Before

Alyssa’s eyes roll into focus as the display flickers, darting back and forth as she parses the upside-down letters.

Her phone, heavy in her hand, falls into her field of view upright. Time: six-oh-five AM.

“Urrrrrrgh,” Alyssa grumbles, her tongue lolling about as she whips her head forward and returns to some semblance of an upright posture, before slumping deeper into the bench-slash-couch-thing’s cushions. The guy next to her chuckles, while the girl to her right snores.

“Thought you were asleep,” Alyssa mutters.

Andy shrugs. “I guess I wasn’t.”

The waiting area is sparsely populated, a handful of travelers nursing their coffees or teas, a few others watching the news in silence as white-on-black subtitles trail across the TV screen. They must seem like quite the odd assortment to those in the lobby: Alyssa is dressed haphazardly, thanks to rushing out of bed. She’s wearing an open-shoulder blouse with short sleeves, its bright pink outshining both the faded blue of her jeans and the stained neon-pink of her beat-up sneakers.

Andy looks more fit for travel, wearing a dark green short-sleeve button-down that hangs straight on his trim frame, tucked into a pair of black trousers. His square-frame glasses magnify light brown eyes, highlighting a lingering fatigue.

Then there’s Veronica, sprawled out on the couch cushions. Her lean-yet-not-quite-petite physique forms a silhouette under the denim jacket that currently serves as a blanket. Further down, her black tank top has rolled up past the waistband of her pre-ripped jeans, exposing a sliver of rosy-white midriff.

“So, how’s the breakup going?”

Andy raises his eyebrows, a crease or two forming in the otherwise smooth, brown skin of his forehead.

“She’s right there,” he whispers back.

“You’ve been dating Veronica for what, like, five months? And you haven’t noticed she sleeps through anything? Here, watch.”

Alyssa reaches over, brushes aside Veronica’s long, glossy black hair, and pulls back one of her eyelids to reveal a hazel eye darting back and forth.

“See? Like a rock.”

“Well, it’s—” He takes off his glasses for a moment, fidgeting with the frames. “—It’s not going well.”

“Screaming? Crying? Or…?”

“We… can’t stay away from each other. If you weren’t between us she’d have crawled into my lap, and I wouldn’t have stopped her.”

“Tsk tsk tsk,” Alyssa clicks her tongue, shaking her head. “Ya know, I told you guys this was a bad idea, especially with you headin’ out of state. But nooooo, ‘it’s just some fun between friends’ you said, ‘it’s just a one night stand.’ Next thing I know you’re both lovey-dovey and shit. Blech.”

“We’re working on it.”

“Better be.”

Alyssa peeks at the display again and frowns. Six-ten now, and still delayed.

She reaches down and starts poking Veronica’s side, jabbing a finger between ribs at random.

“Whu—Hey, hey, stop! Stop!” Veronica yelps, swatting Alyssa’s hand away.

“Wakey-wakey.”

Veronica sits up groggily, rubbing at her eyes. “Boarding?”

“Nah, delayed again.”

“…Then why’d you wake me up, dumbass.”

“Gonna get a drink. You want somethin’?”

“Sure, uh, iced tea.”

“Okie-dokie. Andy?”

“Coffee, cream, no sugar.”

“Gotcha. Holler if boarding starts.”

Alyssa stands up and skips to the lobby stairs, scampers down two at a time, and sprints toward the coffee shop. Before long she’s stepping onto the escalator, a tray of drinks in hand. She pulls out her phone on the way up, checking the time. Six-twenty, now. It’s frustrating—any longer and she’ll miss her connecting flight. Right as she goes to slip the phone back into her jeans, it buzzes: a text from Aaron.

Have you boarded yet?

nah
fuckers keep delaying

Do you have your costume?

got my spandex
no mask
y?

No response. Alyssa shrugs and puts her phone away.

Weird.

As she reaches the top of the escalator she notices Andy and Veronica have gotten a bit too comfortable, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, holding hands. Ugh.

She trots over and sets the drinks down, taking Veronica’s old seat for herself.

“C’mon guys, I leave you unsupervised for five minutes—”

“Shh,” Veronica whispers.

Only now does Alyssa notice the tension in their postures, how Veronica’s light pink skin has lost its usual rosy flush, and how wide Andy’s eyes are behind his glasses.

“Look,” Andy says quietly, nodding at the TV on the far wall.

A city from the air, shattered office buildings and townhouses, the area pockmarked with depressions and sinkholes.

The screen’s too far to read the subtitles, but the program’s graphics are enough:

BREAKING: Magnitude 8 Earthquake Hits Memphis

Oh.

Fuck.

Butterflies gather in her stomach as she stares in shock.

“Hey, uh, Alyssa? Think your flight might be canceled?” Veronica asks, breaking the silence.

Alyssa glances at the board—six-twenty-five, still delayed—and slowly shakes her head.

“I’m not that great at maps, ‘Ronnie, but I’m pretty sure Dallas ain’t near Memphis.”

“Sure, but… just, Jesus fucking Christ.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Andy mutters, grabbing his coffee. He hands Veronica her tea, though her eyes never leave the screen as she sips it. “Let’s try to relax.”

“Alyssa, your layover is only an hour, right?” he asks. “Getting a bit tight, isn’t it?”

“Fifty minutes, yeah,” she sighs. “My boss will probably book me a new flight anyway.”

“Really?” Veronica says. “Aren’t you just an editor?”

“What can I say, the man makes a lotta typos.”

Alyssa glances at the TV again, feeling her heart beat just a bit faster. Good chance she’d be there—soon—and here she is lying about it.

Her phone buzzes in her back pocket, more forceful this time. The screen shimmers a bit as she takes it out, a product of one of the many techno-doohickies Aaron had somehow jammed into it. According to him the selfie camera scans for faces, unlocks the phone when it sees hers, and supposedly ensures only her eyes can see certain things on the screen. She doesn’t quite understand how it works, or trust it, especially with her friends huddled so close to her. Especially when Aaron hadn’t even invented most of the stuff, just tried to copy it from whatever cutting edge papers he could grab. She considers cupping a hand over the screen, or holding it close to her face—but that might just draw suspicion instead. Trust will have to do.

Fuckity fuck fuck.

The screen flickers to her new boarding pass, and she finds the flight on the display. Departing: very soon.

Just stay calm.

“Speak of the devil,” she quips, standing up. “Just got a new ticket, boarding right now.”

She swings her backpack over her shoulders. Her suitcase has already been checked on her old flight—it’ll just have to find its way to her eventually.

“So, um, I gotta go.”

She leans in to give Andy a bro-hug and a fist-bump.

“We’re still on for California, right?” he asks.

“Yep. So long as you two don’t third wheel me, and Davy, and everyone else.”

“We’ll try.”

Alyssa hugs Veronica, who responds with a kiss to the cheek and a playful jab in the shoulder.

“Tease,” Alyssa whispers.

They share a laugh and Alyssa turns to leave, the butterflies in her stomach fluttering ever faster.

You should tell them.

I can’t. Not here. Not now.

Then when? Where?

She shakes the thoughts away, and like always they settle in her chest—a sickening mix of guilt and doubt wraps around her heart, choking tendrils worming into her throat. The feeling compels her to stop and turn around, just enough to look back.

“I love you guys!”

“Stay safe!”

“Text us when you land!”

“I will!”

Not lies, but not the confession her conscience desires, either.

The feeling calcifies, staying with her as she breezes through security and as she boards the plane. It clings to her in the air and it follows her down to the earth upon landing, stalking her as she ducks away into an isolated restroom past the gate, beyond the reach of any prying eyes or cameras.

Here, surrounded by dingy tiles and bathed in fluorescent light, her upper body stripped bare, costume dangling from her waist, she begins to work.

She starts with her face, draining melanin from her eyes until an icey blue gaze stares back at her in the mirror, then adjusts her hair to give it a russet hue. Her hands sculpt her features, the movements almost unconscious, driven by muscle memory. As she works she draws on her reservoir, pumping fat and biomatter up from her stomach and thighs into staging pools on her chest and shoulders, the network visibly pulsing and swelling as the fleshy slurry moves. By the time she’s done her torso has become swollen and barrel-like, finer features buried by the summoned reserves.

Under normal circumstances she would draw on far less, just enough material to strengthen her musculature, or grow her extra arms. She’d be armored beneath her costume, adorned in plates of living bone, each one built cell by cell to match the best artificial protection. Without that armor and without the time or resources to grow it anew, she takes a different approach. A technique she’s been working on, but hasn’t fully explored.

The first few changes are internal, stretching a double-walled membrane between the hemispheres of her brain, growing matching dividers within her throat and trachea. Rerouting vessels and nerves that cross the midline, softening her ribcage at key points. Next, her face stretches ever so slightly at the centerline as structures within are prepared, neural tissue sprouted to bridge between them. A burning sensation emerges at the center of her cranium and works its way down her neck, bone cleaving in its wake.

Her head splits open, pulled away by the muscles in her neck and shoulders, each half of her brain pulsing against the retaining membranes, her brainstem and spinal cord widening as the halves of her skull inch apart. Between them is a thick ribbon of neurons, drooping as it grows longer, little tendrils reaching up to guide it into the gaping cavity where her neck once was.

She grabs onto the sink basins and pulls, bone and cartilage in her chest flexing and splitting, stretching the top of her ribcage until her sternum achieves a wye shape. The movement rips apart her doubled brainstem and leaves her with two, one for each branch of her spinal cord.

Biomatter floods into the gap, oozing out from her open flesh as a white mass with pink and yellow splotches, solidifying into flesh and blood and bone. Everything above her jawline is a copy, a clone of the corresponding half, down to the neuron. Below is something new. The gap in her sternum is fused over, new pectoral muscles sprouting from it, wrapping under her skin to meet with second shoulders forming beneath her armpits. A thick central clavicle bridges the gap across her split spine, muscles and tendons filling out the space between it and her necks. Her ribcage reshapes itself, letting off the tension used to pull it open. Excess space is given new purpose, granting her second set of arms a firm root of new bone.

Her costume isn’t so adaptive. Beneath each sleeve is a slot for her new arms, and the neck simply stretches to fit two. She extrudes a domino mask from each of her faces and coats the bony protrusions in glossy white enamel. Nowhere near the coverage—protective and otherwise—of her proper mask, but these facades aren’t her face anyway.

Mitosis stares at the mirror, turning one head and then the other, studying her own movement. Her breath is hot and her skin flush as her body bleeds off the heat of her rapid metamorphosis. Much of her reservoir persists, and she draws on it, building up her muscles, growing armor on her bare forearms, sprouting cleated boots from her feet.

She raises an arm and flexes, examining the limb as muscles contract and bulge beneath her skin. It makes her feel impressive, powerful—heroic, even—but not quite right. Despite all she has changed, that feeling, that guilt, remains.

Padding surrounds her, coating the walls, suffocating furniture. It makes the already small, dim room outright claustrophobic, and agonizingly familiar.

Alyssa crawls along the floor, painfully pushing herself forward, her legs kicking spastically, uncoordinated. She reaches a couch and struggles to grab onto it, her arms shaking as she tries to move them, finally hauling herself up.

The room is a disaster, her lone chair thrown into a corner, her bedding strewn onto the floor. Her thoughts are just as messy, with scrambled memories. Struggle, longing… happiness.

