranger danger.”  Don’t talk to strangers on the internet.  Don’t accept candy or car rides from strangers.  Don’t tell a stranger your personal information.  Don’t interact with strangers pretty much ever, basically.  It was good advice to live by.

            But none of it meant a fistful of boogers when you had a stranger with a flamethrower bearing down on you through the smog.

            So, instead, when the burning branch threw her flat on her face, her mind flashed to other survival lessons.  Eat or be eaten.  Fight or flight.

            What Doria needed, she thought, was a defense mechanism, like the ones animals had.  If she was a lizard, and the bad guys grabbed her tail, she could ditch that tail and run to safety.

            Doria didn’t have a tail, so she wasn’t sure how that lesson applied.

            If she was a puffer fish, she could blow up like a balloon until the danger passed.  If she was a hedgehog, she’d roll into a ball of spikes, and nothing would touch her.  If she was a jellyfish, she could sting the bad guys.

            The masked figure stepped closer.  His hand reached out.

            If she was a shark, she could bite his face off.  If she was an amoeba, she could chew on his brain until he died.  If she was a sponge…. Well, never mind.  Sponges were stupid.  But at least she would grow back after he tore her to pieces.  And if she was an octopus, she could….

            The bad guy’s fingers closed around her blanket-covered shoulder, and her terrified brain froze around a single word:

            Ink.

            Doria inked.

            She felt a tremendous sense of release when it happened.  Her blanket cape billowed, and a jet of black liquid spurted into the air around her, mixing with the smoke and swamp gas.  Doria’s face was pressed into the mud, but somehow she knew what she’d done as soon as she did it.  It was as if some new instinct suddenly kicked in, connecting her with an inner octopus she’d never known was there.

            The bad guy's hand went slack as sudden blindness overtook him.  Doria threw her left foot backwards into his shin.  He staggered, and she wriggled out of his reach.

            She popped her head up.  A soup-thick wall of midnight met her gaze in all directions.  It stung her eyes to look at.  She put her head back down and crawled away as quietly as she could.  

“You’re an octopus,” she told herself.  “Be the octopus.”  She imagined jetting across the swamp, tentacles spreading outward then thrusting back in unison.

            She needed to breathe.  She closed her eyes and raised her head, pressing the blanket to her mouth and nose to filter the air.  The blanket blocked most of the ink, but her breath still tasted bitter and fishy.

            “Just keep going,” Doria told herself, lowering her head.  Octopus ink deterred predators, but it could also clog the octopus’s gills if the creature didn’t escape quickly enough.  Doria kept wriggling.  She inhaled through her blanket only when she had to.  Otherwise, she kept her head down and pictured the blanket spreading out around her like the webbing between a giant octopus’s tentacles.  She imagined undulating forward across the mud.

            When she’d gone as far as her muscles would take her, Doria rolled onto her back.  She breathed in deep.  The fishy smell was gone, as was the smoke.  Wherever she was, she was clear of danger.  She caught her breath.  She stared at a tree limb.  She tried not to blink.

            Doria was terrified.  She was elated.  She was in a strange place all alone, and no closer to finding her brother.  Melisma and Lyddie were probably still in danger.  But, somehow, she’d just inked, like a real cephalopod.

            After years of fantasizing, Doria Sullivan was finally, truly, the Blob.

***

“Hey, kid!”

            Doria’s eyes popped open.  She’d dozed off in the mud without realizing it, but a shout from across the swamp yanked her back to consciousness.

            Doria yawned, then immediately regretted it.  The dried mud caked across her face cracked and pinched her skin when she opened her mouth.

            “Hey, kid!  You have to get up!”  a girl’s voice shouted, strong and insistent.

            Doria wiped her eyes and cheeks with the corner of her blanket.  It had been pink when she entered the Man-Groves, but now it was a mottled brown and gray.  The blanket also felt dank and slimy against her skin, like rubbing her face with a raw fish.  She wiped the worst of the mud from her cheeks, then sat up.

            A teenaged girl strode into her field of vision.  She was older than Doria, and maybe even older than Melisma, judging from her size.  She looked a little like a skier, with thick amber goggles across her eyes, a bandana covering the bottom half of her face, and long metal poles tethered to her wrists.  She also had wide rubber discs attached to her shoes, which distributed her weight evenly and allowed her to walk across the mud without sinking in.  Doria felt a twinge of jealousy for those shoes as cold swamp mud squelched against her thighs.

            “I’m serious, kid!  You have to get moving!  They’re burning the trees down!  Yours might be next, if they haven’t torched it already.”  The girl extended one of her poles for Doria to grab.