I—I’m supposed—I was going home.

She holds her hand in front of her face, shaking and trembling. She focuses, trying to steady it—

It stops being a hand.

Tendons pull on stacked bones buried in flesh, steadied by a mass of bone and muscle beneath. The tendons penetrate the mass, rooted to greater muscles wrapped around a pair of long bones. A nerve flares up, a wave of electricity and chemistry running through it.

The muscles dissolve into strings and filaments, sliding past each other as the wave reaches them. Then the strands lose cohesion, reduced to chains of cells uptaking oxygen and discharging acid as they contract.

“Wha—What’s happening—” Alyssa tries to say, only managing a sharp, breathless gasp.

The feeling spreads, her arm disintegrating into a mass of cells in space even as her eyes tell her it’s still there. Pushing against the feeling only advances it further, eating into her chest, crawling up her neck.

Rapping on the door, even muffled by the padding, is enough to snap her out of it. The afflicted parts of her body return… to not quite normal. They’re numb, prickly, even harder to move.

The door opens. She closes her eyes, as bright fluorescent light floods in from the hall.

“Alyssa? I’m coming in, okay?”

It’s a nurse, dressed in plain blue scrubs. Her voice is sweet, caring, kind. And yet, it rings hollow.

Something cool and rubbery wraps around her wrist. She opens her eyes to see the nurse’s gloved hand.

“Do you want to go have lunch? You must be hungry.”

She is. But her memories are still jumbled, still… wrong.

“Okay. I’ll help you go over there, alright?”

“Mmmmm…” is the closest ‘yes’ she can manage.

Alyssa cooperates as best she can, shaking as she stands and stumbling with each step towards the door.

“There you go. You’re doing great,” the nurse assures her in that same, overly sweet tone. Alyssa knows the woman means well; it still feels so condescending.

“Oh, and I have good news. You have a visitor today.”

“Mmmmuuuhhh rrrrr dddaaa?” she tries to ask.

“Not your parents. One of your friends!”

Alyssa stops in her tracks, right as they exit the room. Her blood runs cold.

She’d had a few friends visit already, and that had been enough. Enough to realize they weren’t really her friends. They’d—They’d treated her like she was… broken, just like the nurses did. Like she couldn’t understand the words they said. As if the fact that she couldn’t speak and could barely move meant she wasn’t really there.

She can’t risk that. Not again.

“Nnnnnnn…”

The nurse tries to get her moving again, gently pushing her.

“You’ll be fine, Alyssa.”

“Nnnnnnnnnnn!” The failed ‘No’ is more like a growl this time, forced through clenched teeth.

“It’s fine. Just… let’s just go to lunch, okay?”

The crack in the nurse’s facade corresponds to a more assertive grip from the woman, each hand on Alyssa’s wrists, then a lift and push, dragging her feet against the carpet.

The instant her feet find solid purchase Alyssa pulls her arms down and whips her head back. A scream pierces her ears as she hears cartilage and bone shatter, the nurse crumpling to the ground behind her.

Blood clouds her vision as she races through the halls, desperately searching for an exit. She can hear footsteps behind her, just as frantic as hers, nurses calling her name and pleading for her to stop.

She screams in response. Her voice is raw, full of rage.

Finally, she reaches a door, the world beyond blurry through the fogged glass. She slams into the crash bar, knowing it won’t budge. It takes precious moments for her clumsy hand to find the keypad. She knows the code—she knows every code in this damn hospital—but her fingers can’t hit the right keys, no matter how hard she tries.

The voices behind her get louder. Closer.

Alyssa grips the crash bar hard—enough to make her arms spasm—and whips her head at the door. She cries out with each impact, blood and skin left in the cracks as her forehead slams into the glass.

The gaggle of nurses reach her, grabbing her and pulling on her. She tries to resist, clawing at the bar, losing a fingernail or two that get caught in it as the nurses finally pull her off. They become the target of her struggles, writhing and wriggling in their grip, helpless.

She screams.

And screams.

And screams.

Something shakes her, gently this time. She almost lashes out, then realizes she can’t feel the pain; her throat isn’t sore.

“Huh? Whu?”

Is what Alyssa tries to blurt out, but the words don’t form; the necessary folds of muscle in her throat are relaxed, unresponsive.

Her eyes flutter open and adjust to the darkness, staring herself—no, no, her twin—in the face.

“Heya, some dream, huh?”

She can feel her vocal cords tense as nerve blockers dissipate, dissolving back into her bloodstream.

“Uhhhhhh,” she mutters, more of a test than for lack of words. Her pitch is off, a bit deep. “Yeah. It was the, um, the hospital one. You know. Did—Did I…?”

“Don’t worry, I muted you.”

“Thanks.”

Her twin flashes a thumbs up and a smile, then goes back to pecking away at her laptop.

Alyssa massages her trachea, humming, sensing with her power. There’s a few stubborn molecules gumming up the works of her voice box, but they metabolize quickly and her voice returns to its usual nasally self.

She looks at her twin, sitting in the seat ahead and to her left. Her wheelchair sits just far enough away that her twin had leaned over and back to wake her. With how short the nerve blocker lasts, constant contact would’ve been necessary to keep her quiet. Severing the nerves would’ve been the convenient way to do it; on the other hand, waking up to a paralyzed larynx would have been very… distressing.

Through the van’s windows she sees a familiar environment: grassy fields barely visible under the starry sky, the Black Hills evident from the rise in the shadowy treetops. Almost home. She’d fallen asleep about an hour after their last pit stop, somewhere around Sioux City. Which meant her twin had kept her shrieks and screams contained for up to three or four hours, despite the awkward position.

That level of care… it makes her feel warm, in a way she hasn’t felt in a long time.

They turn off from the main road onto one that is more dirt than gravel, passing by a rusty old tractor. Supposedly, when mom and dad had moved out here, mom had bought the already antique machine and fixed it up enough to start her little farm. That farm turned out to be closer to an overgrown garden, but at least mom had a hobby.

Alyssa tilts her wheelchair back and forth a bit, searching for the best angle to peer through the windshield. Finally, she can see home coming into view as the van climbs the hill, tan siding tinted yellow by the porch lights’ glow. Mom and dad had bought the place as young newlyweds, a single-floor cabin with such attractive amenities as a wrap-around porch and a basement. Most couples with a better knack for long term planning would’ve picked something with more room, or at least moved to a bigger property when the stork started flying overhead. Her parents had a… special ability to live in the moment, and that led her father to decide that the house would just have to grow with the family, bit by bit.

The first night she slept in her own room is still vivid in her mind. She didn’t have any furniture and the paint still smelled, but it was the first time she had a place to herself.

Tears start to flow from her eyes, and she feels a familiar finger tap her arm. Something from her power, as well.

“Hey, do you—”

“No.” Alyssa shakes her head. “I want to cry.”

“Uh, I was asking if you want a tissue.”

“Oh. Um, yes. Please. Thanks.”

Alyssa dries her cheeks sparingly, letting the tears run their course. By the time her eyes have run dry, the van has come to a stop atop the patch of asphalt in front of the garage. She looks over at the house: the windows are dark, their curtains pulled shut.

“We’re here,” Dad announces. “Everybody wake up.”

Mom stirs in the passenger seat, righting herself as she rouses.

“James, it’s already dark,” she mutters. “What time is it…?”

Alyssa blinks and rubs at her eyes, briefly blinded by the interior lights.

“Girls, I’m sorry, we’re a bit late.”

As her vision returns Alyssa manages a glance at the dashboard clock: twelve-thirty in the a-em.

Late’s kind of an understatement, Mom.

“Can we unpack everything tomorrow?” her twin asks.

“I don’t know about everything. We should probably unload your sister,” Dad answers, grinning into the rear-view mirror. “Then we’ll see about the rest.”

Alyssa fidgets as the rest of her family gets out of the van. Her twin swings a seat out of the way, and bends down to start unhooking the wheelchair’s straps. She wants to curl her toes up inside her shoes, clenching her socks between them, but the impulses meet dead-end nerves coiled up against her pelvis, making the muscles of her stump-like lower half twitch and twist. Weaving her fingers together and twiddling her thumbs doesn’t quite satisfy, but it’s something.

Cool air wafts in as the tailgate opens up behind her, the chirping of crickets echoing through the van. Alyssa grips her chair’s joystick and eases it back, reversing carefully. She feels a bit of resistance from her father’s hand on the headrest, guiding her. The ramp extends past the black top and onto gravel, rumbling and crunching as her chair drives onto the stones. Dad gives her a pat on the shoulder once she’s clear of the van, then starts to pack up the ramp.

Alyssa turns about, facing the house. It’s changed, in little ways. The front steps are gone, modified into something more fitting for her… capabilities. The double doors hang just a bit lower, the once-prominent threshold now flush with the floor.

She drives up to the house hesitantly, stopping at the ramp. It’s long with a gentle slope, railings extended to match, blending with the porch around it.

“Need some help?”

“I’m fine, Dad, it’s just… it’s different.”

Driving up the ramp is smooth and uneventful, no creaking of boards or timbers, not even a bump at the end. Dad had clearly done a good job; she just wished he hadn’t done such a permanent one.

Alyssa slowly pushes the doors open only to find them silent on their hinges, absent their old squeaking and creaking. Her chair makes up the difference, its motor whirring as she scoots inside. The doors close with the gentle click of a latch, leaving her in near-total darkness. Electric blues and greens seep in from the kitchen archway on the far wall, adding a pinch of illumination. Left of the arch is the staircase, darkness flowing from the second floor and encroaching on the bathroom’s door, held back by a lonely nightlight.

Even in shadow she can tell things are ever so slightly different. The rugs are gone, leaving glossy hardwood in their absence. The sofa and living chairs in the corner have been rearranged, spaced out, where they’d once been clustered around the television. In the back corner, the archway to the dining room has been walled up, a door hung in its center.

Guess Dad gave up on fixing the draft.

The only thing that seems untouched is great-granddad’s piano, still nestled in the corner to her left.

Alyssa shakes her head and makes her way into the bathroom. The doorway’s narrower than those at the hospital, but she manages to get the chair through it, closing the door behind her.

She keeps her eyes shut as she turns on the lights, giving them a moment to adjust. The bathroom’s basically the same, save for some grab-bars in the shower and near the toilet.

Thoughtful, I guess.

Relief washes over her as she finally undoes her harness. She stretches her arms out and over her head, flexing her shoulders, loosening everything up. A yawn escapes her mouth in the process; she feels exhausted, even after sleeping most of the day away. The pillows surrounding her, having proven comfortable, make sleep a tempting proposition.

Her eyelids drift shut and the light blurs into a red glow through the heavy curtains of flesh, strange patterns blossoming and withering across their inner surface.

A thump awakens Alyssa with a jolt that nearly throws her off the chair. Once her heart calms down she can make out footsteps just outside the door, floorboards creaking and beams groaning. Another thump—a suitcase bouncing off drywall.

Alyssa scoots closer to the sink, cupping her hands under the faucet and splashing her face. Drowsiness yields as cold water drips down her neck and soaks into her shirt. She licks droplets from her lips, whetting her thirst.

She clutches the edges of the counter and leans into the basin, swallowing a swig or three directly from the stream. The water tastes slightly of chalk, milky and smooth. So much better than the copper-laced crap at the hospital.

Ideally she’d take a bath, but it’s already late. She settles for dunking her head into the sink, scrubbing her face off and doing her best to wring oils from her hair.

A bit more maintenance, mundane or otherwise, then a quick change of clothes, and she’s finally ready for bed.

Alyssa drives out into the shadowy foyer, a bluish-white glow coming from the kitchen. She follows the light and finds her twin staring into the fridge, nibbling on a slice of cheese.

“Hey, uh, sorry if I took too long.”

“Huh?”

“You were waiting for me, right?”

“Nah. I came down for a snack, and I just couldn’t stop looking at it.”

It?

Alyssa scoots closer, getting a better look for herself. ‘It’ would be her belated birthday cake. Well, it was kinda ‘theirs’ more than ‘hers’, but still.

“Looks good, don’t it?”

A fudge cake, chocolate coated strawberries adorning the top, swaddled by a generous coat of frosting.

“Yeah.”

Her twin reaches into the fridge, and Alyssa slaps her hand away.

“Hey. Ow. I just wanted to taste the frosting.”

“You can wait.”

“Fine,” her twin sighs, then shuts the fridge.

Something on the door catches her eye—the whiteboard that serves as the family planner, barely legible in the dim light. There’s a row for each of them, further divided into blocks, upcoming things or important tasks scrawled within.

Hers is one of the last, a few blank rows beneath it. The dry-erase marker had set, preserving a life that had been interrupted, a past that didn’t happen. The college trip she’d planned. Her first day on campus. Her birthday.

“This is it,” her twin says. “Think of anything serious?”

Alyssa shakes her head, smiling a little. “Nah, I guess I forgot.”

Her sister plucks a marker from the holder stuck to the fridge, pulls the cap off, and offers it to her. She wrinkles her nose at the sharp smell of permanent ink wafting off the felt tip.

“You wanna do the honors?”

Alyssa takes the marker and scoots closer to the board, holding it firmly. She writes down two names:

Dee
Elle

She caps the marker as the ink sets, and slips it back into the holder.

“Think we should tell them which is which?”

“Nah, they can figure it out.”

Alyssa looks at the board, taking in… whatever it is that she’s feeling. A weird mixture of sadness and hope.

A familiar hand pats her on the shoulder.

“I’m headed to bed. Got school in the morning, y’know.”

“Hey, um, about that. I didn’t see a lift on the stairs. Are you going to carry me, or… what?”

“Oh, shit, I forgot. Follow me.”

Alyssa does so, driving out of the kitchen and into the foyer.

“So, uh, between your chair, the van, medical bills, all that, we couldn’t afford a lift…”

They come to a stop outside the new doorway, where the dining room should be.

“…so Dad and I figured something out. Go on, open it.”

Alyssa opens the door, unsure what to expect. The dining table and china cabinets are all gone. In their place, a bedroom.

“What’dya think?”

Again, conflicted feelings. It’s a place she can call her own—one made just for her. She should feel happy. Grateful.

“It’s… it’s nice.”

But it’s not what I wanted.

Alyssa blinks and rubs her eyes, then rolls over to look at the clock.

6:30 AM

Little bit late.

She crawls to the foot of her bed, climbing over the rail and lowering herself to the floor. Her butt—well, bottom, really, since she doesn’t have any glutes—serves as a single foot, which she ‘walks’ with by using her arms to pick herself up and pivot her body forward, inching along. It’s slower than walking, much slower, but a vast improvement over crawling or waddling on her hands.

She reaches her dresser and rifles through the drawers within her reach. It’s organized a bit upside-down, with shirts and tops in the bottom drawers; pants, socks, and other leg-centric items up above. Or at least, it had been; most of their clothes have been packed up, a few left out for today.

Alyssa picks out a nice blouse, a pink thing with some kind of abstract art printed in white. She grabs an old tee shirt, alongside a skirt, then shuffles over to the bathroom. The handle is a bit of a reach, but she manages to turn it and shuffle inside, setting her clothes down and closing the door behind her.

Her abdominal anatomy is still very much a work in progress; her lower vertebra have yet to fully ossify, and she has something of a pseudo-pelvis composed primarily of cartilage, grown enough to support her body weight and anchor her back and abdominal muscles, but lacking further structure. Where the hip joints would be she has pegs of bone and cartilage instead, coated in calloused skin. They work fine on linoleum, but the tile of the bathroom is too hard, and quite cold even through fabric.

Behind the bathroom door is a full length mirror. She’s been wearing oversized tees as pajamas, tying the extra length up around her bottom. She almost looks normal in it, which is nice to see, even if it’s not true.

Alyssa unties the knot in her shirt, closing her eyes as she pulls it off and tosses it aside. She stands there, unwilling to look, until she hears footsteps from her room. What she sees is…

Disappointing. Pronounced ribs, skin stretching around them as she breathes; a lower body that reminds her of her childhood dolls, their legs torn off.

She shakes her head, and looks again.

Pale, imperfect skin, but skin nonetheless, instead of a patchwork of skin and scar tissue. Flexing the right way lets her see her abs for the first time in a long while, and it feels… good. Progress, slow as it is, is still progress.

A thump on the door startles her.

“Are you done in there?” Her twin’s voice is a bit strained.

“Uh, shit, almost.”

She lays down the tee shirt and sets her lower body atop it, wrapping it around herself and tying it at her waist. Then she pulls the skirt on from above, cinching the elastic over the tee. With the blouse to finish it all off, she actually looks a bit… nice. Pretty, even.

Alyssa opens the door and shuffles out of the way, just in time for her twin to dart in, slamming the door in her haste, the shower running a moment later.

She shuffles over to her wheelchair, climbing up the leg rests and crawling into the seat. Her newest vertebrae aren’t yet up to the task of supporting her weight full time—not if she wants them to form properly—so the seat has pillows propped around her, distributing her weight. She hasn’t had the chair long enough to break in the extra padding, making the shoulder harness a bit tight, so she fiddles with it before strapping in.

Motors whine as she pivots the chair and slowly maneuvers it between their beds. It isn’t hard to drive, but it’s not something she’s used to, either. She reaches forward, manages to pluck her phone off the nightstand, and slips it into her skirt’s waistband.

There’s not much else to do except wait. Everything has been packed, and there’s no point in making her bed; even if she could, the hospital has to wash the linens anyway.

Feels like there’s… something I forgot.

She glances around, and that something catches her eye.

Right. The cord.

They haven’t been using it, not really. It’s been maintained, kept alive, just in case. Now Alyssa and her twin are… not quite independent, but not so reliant on each other.

She grabs the end, making contact with the fleshy valve, and starts peeling away its plastic sheathe. Despite its resemblance to an umbilical cord there’s nothing special about it, just two vessels encased in fatty connective tissues, letting it hibernate when disconnected. Her twin had grown it from scratch, so she won’t be able to just absorb it. Too much baggage to keep it, and while it could be repurposed, she’d need surgery to get it somewhere useful first. She can leave it here, but the hospital would destroy it, which feels wasteful. That leaves one option.

Down the hatch.

It’s not what she expected—about the texture of licorice, similar flavor to pork fat. Would’ve made decent jerky, but too late for that now.

There’s a few knocks on the main door, just as she takes a fourth bite.

“Sweeties? Are you two up? Can we come in?”

“Umph. Uh.” She swallows the inch or two of flesh whole, gagging a bit as it slides down her throat. “Sure, Mom, come on in.”

Alyssa seals the cord’s end so it won’t bleed everywhere and uses her power to make its blood congeal, then quickly rolls it up and tucks it behind her.

“Good morning,” Mom says as she comes through the door, Dad not far behind her.

Looking at her parents is—it’s still hard. Growing up, she’d realized that she hadn’t quite inherited their best traits, like her siblings had.

Mom is an inch or so above average height, slim and curvy. Fine, wavy black hair falls to her shoulders, framing her face, contrasting with her light skin.

Dad is reasonably tall, with broad shoulders and strong arms. His brown hair is thick and cut short.

Comparing herself to them, Alyssa feels like some wires had gotten crossed. Forget having an hourglass or even a pear shaped figure: she’s built like a washboard, with none of the tone. On top of that her lanky arms dangle from her shoulders, paired with stubby legs. Worst of all she’s stunted, a runt. Five feet had been a goal for her, one she’d only barely reached.

She’d tried to fix all that. Incremental changes, so no one would notice. Yet no matter how much she tried, how much she learned to do, it never stuck.

‘Course, much of that wasn’t really true anymore. Not for her. Five feet sounded pretty damn good compared to her two-foot-eight. Especially—

No.

She seizes her errant thoughts, forcing them to stop.

No shit-talking yourself. Not today. Today is a good day.

“Get ready all by yourself, sport?” Dad asks.

“Yep,” Alyssa answers, smiling.

“Sweetie, is Alys—is your sister in the bathroom?”

“She just hopped in the shower. And, um, we woke up a biiiit late, so I was thinking I could get breakfast for the two of us, while you and Dad pack the van? If that’s okay?”

“I don’t know… are you sure?”

“Mom, I’ll be fine. I can do this.”

That last part is more for her sake. She’d seen herself as something abnormal for so long, something that had to be kept hidden.

Part of her hopes Mom will just say no; another has something to prove.

“Let’s go together; I need to sign some papers before we leave, anyway. Alright?”

Shit.

Probably the worst outcome, but it’s not like she can talk her way out of it.

Being out of her room, out in the halls… it’s weird. Really fuckin’ weird.

Mom and Dad had come out here a few days ago, bringing her wheelchair and a matching van with them. She’d driven the chair around a bit for practice, but she’d only gone to the day room at the end of the hall, barely a few rooms away.

Going this far brings… unpleasant memories. Getting carted off to surgeries, or worse. The feeling’s not so bad now, at least.

A few burbles announce her tiny stomach rousing from its nap, done with what she’d last delivered to it. She fishes out the rolled up cord, holds it in her fist, threads it out between her thumb, bites off a chunk, and starts chewing through it.

“Get yourself a snack, earlier?” Mom asks.

“Uh, yeah. Jerky.”

“Have enough to share?”

Alyssa nearly vomits then and there.

“I—um, noooooo. ‘Sides, it’s, uh, it’s that low sodium, heart healthy shit.”

Mom wrinkles her nose. Crisis averted.

Her wheelchair is kinda-sorta slow, to the point where Mom seemed to struggle to keep an exact pace with her at first. Gives her time to look around, figure things out. Like many government buildings, this one was built on the cheaper side, and from her room she could often hear things. Machines and equipment on quiet days, both mundane and medical. She passes a pair of vending machines responsible for the low hum she could make out at night, and glimpses a ventilator through a cracked-open door. Thankfully, it’s too early for many of the other, less pleasant sounds.

She passes by the rows of elevators, eying the staircase.

“Sweetie?” Mom calls from behind her.

Oh.

Shit.

“Uh, forgot, whoops,” she replies, turning around.

The elevator smells of citrus and ammonia, and the wheels of her chair make a sticky, tacky sound as she drives to the back of it.

Mom presses the second floor button, where the cafeteria is.

Alyssa feels her guts shift as the motors kick into action and the elevator descends. She grips the arms of her chair, her fingers digging in.