            Doria ignored the pole and climbed to her feet on her own.  “My tree?” she repeated.

            The girl nodded impatiently.  “Your tree.  You came from a tree.  Look, I don’t have time to give you the full introduction right now – it’s not safe here – but we can talk on the way.  Now let’s get moving!”

            Doria inspected her surroundings.  Everything seemed so peaceful compared to the chaos she had just left.  The mud around them lay undisturbed, aside from the shallow, disc-shaped indentations the girl’s shoes left behind them, and a much deeper, Doria-shaped furrow snaking back the way she'd come.  Actuarial trees grew all around them, tall, leafy, and untouched.  Almost-ripe personality fruit swayed peacefully on the boughs.

            Of course, the place she’d just been had probably been peaceful, too, before the bad guys arrived with their flamethrowers.  The trees here would burn just as easily as the ones back there.

            “Hold on,” Doria told the girl.  “I have to find my sisters.”  She pointed in the direction of the mud furrow.  “They’re back there somewhere.”

            The girl groaned in exasperation.  “But that’s toward the fires!  And there was fighting over there, too.”  It was hard to read her expression, since her whole face was covered but the tip of her nose, but Doria half-imagined that the girl’s nose tip glared at her impatiently.

            “Then I need to save them,” Doria said.

            The girl sighed.  “You’re going to get yourself killed!”

            Doria set her jaw.  “Maybe, maybe not.”  She imagined running up to all the bad guys and inking in their stupid faces.  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was something.  “Why do you care?”

            “I’m tired of watching them all kill each other.”  The girl sighed.  “I just want everyone to be safe.”

            Doria nodded.  “Me too.  But for my sisters to be safe, I need to go save them.”  She flipped her clammy cape over her shoulder in what she hoped was a heroic fashion.  She started walking toward the furrow.

            “Hold up,” the girl said.  “I’m coming with you.  If there’s saving to be done, then I want in.”

***

They followed the furrow for what felt like years.  It was slow-going work.  The girl moved easily enough with her special shoes, but Doria had to carefully plant and un-plant her feet, one of which had lost a shoe.  She was amazed that she’d wriggled so far in her blanket.

            The furrow had mostly filled in with swamp mud, but its outline was still visible.  Its shape undulated as they followed it, widening and narrowing at regular intervals.  Doria thought again of an octopus, stretching its webbed tentacles out to the side, then shooting them back to propel itself forward.  Had she somehow swum through the mud?

            This called for an experiment.  “Hold on a second,” she called to the girl.  She lay flat on her stomach, with her blanket fanned out across her back.  She took a deep breath, then shoved her face into the swamp.  This was the exact position she’d been in when she’d inked.

            “What are you doing?” the girl cried.

            Doria pushed her arms out and tried to swim.  Swamp muck oozed into her armpits.  Her butt wiggled a little.  But her body didn’t budge.

            She closed her eyelids tighter and tried again.  “You’re an octopus,” she told herself.  “Be the octopus!”

            Doria’s shoulders shimmied uselessly in place.  She pulled her face up and spluttered.

            “You must really love mud,” the girl commented drily.

            Doria huffed and threw her head back down.  She extended her arms out all the way, then squelched them toward her body.  She pulled her elbows toward her shoulders and extended her arms again.  As she did this, she scissored her legs open and shut.  She imagined her limbs as tentacles: extending, contracting, extending, contracting, pushing her ever-forward.  She felt the mud shift and slide around her.

            The sound of laughter interrupted her efforts.  The girl giggled at first, then chortled, then let loose in rich peals.  Doria raised her face from the mud.  She was in the exact same spot, though the mud was looser around her now.  The girl extended a hand and pulled her to her feet.

            Doria felt more than a little stupid.  She was covered from head to toe in black guck.  Mud flowed down the front of her pants and into her underwear.  She dabbed at her eyes with her blanket.  “What’s so funny?” she cried.

            “Nothing,” the girl chuckled as her laughter subsided.  “But look!  I’ve never seen one of those before.”

            Doria looked at the sludge where she’d just been lying.  Her body had left a silhouette in the mud, with a skirt where her legs had been and wings where her arms flapped back and forth.  She hadn’t swum like an octopus, but she had made a perfect mud angel.

            “I underestimated you, kid,” the girl said in a low, serious voice.  “No foe in the world would dare mess with you if you can do that!”  She chuckled.  “For now, though, we probably need to pick up the pace.  How about a piggyback ride?”

            Doria’s cheeks burned with embarrassment beneath a thick layer of mud.  She gratefully accepted the girl’s offer.  She’d slogged through enough swamp to last a lifetime.  Besides, maybe even octopuses needed someone to carry them sometimes.

***