“Are you alright?” Mom asks. “You’re shaking.”

“I’m fine,” she lies; she hadn’t noticed any shivering.

“Just makin’ sure, sweetie.”

Her grip loosens, but she only lets go when they finally reach their destination.

The cafeteria isn’t far, through a big arch labeled ‘Food Court.’ Which was kinda overselling it, when all there is is the hospital kitchen and a chintzy donut shop. The latter’s all barred up, yet to open. No loss there; damn things could be fresh out of the oven and still be stale.

Or at least, that’s what Cindy had complained about, right? Or was it her twin?

…Whatever, it’s too early for her to remember.

Crossing under the arch marks a shift in her mood. The bold part of her had imagined driving—no, walking over—to the counter and placing her order, just like normal. That side of her had been embarrassed having to drag Mom with her, too.

Now that part of her feels awful small.

There’s a rough-faced man in a chef’s hat and matching whites behind the kitchen’s serving counter, wiping it down with a rag.

Alyssa drives up to the counter, right across from the chef.

“Howdy,” he says, looking her in the eye.

His expression seems equal parts tired and confused, for a split second. Kinda weird, really, for a guy working in a hospital to react so strangely to a girl in a wheel—

Oh. She realizes why, a lump forming in her throat.

It’s not the chair. It’s her. Her twin’s been down here at least once a day, seven days a week, for months.

“Uh, hi, um…. Uh, I was—um.”

“C’mon girl, spit it out.”

Shit.

“I—um, are you, uh, are you guys open?”

“Fixin’ for some breakfast?”

“Y-yeah.”

“We’re gettin’ the grills warmed up. How’s about you and yours find a table, and I’ll send one of the girls out to get your order when we’re ready?”

“I, uh, please. I mean yes. Sure. Thanks.”

She glimpses a shrug from the man as she spins her chair around, making a beeline for a table. And thank god, Mom had already sat down at one way in the back.

Her chair fits against the outside edge of the table, putting her right across from Mom, who’s seated on the back bench of the booth. She tries to relax, but she just can’t drop that awful feeling as it works its way down from her throat and into her gut.

“Alyssa, you’re shaking again.”

“What if he knows?” Alyssa whispers, leaning forward as best she can. “My—my sister comes here every day and—and we look completely identical and he’s never seen me before what if he realizes what if he knows—”

“Shh, sweetie, it’s fine.” Mom reaches her hands out, and Alyssa holds them. “He sees hundreds of people here every day. Even if he might’ve noticed, he probably thought ‘whatever’ and moved on already. Besides, all the nurses and doctors know, and nothing bad happened.”

“Mom, you don’t get it. They’re doctors and all that shit. If they tell anyone, I can sue them. He’s just—he’s just some guy. And if he can notice, other people will, too, and… and…”

“Identical twins are completely normal, and that’s all anyone will think you two are.”

“I—I don’t know if I am normal. I’m like, I’m just a chunk of her, like some kind of… deformed bud.”

“Don’t look at it that way. Remember all of my apple trees at home? They all started as branches from the same plant, and now they’re tall and healthy.”

“You can’t—you can’t take a cutting from a fucking person, Mom. We’re too weird. People are going to notice. I—I thought going home was going to be simple, but—”

“Sweetie, you need to chill out. Nobody’s gonna care, not here. This is your day, and I’m really proud of you. So right now you should just relax, and enjoy the moment.”

“Living in the moment is what got me here, Mom. And what about people who know me, but don’t know about me?”

“When we get home, we’ll figure something out, okay?”

“How? They’ll pick up things. Ask questions.”

“Just act like you belong. That’s the first step. Nobody’s going to bother snooping around if everything seems normal.”

Kinda shitty advice, if she’s honest with herself.

“Here,” Mom says, sliding a menu over towards her. “Why don’t you practice? I know you wanted to do this alone, so here’s your chance. I’m going to go out to the van and help pack. You have money, right?”

“Yep.”

Mom scoots herself out of the booth, and gives Alyssa a quick kiss on the forehead.

“Good luck, sweetie,” she says, and walks away.

Alyssa reaches into her purse, tucked into a bag hanging from the left armrest, digs her wallet out and places it on the table. She pulls out her credit card, laying it flat.

It has her full name printed on it: ALYSSA LEACH.

Probably won’t be an issue, now. Might be one later, though.

She skims over the breakfast side of the menu. Her twin always gets the same thing; for herself, she’s thinking of something light. As she’s reading, she can hear footsteps behind her.

Okay.

You can do this.

Alyssa stumbles out of the shower, almost tripping on the bathmat. She dries off hurriedly, dragging the towel across her body with rough, forceful motions. Not the most comfortable feeling—damn things are itchy enough as it is, but she’s already late. Her other half had gone to bed early and still overslept; as for herself, she’s not had a good night’s rest for a while. She doesn’t have the time for it.

She wraps the towel around her head and peeks through the door; nobody’s home.

Really fuckin’ late, then. Especially when the plan is to be home for dinner and that means driving all the way from Kansas fucking City.

Alyssa hurries over to the dressers, digging through what’s left. The blouse she’d planned on wearing is gone, and the suitcase with her shorts in it has disappeared. Which leaves her with—

A latch clicks open behind her.

“Naked!” she shouts.

The door shuts, followed by a muffled ‘whoops, sorry.’

Anyway, clothes. Clothes, clothes, clothes.

Alyssa throws each piece on as she pulls them out of the drawer: bra, panties, skinny jeans, socks. She tears the towel off her still-wet hair and tosses it onto the bed, then wriggles into a purple v-neck tee.

“Ready!” she calls out as she shoves her shoes on, already tied.

She doesn’t bother checking the door as it opens again. It’s obviously Dad; Mom would’ve slammed it shut earlier, or, hell, just burst in before she could utter a word.

“Where’s Mom and Alyssa? Are they in the car already?” she asks, fast enough that a few words nearly slur together.

Dad says something, but her focus is elsewhere. She’s gathered an armsful of clothes, her eyes darting around in search of a bag.

“What?”

“I said they’re getting breakfast.”

Her stomach rumbles. Because of course it would be now, of all times, to realize she’s fucking starving.

“Then… where’s all the suitcases?”

“Haven’t been packed yet. Just carried them out to the curb.”

“Fuck fuck fuck. So late, so late, fuck.”

She spies a single suitcase—a pink one in the corner, backpack on top. Her suitcase.

She leaps over to it, pushes the backpack off, rips the zipper open and shoves the clothes inside, then slams it shut and forces her muscles to deliver the strength necessary to close it.

“Is that the last of it?”

“Uh…”

Alyssa gives the room one last sweep, peeking into drawers and behind furniture. Satisfied, she goes back to her things, swinging the backpack over her shoulders and pulling the suitcase behind her.

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

It’s fortunate that the nursing-slash-rehab-slash-long-term-care wing of the hospital is its own building, situated near a main road to boot. What’s unfortunate is that her room is on the fifth floor above ground, and the elevators are pretty slow for new construction.

Not that she wants to use an elevator, anyway.

Alyssa skips down the stairs two at a time, suitcase banging on each step behind her. Which is kinda dangerous, given her gait, but whatever. She reaches the ground floor while her father is still a whole flight behind.

“C’mon Dad, hurry up!” she calls out.

That’s the problem with relying on Dad. He’s always, well, he’s not slow. He likes to take his time, and then cut corners to make the schedule work out. Probably not the best image for a carpenter-turned-architect. But hey, their house hasn’t fallen apart. Yet.

Of course, the staircase is in the back of the building. Because what crazy person walks when a rickety metal box could deliver them to their floor of choice.

She runs her free hand through her still-wet hair as she waits, transitioning the nervous action into something useful, combing her hair into place and securing it with a snap-clip. Thanks to her power her hair is not-quite-dead; tiny capillaries run up each strand so she can adjust melanin content on the fly. It’s kind of annoying, sometimes, to feel it, but there’s the additional upside of being not-bad at styling, even without a mirror.

She manages to stay still long enough for Dad to leave the stairwell, then takes off down the hall, suitcase wheels clicking on the tile. Something small and light smacks against her ankle with each step, as if whipping about. Her jeans are pretty old, the edges frayed; it’s probably a loose hem.

“Hey, Alyssa, wait!” Dad’s voice echoes through the empty hall to reach her, a few corners distant.

She considers slowing down; they’re already late, and it’s not like they would’ve gotten home in time under ideal circumstances, either.

But she has so much more work to do than she thought she would, and there’s not going to be much she can do on the road except read or write. The sooner she can sit down, crack her laptop open and start downloading papers, the better.

Arriving at the lobby she blows right past the reception desk, heading straight for the set of glass doors. She can hear Dad running behind her, now.

He enters the lobby just as she reaches the doors.

“Alyssa! Stop! Your—”

The doors shut behind her as she practically sprints outside, the cool air raising goosebumps on her damp skin. She makes for the van, bounding down the stairs.

Her foot snags on something mid-stride. Momentum carries her forward, stretching her leg out and spinning her around. She lands on her backpack with the telltale crunch of snapping plastic, the back of her skull leaving its own crack against the stone stairs.

Through stars she sees her right shoe dangling a few steps above her, a loose lace caught on the rusted railing. Her heart, already at a decent tempo, kicks it up a few notches.

“Shit,” she can hear Dad mutter as he jogs over. “Are you okay?”

There’s a growing lump on the back of her head, and a few bumps on her legs that will probably bruise. Compared to what she’s suffered before, it’s nothing.

“I’m fine,” Alyssa insists as she crawls up the staircase, freeing her shoe and slipping it back on.

Dad helps her stand, lifting her by the shoulders, turning his grip into a hug. She struggles against it, only one thing on her mind.

“Hey, hey, calm down,” he whispers. “What’s going on?”

“My—my laptop. It broke,” she stammers; the very thought making her tear up. So much work, all wrapped up in a stupid plastic thing.

Even with her still-weak physique and their significant size difference, Alyssa finds the leverage to get one shoulder free, slipping her backpack off and around.

He takes the bag away before she can open it, holding it out of her reach.

“Dad. I need that.” Her voice cracks, on the verge of sobbing. “Please.”

Dad pulls the laptop out. Its candyshell white casing has chunks missing, larger cracks running across it. Still, the screen glows as he opens it, displaying her log-in profile.

“See? Just a few scuffs,” he reassures her, then puts it away. “I’ll bring your bags to the van. Why don’t you go sit down?”

Alyssa sniffles a bit despite herself; she must look so pathetic, right now. It’s pretty obvious Dad means for her to get in the car so she goes and sits by the curb instead, away from the clustered suitcases.

She watches as he puts her things away, smoothing a few wrinkles from her jeans to keep her hands busy.

After finding spots for a few more bags Dad strolls over, sitting down next to Alyssa. She scoots away an inch or two, but it doesn’t amount to much with his height, and he easily reaches an arm around her shoulders.

“What’s wrong?”

Alyssa usually hates hugs from her parents. She hasn’t really grown at all in the past seven years, she’s just aged. And even though they’ve gotten older too, hugs still make her feel like a little kid. But right now… she’s cold, sore, and upset; he’s warm, and his jacket is soft.

“Nothing. I’ve got a lotta homework, okay?”

“I thought you’d be done with it by today.”

“I know, I thought so, too. It’s just, it’s not even October and we already have a research paper in this one class, and the first draft is due tomorrow. I can’t handle this shit.”

“Look, I know your mother and I haven’t been the best about this in the past, but you can always ask for help,” he says, squeezing her a bit. “And if we suck at it, there’s always the rest of the family. Sammy’s good at writing, I’m sure she’d love to help.”

“Dad, it’s not—the school shit isn’t the problem. It’s her. I can’t be her fucking nurse and take care of myself. I thought I could, but I can’t, and this is… it’s going to keep dragging on and on and on. And I—I can’t risk failing again, not in senior year. But I don’t know what to do.”

“Back up a bit. I thought she’s taking care of herself, now?”

“Dad, you haven’t seen her. Not like I have.”

“Alyssa, she’s looking great. She got dressed by herself. Hell, she can practically walk.”

Alyssa takes a long, deep breath.

“Say you’re adding onto a house. A whole new floor. What do you do if the foundation’s bad?”

“Jack it up, dig it all out and pour a new one?”

“Okay, but what if you find out the first floor’s rotting, the second one’s full of mold, and just about the only stable part is the roof?”

“If it’s that bad, is it really a good idea to bring her home?”

“Look Dad, I know bodies, not buildings. So maybe it’s not that bad. It’s just every time we try to make her more capable, shit happens and I end up doing more. Yeah, she can waddle around, but showers are too slippery for her. Baths are tricky because her insides are more filler than guts, so her buoyancy’s fucked. I’m worried when she starts solid food that she’ll get blockages or some other shit. So much could happen, and all I know is that every time my life seems like it’s on the up and up, shit comes crashing down pretty quick. She’s not going to be any different.”

“Alyssa, you don’t have to be alone in this. We’re all here for you. We’re probably going to get home pretty late, but tomorrow we can all sit down and figure out how we can help her, so you don’t have to. Is that cool with you?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Dad.”

“Great,” he says as he stands up, stretching out. “I’m gonna start packing, do you want your laptop?”

She does, but her stomach has been sending pulse after pulse into her nerves, whining like a fat kid whose mother won’t give her a second chocolate bar. Bad enough by itself, but it’s making it hard to quiet her emotions.

“Nah. Too distracted, and still kinda upset.”

“I know it’s hard, but today’s a big day. For you, and especially for her. Let’s try to make it a good one.”

Alyssa’s heart beats like a jackhammer, despite all her countermeasures. And as if the cardiac conniption wasn’t enough, her flesh-laden stomach has felt the need to contribute. She swallows against another rising tide of vomit, and decides to consider the upside: at least it’s working. All of this thanks to her poor, poor adrenal gland doing its damndest to shove her from a state of heightened nerves to an outright anxiety attack. And in complete fairness to the battered gland, she’s been sending mixed messages.

Nobody cares. They’re not staring. And if they did stare, they can’t know.

The worst part’s over now. She has a take-out box full of french toast in her wheelchair’s basket, and a fruit smoothie filling her cup holder. All she has to do is cross the lobby, and she’s free.

The totally empty lobby.

Except for the receptionist over at the desk.

Aaaand the homeless guy who snuck in while she was trying to not be seen by the receptionist.

In the corner of her eye she catches a security guard, meandering over to check out the hobo.

She takes a swig of her smoothie, deliberating.

Just go already.

Alyssa imagines shoving the joystick as far forward as she can, the wheelchair rocketing across the lobby, automatic doors just barely opening before she speeds through them.

None of that happens. The chair isn’t that fast to begin with, and even if it was, it cost like, four thousand bucks. Instead, she drives at a measured pace, the electric motor making its whiny little ‘whrrrrrr’ sound.

The receptionist barely acknowledges her, with a quick glance and a slight nod. The lobby’s other two occupants don’t notice at all.

She makes it through the doors and out into the cool morning air. It’s still dark, with the street bathed in soft sodium yellow, traffic sparse. The van sticks out among the few curbside cars, a big gray thing of a vehicle with an equally gray, if not quite as big, cargo carrier up on top. The plastic pod is split open like a clam, suitcases piled into it.

Her twin is sitting on the curb, her hair still damp, combed into their usual bob that just about covers her right eye. They’d coordinated their hair in advance, so Alyssa had gone for a left part, with the hair on that side swept behind her ear and the right swept over her forehead, held away from her face by a pink clip.

Her twin spots her first, hopping over and making a beeline for the breakfast box.

“Finally,” she blurts out as she tears it open, shoving a piece of french toast down her throat. 

Mom’s leaning into the van through its side door, finding a home for a pair of bags that didn’t make it into the carrier. Having found one, she turns around, sees Alyssa, and frowns.

“Are you sure that’s enough?” she asks, pointing at the smoothie. “Maybe you should have some toast, too.”

“It’s fine, Mom. ‘Sides, I had that snack earlier.”

Her mother shrugs, then looks up at Dad. “James? Is it going to work?”

“Just… about—” Dad grunts, and the carrier’s latches snap shut. “There.”

He hops down from the car, dusting off his hands.

“I hope you girls got everything you need, because that ain’t closing again.”

Alyssa runs through a quick mental list: phone, earbuds, and… well, she doesn’t really need anything more than that.

“I, uh, I think I have all my stuff. What about you?”

“Mmph,” her twin nods.

“Everyone pile in, then. We’ve got a long day ahead.”

Alyssa wheels herself around to the back, as her mother and twin walk over to the driver’s side and take their respective seats. Dad accompanies her, opening the door and unfolding the ramp.

Driving into the van is a little nerve-racking. The ramp wobbles a bit, and even though her head easily clears the ceiling she feels cramped, restrained. She gets a feel for things as Dad ties down her chair; there’s not much of a view in front, only the backs of seats, but at least she has the rear windows to herself. Still, between the small space and the harness she almost feels… trapped.

No, she repeats to herself. Today is a good day.

The van starts up with little fanfare just as Dad closes the passenger door, and they drive off. She feels an urge to look back, fueled by worry; instead, she looks at the road ahead. The road home.

“…special investigative report on the earthquake that devastated Memphis. Tonight we’ll be speaking with Doctor Ursula Green from the US Geological Survey as to the unusual nature of the quake and what it may mean for the future of our country. We also have a few special guests here with us in the studio, including two who were on the ground. But first, inquiries continue in the case of…”

The anchorwoman’s voice drones on behind the half-open door as Alyssa approaches it, papers in hand, and raps on the metal frame.

“Come on in,” her sister says.

‘Sister’ still doesn’t feel quite right, but it helps to humanize their relationship, put it in a better perspective than ‘other’ had. ‘Twin’ had been tempting; it was more accurate, yet it felt… problematic.

Alyssa closes the door behind her.

“Mind if I sit?”

“Uh, nah, hold on a sec.”

Her sister sets her drink on the night table, freeing her hands so she can scoot to the side.

“Go ahead.”

Alyssa walks around the bed, passing the tee vee, the anchorwoman going into the details of various lawsuits, blame-mongering, and insurance bullshit spawned by the disaster. In other words, blah blah blah. She sits down on the empty side of the bed, swinging her legs up onto the mattress.

“Morning news must’a been awful, if you’re watching this crap from last night.”

“I wanna see the interviews. ‘Sides, it’s better than the stupid soaps.”

Her sister takes her final few sips of the drink, slurping and sucking through the straw, then sets it aside.

“How’re the guts workin’?”

“Pretty good; haven’t had to puke yet. Really had to fight it though, with how dogshit these nutrition shakes taste.”

Alyssa nods and holds the papers up, leafing through reams of doctor-speak until she finds a legible page. On it are two feminine figures, annotations and lines sketched on the abdomens of each. Planning for incisions, extractions, cuts for skin grafts.

“I talked to Doctor Nic and Doctor Ahmed. They think we’ll be ready for the next set of surgeries on Wednesday, if everything goes well.”

Being on a first name basis with doctors feels kinda weird. But this whole deal is new ground, and that meant she’d been more involved in the process than most patients would.

Her sister takes the packet, examining the diagram and the ones after it.

“Can’t we bump it up to, I dunno, Monday morning?”

“Too soon.”

Her sister rolls her eyes and sighs, tossing the packet onto the nightstand.

“But… Cindy won’t be here then…”

Alyssa scoots over and puts her arm around her sister’s shoulder in a loose hug. Her power’s awareness spreads out from the points where skin meets skin, familiar, yet alien.

In the past two months her touch had been clinical at best; most of it had been rough, flippant, boundless. Now that they’ve established boundaries between them, as two separate persons, she’s aimed for her touch to be one that comforts and heals.

“We’ll be awake for this one; I’ll be there for you, okay?”

“That’s… alright, I guess.”

Through their power Alyssa should have total awareness of her sister’s body, and to an extent, she does. But the details get fuzzy sometimes, harder to stay focused on. She’s got a sense of what’s going on, just not quite the full picture.

“Hey, um, I think you said Cindy would be over in an hour or so from now, right? Do you wanna get your checkup done now, or wait until tonight?”

“Uh… we’ll probably keep her late again, so now’s probably better.”

“When you’re ready.”

Her sister pauses the tee vee—not that Alyssa had been paying attention to it—and pulls off her shirt, naked underneath. Her sister’s body is still a work in progress, to put it nicely. Her chest is bony and emaciated—a ribcage that sits atop an abdomen in the shape of a tied-off plastic bag, tapering to wrap around a protruding lower spine. The very lowest vertebrae connect to the beginnings of a pelvis, slowly growing outward under a thin sheath of donated skin. Their next surgeries would be transplanting the remaining vital organs; after that would be muscles and skin, once she’d finished growing the grafts and copies of the muscles.

Her sister’s spine moves almost like a tail as muscles flex across it, lacking the deep ossification that would make it rigid, allowing her to lift it up as she waddles over and sets herself on Alyssa’s lap.

“Okay, ready,” her sister says, unpausing the tee vee.

With the way their power’s been acting, touch is necessary. It reminds her of when her power was new, almost uncontrollable. Focus had been key, and touch the easiest route to it. Before she’d mastered it a hand on the hip or the nervous twiddling of thumbs could elicit deep changes, drastic ones, if paired with the right—or wrong—thought or impulse. No risk of that here, fortunately, but touch had again become the tool of real awareness.

The first tasks are mechanical, gently flexing the leaves of cartilage that would give rise to the ilium, ischium, and pubic bones, testing their resilience. Then she rotates the pelvis itself, holding it by the sacrum, feeling as the spine flexes. With her power she tunnels her focus into her sister’s neural column, making sure pulses move freely, that nerves don’t get pinched or compressed.

Her hands slowly work their way upwards, lifted and placed deliberately, avoiding motions that would brush, sweep, or rub. The abdomen is where things get complicated; the skin here is a fragile blend of grown and grafted. Skin has a grain to it, an alignment going back to each area’s fetal progenitor. Alongside this pattern is a mosaic, formed on the basis of a cell’s ancestor. Each cell can only draw from one X chromosome, and like most humans she’s lucky to have two.

Their power likes to normalize, return to the baseline. It means they heal in ways no one else does, but it has its complications, too. Her sister’s body is hard at work trying to correct the grafts and growths, matching them to its power-granted blueprint, and some things just don’t turn out right.

Her sister should be able to fix the problems herself as they crop up. That she isn’t can mean several things, and none of them are good.

Alyssa draws on her reserves to fix the damage, killing off her own cells to repair and rebuild her sister’s. After a minute or two the work becomes almost automatic and Alyssa lets her senses take in the wider world around her.

“One last thing, Doctor Green. What do you make of the speculation going around, that this quake wasn’t natural?”

“While this event certainly had its share of unexpected behaviors, such speculation is unfounded. Memphis is located on an intraplate fault, making it difficult to predict seismic activity in the area. Though it is outside of my field, I think the public’s fascination with powers has led to some conflating of fiction with reality.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Up next, my colleague Jason will be leading a group discussion with our guests, right after this break.”

Her sister mutes the tee vee.

“So, um, uh…”

“Uh, what?”

“I know it’s been like half a week or something, but I can’t think of anything. Like, I looked at some baby name sites, but nothing clicks. And now the stupid phone thinks I’m pregnant.”

“It’s okay, I’ve only thought of like, one. No pressure.”

Alyssa feels her sister sigh, masses of muscle relaxing.

“But it’s important. And we’re already putting it off.”

“How do you feel about ‘Courtney?’”

“…for me?”

“Yeah.”

“Why that one?”

“It’s a pretty name.”

“I—we were saving it. For someone special. It’d be awkward.”

“There’s always ‘junior,’ when we get there.”

“That’s—that’s not what I meant. Why can’t you go by Courtney? Why can’t I be Alyssa?”

“Because that’s—”

—my name.

Alyssa bites her tongue right before the last two words leave her lips. She feels her sister’s emotions simmer, neurons firing wildly.

“Look, I still want this to work out, just… don’t erase who I am. I’m not you. I’m definitely not your fucking kid.”

“Sorry.”

“Here.” Her sister holds the phone up, waving it in her face. “I wanna go back to my show. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

Alyssa frowns; one of her hands is atop her sister’s liver, aiding in the inspection of its regrowth and integration with the latest donor lobe. Her other hand rests above her sister’s heart, checking the overlying graft for defects.

“I’m kinda busy right now.”

“This whole thing was your idea.”

“Yeah, and I’m thinking on it, but if I stop what I’m doing you’ll get cancer or something. Again. Do you really want that?”

Alyssa feels her sister’s grumbled ‘no’ more than she hears it, then settles back into her rhythm. Her eyes and ears focus on the television, relying on other senses for her work.

“Welcome to our show; I’m Jason O’Brian. Now, I’d like to digress from our usual schedule and jump right into the thick of things. I’m sure our viewers are all wondering just what did happen in Memphis, whether we should be concerned, and how to mitigate or prevent such disasters in the future, if we even can. There’s been an overwhelming amount of speculation, and tonight I’m hoping to find some truth. WIthout further ado, our guests, ladies and gentlemen.”

The camera pans back at the host’s cue, revealing the rest of the studio, two men and a woman seated across from the host’s desk. Something’s familiar about the woman, but she can’t quite pin down what.

“Our first guest is a well know superhero, Slipstream, one of the faces of the nationwide Community Guard.”

Face being key—he doesn’t have any sort of helmet or mask on. Means he’s one of the real high-ups; most of their members are allowed anonymity, but a few corruption scandals some years ago had shaken a carefully cultivated image. As part of cleaning house, the organization’s leadership had unmasked themselves, hoping to win some trust back. It’d worked, mostly. Knock-on effects had seen the upper echelons of each sub-organization taking up a similar idea. No masks, but they kept their aliases.

Slipstream the man doesn’t look particularly heroic; a young guy with a plain face, early thirties or so, brown hair and fairly muted blue eyes. He has a costume on, a fairly practical one consisting of a tight-ish white bodysuit, vital areas protected by silver plates. Minimal decoration; a few silver-and-white wing motifs, and of course, one of Community Guard’s signature badges on his chest. The badges differed by regional division, united by a common theme: an overall shape of a shield of some kind, with two hands clasped in agreement. Slipstream is from the Gulf Division, by Alyssa’s recollection, though she can’t quite make out the other details on his badge to be sure.

“Thanks, Jason. A pleasure to be on the show.”

“Next up is Staff Sergeant Gabriella Diaz. Longtime viewers will remember her; she came on the show several years ago to discuss her experience with the aerial infantry in Afghanistan, and I’m honored that she’s able to be here with us once again. As I understand it, you’ve since transferred to domestic duty?”

The camera focuses on Diaz, and Alyssa feels her sister’s eyes narrow, if only briefly. The Staff Sergeant sure looks the part—her black hair is tied up handsomely short, and she’s wearing a rather decorated service uniform. Most of the patches and pins are meaningless to Alyssa, except for one. It identifies Diaz as a unique sort of soldier. One with powers.

Powered soldiers were… weird. The Army had a few units for them, each with a different focus. Their powers tended to be a bit too similar in function and capability, more than they should get from selection and training alone.

“That’s correct. I had the opportunity to retire after finishing my service abroad, and felt that my skills would be best utilized at home instead.”

“Such a sense of duty is one we should all aspire to. Now, last but certainly not least we have Professor Jakob Meier, a neuropsychologist and one of the leading researchers studying powers in the past decade.”

Meier doesn’t quite look like a typical egghead. More like a businessman, with the beige suit and red tie he has on. His features look old enough though, eyes wrinkled and hair graying, but not like, bucket-kicking old.

“Thank you, Mister O’Brian.”

The view switches back to the main camera, showing the stage.

“I’d like to start with you, Slipstream. Your organization has been all over the headlines due to its involvement with the rescue efforts. As someone who was on the ground in Memphis, how well do you think we, as a nation, are prepared to handle such disasters in the future?”

“Community Guard’s major branches have been working with state and federal governments for the past several years on creating a nationwide response network. Thanks to this system we were able to deploy dozens of capes to Memphis within hours of the quake, helping thousands of people. I’m sure we’ll see even better responses in the future as this network matures.”

“This cooperation with government—do you think it could lead to integration with law enforcement, somewhere down the line?”

“No. As it stands, our relationship with conventional law enforcement is complementary; we address what they cannot. While we’re happy to work with law enforcement, of course, it’s our independence that lets us focus on our mission: protecting our communities, not policing them. We already have close relations to other emergency services, and this response network is an evolution of our local efforts to the national scale.”

“It’s going to be interesting to see how this system develops, I’m sure,” Jason says with a nod. “Now, Staff Sergeant Diaz, there’s been controversy over the deployment of the Third Aerial Infantry to Memphis, particularly whether the federal government overstepped its bounds to do so. Could you give us your take on this situation?”

“Much of this is due to popular misconceptions regarding the legal standing of domestic operations involving powered soldiers. The two-thousand-four amendment to the Homeland Security Act, which allows Army or National Guard capes to be deployed domestically only at the explicit request of state law enforcement, has been cited as the law supposedly violated. Our presence in Memphis wasn’t in a law enforcement capacity; we deployed under FEMA supervision to assist the Army Corps of Engineers, per Governor Stallwell’s request.”

The memory of a scream surfaces in Alyssa’s mind, sharp and forceful. A voice that could blast apart tons’ worth of stone and even force its way through Orrery’s sphere.

Diaz’s power.

The Staff Sergeant sure looks different in dress. Something about the skirt, maybe, or how her shoulders aren’t as broad as Alyssa remembers. Not that they’d met in Memphis; just a glance, here and there. Alyssa hadn’t even gotten the chance to thank her.

She notices something else as well, through her power. Neural activity brewing in her sister’s head, muscles tensing, twitching. Excitement, or… anger?

“Thank you for the clarification, Staff Sergeant. Moving on, Doctor Meier, what do you make of the speculation regarding a human cause of the Memphis quake, particularly by one or more capes. Do you think that’s possible?”

“No. Not as a principal cause.”

“Could you expand on that, Doctor?”

“It’s a matter of energy. Broadly speaking, powers either draw from an as yet unknown source, or rely on their wielder to acquire energy from their surroundings. The former cases have been observed to only use energy at a given maximum rate, and the latter are of course ultimately limited by their environment. In every known case, none have ever come close to the energy released by an earthquake. There is some possibility for influence over geological activity in the case of powers that express via technology, however…”

Alyssa finds herself unable—and unwilling—to keep up with the doctor’s explanation. She closes her eyes and turns her focus back to her work, hands now on her sister’s sides, fingers resting in the furrows between ribs. Things seem alright, maybe not a clean bill of health, but good enough. Except… there’s something wrong.

A mass, or something, nestled under her sister’s collarbone. Heavily calcified to the point it’s not even bone anymore, a burr poking and prodding into the surrounding flesh.

Alyssa tweaks a few of her sister’s nerves, creating the sense of a tap on the shoulder.

“Somethin’ up?”

“Left clavicle. Tumor or something.”

“Really? I could swear—oh. Shit. I thought I fixed that.”

“It’s fine. I’ll deal with it.”

A skin of osteoblasts surrounds the malformed knot of bone, depositing calcium crystals with little rhyme or reason. Within the mass she can feel the remnants of a ligament, torn flesh now petrified. Had this been healing gone wrong? A process her sister started and couldn’t stop? Something else?

No use in speculating.

Alyssa culls the osteoblasts, dissolving them into their constituent chemicals and giving rise to their opposites from the resulting soup. She guides the osteoclasts manually, directing the cells’ acidic bites into the abnormal matrix, steering them away from healthy bone. As the mass shrinks away she coaxes the ligament into the void left behind, re-anchoring it once it meets the clavicle’s surface.

“Better?”

Her sister rolls the affected shoulder, muscles contracting and extending smoothly.

“Yeah.”

All that’s left is a tune-up, something Alyssa could handle in her sleep. She opens her eyes and lets them drift back toward the screen.

“You mentioned earlier, Staff Sergeant, that you’re concerned about the efficacy of Community Guard’s response network. As I recall, you were one of the early supporters of it. Could you tell us what changed your mind?”

“Firsthand experience. Disasters are often compared to warzones; you need to keep cool and stay calm, or you’re going to get in the way, or worse. Community Guard first approached the government with the understanding that any capes they sent would have the right mindset, and I can honestly say they exceeded my expectations. If their members were representative of the program, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Somewhere in the process smaller groups—so-called ‘independent heroes’ and ‘local teams’—started to feel left out. While I admire these independents’ bravery and applaud their willingness to help their fellow Americans, many weren’t ready for something of this scale.”

Alyssa feels another shift in her sister’s internal chemistry, hormones and neurotransmitters pumping out into her bloodstream. Emotions bubbling, at risk of boiling over, but… why?

“I hope that didn’t interfere with the rescue efforts.”

“Not directly. The independents I saw were clearly skilled, and they wielded their powers to great effect. Unfortunately, power and skill are not equivalent to training and experience. I’d like to point to what Doctor Green mentioned earlier: there is a definite public fascination with individuals like myself, and I believe that fascination led certain decision makers to overlook practical concerns.”

“Hm, hm… Slipstream, do you have any comments?”

“This whole venture is a new experience, for Community Guard, our affiliates, and our partner teams. What happened in Memphis wasn’t our ideal proving for the program, but we’re already taking steps to learn from what went right and what didn’t, including revamping our training and selection criteria for future incidents of this scale.”

“May I make one last point?”

“Go ahead, Staff Sergeant.”

“The problem isn’t just a lack of training. It’s the population in question. The majority of independent teams are groups with a handful of members operating on a contractual basis with either local police or with a larger organization. A significant number of these consist of very young people. College age kids, teenagers. They don’t have the resources to meet the right standards, and it shows in the numbers. Independents suffered higher injury and death rates than other first responders. I witnessed several tragic incidents and the aftermath of dozens more, of kids getting themselves into dangerous situations without even realizing the risk. Kids who died, or who will suffer for the rest of their lives. None of that had to happen.”

The screen flickers off. Alyssa feels her sister’s mouth move, lips curling, a cuh- sound slipping through, the rest silent.

“Hey, you alright?”

“It’s a bunch of bullshit. She wasn’t fucking there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s up there on tee vee blaming us for getting hurt! Blaming us for shit that no one thought would happen!”

“Calm down, even if—”

“Why are you defending her?”

“I’m not, it’s just—”

“Why do you care? Huh?”

“Please, let me—”

“Do you like her? I could feel you looking at her.”

“What? No, ew, she’s like, thirty or something.”

“Then what is it, huh? What is it?”

“She saved my life.”

Her sister goes silent, neurons simmering.

“Fuck.”

“She saved yours, too.”

Her sister pushes off of Alyssa’s lap and onto the bed, wriggling into her shirt.

“Hey, we’re not done yet.”

“I am. Get out.”

“But—”

“Get the fuck out.”

“Okay, okay,” Alyssa mutters, sliding off the bed and walking to the door. “Page me if you need anything.”

“I said get out.”

Alyssa closes the door gently behind her, leaning on it. She lets her knees buckle and falls into a crouch, the metal cold against her back.

She wants to stand up and slam the door, or bang her head against it. But even that part of her is tired now. So, so tired.

How long? she wonders.

Months? A year?

A lifetime?

Greens and blues and reds flicker across the popcorn ceiling. Light-emitting-diodes that dazzle with each blink, even with her eyes closed, but they’re not what’s keeping her awake.

Her sister is… emotional.

Neurons that spark and flash like the lights, but the patterns are opaque. They whizz by at break-neck speeds, morphing and shifting almost at random. Is it anger? Anxiety? Sadness? The uncertainty puts her on edge; fear of an outburst, or panic, or sobbing. Her own body responds in turn: juicing adrenaline from tortured glands, deepening each breath.

Messengers diffuse into their shared umbilical. Her sister’s neural patterns become more erratic, jittery.

A vicious cycle.

She does her best to counteract it, to soothe her nervous flesh, but it’s hard. She’s never had to use her power like this, or so often, even when she had to fight it.

“Hey.”

Alyssa holds her tongue.

“I know you’re awake.”

Fuck.

“I… I wanted to say I’m sorry. I just, I was really hoping you’d get it.”

“Get what?”

“Why I’m angry. The soldier lady—Diaz—she… she told Cindy to let me die.”

Oh.

“Jeez, wow. Um, how come you didn’t tell me?”

Her sister is silent as neurons stir. Her chest rises and falls for a few deep breaths.

“I don’t remember much, from before. I don’t remember the bank, or the plane to Memphis, or the whole week or two before all that shit. I know about it, but I don’t remember it. Everything about my life… it’s all kinda fuzzy sometimes. All I remember is struggling, fighting to stay alive even a second longer. Cindy helped, but she was hurt, too. And then the first person who showed up to help us said I’m not worth saving.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It didn’t stop after that. Most of the doctors didn’t really know what to do. They didn’t want to fight, like I did. I was so alone. Aaron had a concussion and couldn’t really do anything, Cindy was higher than a fucking fighter jet with the drugs they gave her. The doctors kept asking about, y’know, next of kin, living will, shit like that. I didn’t tell them anything, ‘cause you know how mom and dad are.”

Alyssa nods. Mom and dad would’ve been distraught, overwhelmed… suggestible.

“All of it’s burned into my brain. I didn’t want to tell you because… this stuff, it’s me. And there’s days where I can’t remember if I did something, or talked to someone, or if it’s just something you did that I watched, or that you told me about. I don’t want to wake up one day and not know who I am.”

“I get that, I really do. But, we can’t keep doing this, this whole… right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, thing. And, um, I know I haven’t been good about being open, either. So, if there’s anything you want to ask me, go ahead.”

“How do you think of me?”

“…Didn’t we talk about that?”

“I mean like, now. What word?”

“Sister.”

“And it works for you?”

“It’s better.”

“Then why do I need a new name?”

“Because you deserve one.”

Her sister’s brow crinkles, and her eyes lower.

“Cindy told me how it was hard for you, sharing everything. I thought if we each had our own names, it’d help set up those boundaries. I didn’t want to change who you are. They can be between us, if you want. No one has to know.”

“I, um, I didn’t think about it like that. Thank you?”

“You’re welcome,” Alyssa says with a shrug. “Good night.”

“Sleep tight.”

Alyssa closes her eyes, letting go of the world around her. Just as she drifts to the edge of sleep, a sensation forces her awake. Movement of her sister’s throat and diaphragm. Giggling.

“Hey, uh, what’s funny?”

“Nothing, nothing. I just had a dumb idea for names, that’s all.”

“Oh?”

“They’re really dumb.”

“C’mon, tell me.”

“Okay, fine, but I’m going to whisper it.”

Alyssa can’t make out the words; she can barely hear a thing. But she can feel the muscles in play, the movement of her sister’s tongue, and she can’t stop herself from laughing.

“Oh my god, that is so dumb.”

“Right?”

“It’s great.”

“I dunno, it’s like, really silly. Like, Krissy’s gonna totally hate it.”

“Like she’d ever figure it out.”

“Yeah, okay, but maybe we should try for something more… serious? We’ve got a few weeks before we go home, maybe a month.”

Alyssa mulls over the possibilities. It’s not like they had any luck when it came to ‘serious.’

“We can try. But let’s hold on to these, if we can’t think of better ones. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Alyssa closes her eyes, almost in sync with her sister. For the first time in a long, long while, she has good dreams.

An explosion envelops her legs, tossing her into the air as blood blankets her vision. Then the screen fades, a death timer ticking down. Alyssa sets the controller on her bedsheets, waiting.

“You’re supposed to go around the mines, noob.”

The voice crackles with the unique noise of a garbage mic, managing to receive distant traffic and her teammate’s self-important tone at the same level of detail.

“Fuck off,” she mutters into her mic.

“I was going to get you up… but if you’re going to be a bitch…”

His character stands in cover, watching hers. The timer runs down and her character’s prone posture ragdolls onto the terrain, the camera swapping to another teammate’s view.

Some modes allow respawns; this one doesn’t.

“Pay attention, or pick a flier if you’re this bad at the ground game.”

Alyssa throws her headset at the chair in the corner. She didn’t jump into a match just for some dickwad to say her game was off. Especially in freeplay.

‘Course he isn’t wrong, which just makes her more frustrated. Her blood sugar is getting low, urea building up. Any normal person would notice these issues, but they’re just the start. Her body lacks in the endocrine department: she has her thyroid and parathyroids, pituitary and pineal glands, and that’s it. The girl provides what she can’t.

Which is fine, most of the time. They’ve been separate for nearly three hours now, and her body is starting to notice. All the little bits in the background, each metabolic process, all of it’s starting to go off-kilter. Hard to focus when your bones are being slowly eaten from the inside.

Not that she needs to focus to enjoy what the game has to offer. When she picked it up she didn’t intend to do well, or even win. It reduces the beautifully complex yet unattainable action of walking to flicking a joystick with her thumb, and that is enough.

Put that way… it’s also fucking pathetic. She’d damn near had a breakdown, yelled at her best friend, and retreated into living vicariously through a damn super-shooter. Not the healthiest decision, but what else is she supposed to do? Sit here and stew in her regrets for an afternoon?

Alyssa glances at the screen. The match timer still has ten minutes to go. She could get up, change discs, and play a different game. But that could take five minutes to achieve, and if stubbing a toe hurts like a bitch, stubbing a vertebra is akin to getting mauled by the entire kennel. Ten minutes of self-reflection isn’t so tortuous in comparison.

Besides, she owes it to Cindy. More than that, she owes it to… to the girl she used to be. The girl who isn’t even that anymore, since they’d had their twenty-first birthday in this fucking hospital. Months ago, they’d both called each other by name, often to the confusion of everyone around them. She’d thought of her twin by her name, even, but at some point she stopped and had seen fit to strip that bit of her twin’s humanity away, at least mentally. She’d only settled on girl because clone wasn’t accurate, even if it would’ve been more satisfying.

Hard to remember when that had started, but she knew it had been around the same time as the dreams. The dreams fueled by envy, the dreams that made her realize the nightmare she lived in. But it hadn’t been the dreams alone; they’d had disagreements, too.

Alyssa looks at her hands, turning them over. She grabs the controller, watching her fingers curl around it, bones and muscle moving beneath skin. She’d had to fight for these hands.

Each of her arms weighs nearly six pounds, more if she includes the muscles on her chest and back. Her twin had argued that those twelve or so pounds would be better spent elsewhere. Argued that arms wouldn’t help early on; that their best benefit would be the marrow of the humerus, but the red marrow of new ribs would contribute more.

It was the worst thing they’d fought over, but it wasn’t the first, and hadn’t been the last. By now the bitterness she’d felt over those fights… it hasn’t faded, but it has been supplanted by something else: fear. Fear that her twin was right, that in her short-sightedness she had thrown out her chance to ever recover, dooming them both to this hell.

Despite all their fights, her twin had risked a lot for her. The least she can do now is treat her like a human being again.

Alyssa looks back at the television. Over the game’s sounds she can barely make out footsteps outside the room, muffled by the door and hushed by her various electronics. She quits her game, turns off the TV, and listens.

Quiet conversation accompanies the footsteps and continues in their place, just on the other side of the door. Familiar voices, two she knows very well. The conversation dies off, and the door handle turns.

Cindy enters first, leaving her crutches by the door and pulling a chair between the beds. Alyssa’s twin follows, closing the door and walking around to Alyssa’s bed.

The sight of her twin elicits a visceral reaction; for as much as she has viscera, at least. Negative thoughts start to bubble up into her head, and she has to actively ignore them.

“Mind if I cozy up with ya?” her twin asks.

Yes

No

Alyssa shrugs.

Her twin crawls onto the bed, kicking her flip-flops onto the floor in the process, and sits cross-legged at the end.

“So… Hi, Alyssa,” her twin says.

It’s still weird, to hear her own voice. Even weirder when that voice addresses her by name.

“Hi.”

“Playin’ games and having fun?”

Alyssa looks at the controller, then places it on the nightstand. She shakes her head.

“Just… walking.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. How was your ice cream?”

“It was great. Cindy and I had a lot of fun.”

Cindy mutters something and shakes her head. Something to ask about later.

“And don’t worry, I definitely got you some. First, um, Cindy and I talked. I know you’re having a hard time, and—”

“Stop. Please.”

“Look, this is important.”

“Hey,” Cindy interjects, “if she doesn’t want to talk right now, that’s her decision. How about I put some movies on, and you guys can talk when she’s ready?”

Alyssa nods.

“That… works,” her twin says, moving to leave the bed as Cindy stands and starts setting up the DVD player.

“Wait.” Alyssa reaches out to her twin. “You can stay.”

“I thought you didn’t want to talk?”

“Can we just, I dunno, hang out? Cindy can have the other bed, to rest her leg.”

“Uh… sure.” Her twin shrugs. “Do you want your ice cream now?”

Lacking a stomach, she can’t get hungry. But there’s still a craving, a need.

“Duh.”

Lightning flashes across the glass, flickering phosphor briefly illuminating the room beyond it and the gruesome scene within. Alyssa can feel the jolt of adrenaline kick off a cascade of near-involuntary responses. Heart pounds, muscles tense, neurons spark.

Her twin sits at the perfect mix of fear and excitement, lying down at the foot of her bed. Her own reaction is muted—what hormones do reach her are dilute, impotent. Cindy left hours ago, and the two of them kept watching movies more from momentum than enjoyment. Still, she can have one last bit of fun.

On screen a woman stumbles through ice and snow, desperate to escape. Each strike of lightning pierces the darkness, revealing the bloodied body of a man behind her and a shadowy figure closing the distance. The killer’s blade glimmers during the approach, blood frozen to the edge. With every thunderclap, an ominous orchestra swells.

There’s a single nerve buried in the throat of Alyssa’s twin, tied to a whole network of unusual nerves. Every cell has been modified, capable of transmitting specific signals. Crude memory of taste, texture, and of course, temperature. It had been her ice cream, and now with a few quick modifications, it will be so much more.

She gives the movie her full attention now, taking note of the timing, the killer getting closer with each passing moment. The woman reaches the treeline, ducking behind a large oak. Heavy footsteps get loud, louder, and then quiet. The woman slumps against the tree, breathing hard, and the music fades.

Any moment, and… now.

Alyssa’s throat goes cold, a stabbing pain shooting through her neck just as the killer’s knife finds its mark.

Her twin screams and claws at her own neck, nearly falling off the bed, kicking and flailing as Alyssa laughs.

“Asshole,” her twin mutters, righting herself. She sits still for a few moments, massaging her neck and throat. “How… Oh, that’s how… Clever.”

Her twin grabs the remote and turns off the TV.

“Uh, you weren’t watching that, right?”

“Not really. Don’t have the right, um, equipment to enjoy it.”

“Aw, shit, sorry. I didn’t even think—”

“It’s fine. Really, it was a good night. Even if I had to make my own fun sometimes.”

“Speaking of night”—her twin stretches her arms out and yawns—“it’s gone from fucking late to fucking early. We better get to bed.”

Alyssa reaches through their link, coaxing certain glands to release specific hormones. Enough to keep the two of them awake a bit longer.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Uh, shoot.”

“Who do you think of, when you think of me?”

“Uh, you? Kind of a silly question.”

“What am I, to you? Am I Alyssa, or a sister, or…?”

“I dunno. I kinda think of you as ‘other me’ I guess.”

“For a while I thought of you as… as less than a person, just some girl living in my body.”

She pauses, to let her twin get a word in. There’s a reaction deep in her twin’s brain, but no response.

“I don’t want to think of you like that anymore. But if you keep treating me like… like a clone of you, then I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care if you’re sorry. I know there’s things I was stubborn about. I know some of those things I refused would’ve been really, really helpful by now, but if you won’t let me have a voice, how can I agree? Just, listen to me, okay?”

“If it’s about having a voice, I think I know what we need.”

It’s not the answer she wants, but… it might get there.

“Go on.”

“Cindy and I talked about us. You and me, who we are. We’re… not good at being honest with ourselves. Maybe, if we’re going to listen to each other, we have to stop being us.”

“What does that mean? ‘Us?’ We’re already different.”

“I think we need new names.”

“No.” Alyssa shakes her head. “I’ve lost too much. I’m not losing my name.”

“Hold up. No changing, just, new names. Nicknames. I thought about it for other people’s sake, but I think it might help us, too.”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Just think about it. We’ll do it together.”

“Really?”

“I promise.”

That was what she wanted to hear.

“Was this what you wanted to talk about, earlier?”

“There was something else, but… I was kinda hoping Cindy would be here for that, so—”

“You said it was important.”

Her twin pauses, and takes a deep breath.

“It’s August. Classes start on the twenty-second, and you’re just—you’re not going to be able to live on your own then. Probably not by September, either. Regrowing everything, best case, would be two more months. But after all the issues we had getting here, I can’t do that.”

“Well, um…” Alyssa trails off.

I can’t believe I’m saying this.

“What if I don’t need everything? Just enough to be self-sufficient. Bare minimum.”

“That… Hrm.”

Her twin closes her eyes and starts counting on her fingers. Alyssa feels a brief flurry of neural activity across her twin’s brain, one of the few physical cues of their shared power.

“If we did that, it’d be a month. Which is better, but… do you really want to do that? We’d have to skip a lot, like—”

“Alyssa. I want to go home. I don’t care if I can’t walk, or eat solid food, or if I need dialysis. I just want to go home.”

“I know, believe me, I know. With how little time we have, how little resources, I just… I don’t know what to do. Everything we tried to speed things up failed. I’ve got nothing more to give you.”

Alyssa reaches through their tether, consciously analyzing the body linked to hers. Her twin is almost underweight; the reservoir network that once held a slurry of fat and stem cells has been reduced to mere vestiges, ribbons of flesh scaffolding and a handful of pockets where young cell lines slowly incubate. But her body is healthy, despite enduring Alyssa’s metabolic demands.

“Maybe we’re doing this wrong. Maybe we shouldn’t start from scratch.”

“What d’ya mean?”

“When mom gave me pneumonia, and I needed a lung, you gave me one. Maybe we can do that again. With essentials.”

Alyssa can feel her twin’s spine quiver, and it gives her some pause.

“Look, that’s kinda asking a lot.”

“I don’t need much. A few feet of intestine, an extra lobe of liver, and a kidney. One ovary; you can even keep the tube.”

“I’d have to regrow everything you take.”

“Growing is hard. Regrowing is easy. You had your lung back in two days while keeping my necrotic ass alive. I don’t feel good about this, but it’s our only option.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“What if Cindy hadn’t come? Were you just going to keep stringing me along? When school started… were you just going to abandon me?”

“No, I—”

“Then listen! You promised you’d listen! Don’t—”

Alyssa chokes on a sob, and her eyes start to water.

“—Don’t break that promise just because what I said is inconvenient for you.”

She tries to say more, so, so much more, but only finds tears.

“Okay. I’ll, um, I’ll have our surgeon come and talk to us about it in the morning, okay?”

Alyssa manages a nod.

“…Do you want a hug?”

“Please.”

Her twin gets off the bed and lifts her up. There is a gentleness to it, a caution that their usual contact lacks. She does her best to focus on her senses, seeking the warmth and comfort she’d feel with a friend, or a loved one. It’s hard, with their shared power; each point of skin contact excites it, blurring the separation between them. Cloth and fabric make it easier to bear at first, but the awareness is total, alienating.

It’s not how a hug is supposed to feel.

It doesn’t feel right at all.

But maybe it doesn’t have to.

“I don’t have to look, right?”

“You watched my lung transplant just fine.”

Even with a surgical mask on, Cindy’s frown is obvious.

“That was different. I honestly think I shouldn’t even be here for this one, or at least not this close.”

“It’s not emotional support if I can’t squeeze your hand, Cindy.”

“Alright, I’ll stay. I’m just nervous about this. It seems… extreme, even for you two. And there’s—”

“Excuse me,” a nurse interrupts, pushing a cart of surgical tools.

Cindy barely succeeds in flattening herself against Alyssa’s bed, giving the cart just enough room to pass them in the cramped hallway and progress into the operating theater.

“Like I was saying, there’s so many people here. It’s making me uncomfortable.”

“It’s a government hospital, Cindy. They know who we are.”

“That’s why. And they’ll be watching.”

“C’mon, it’s just some old doctors and eggheads taking notes while me, myself, and I engage in a little plug-and-play. They probably won’t even notice you’re here.”

Cindy crosses her arms and sighs.

“I know, I know. I just can’t help worrying about it.”

“Look, you’re all scrubbed up. Nobody’s going to recognize you who doesn’t already know. ‘Sides, why are you nervous? I’m the one going under the knife.”

“Sorry. There’s also… I don’t mean to question your judgement, but are you guys really sure about this? When your sister explained it to me earlier, she didn’t seem that confident.”

Alyssa takes a moment to realize Cindy meant her twin.

Really need to get that name thing sorted.

“We talked with our doctors. It’s fine.”

Across the hall the doors of the operating theater swing open. Alyssa cranes her neck, barely able to see the interior. Her twin is sitting at the edge of the surgical table in a hospital gown, legs swinging in the cool air, talking to their surgeon.

A nurse approaches from the room, waving. If Alyssa had a stomach, she could bet a few butterflies would be fluttering about. She gives Cindy’s hand a squeeze, just hard enough to get a reaction.

“Ya know what, can you keep worrying?”

Please say yes, so I don’t have to.

“Um, sure?”

“Thanks, Cindy.”

Then

Bone cleats dig into plaster-dusted carpet, propelling Mitosis down the hallway. She sees in double, one head always looking forward, right and left sharing that duty as she glances into open doors or down side passages.

Behind her another hero tries to keep up the pace. A giant wearing a bulbous shell. It reminds her of a person-shaped pastry, each segment puffy and rounded. She slows slightly as she turns a corner, giving the overinflated tire mascot time to catch up.

A jingle tickles her ear, courtesy of her phone. Paragon’s ringtone.

“What up?” she answers with her left mouth, closest to the earbud mic.

“The basement’s clear, so far. I saw an alarm on one of the freight elevators, but the emergency phone wasn’t working. Can you check it out?”

“Um, lemme see…” She racks her brains, trying to recall her exact position. “Aight, gonna be a bit out of the way, but we can get it.”

“Thanks. Be careful.”

“‘Course,” she says, terminating the call.

Mitosis leans into a turn, keeping her speed.

“Hey Bubble boy!” she calls back, only to realize her mistake.

Fuck, I don’t know what’s under there.

“Or Bubble girl? Bubble… they?” she asks, feeling like she’s grasping at straws.

The hero’s name is, of course, not ‘Bubble’. But fuck if she’s going to try to pronounce Orrery.

Bubble rounds the corner after her, and speaks in a digitized voice.

“It suffices.”

“They? Okay, cool.”

“Not ‘they.’ It.”

“Aw, c’mon buddy, you’re selling yourself short.”

She looks behind herself with one head, her neck able to twist all the way around. Bubble’s domed ‘head’ is smiling.

“No. You are short.”

“Oh, hardy har,” Mitosis says with one head, laughing with the other. “So funny. Anyway, in case ya didn’t notice, we’ve got a change of plans.”

“Yes. The elevator.”

Instinctively, Mitosis tilts her rear-facing head to its right. It bumps its twin, hurting that head’s ear.

“Ow. Uh, I mean, what?”

“Your teammate informed me.”

“Right. Duh.”

Mitosis skids to a stop as they reach the floor’s center, dominated by the building’s elevator tubes. She darts over to the largest doors, digging her fingers into the gap, two hands on each door. Despite the effort of her four arms, they don’t budge.

“Urgh,” she grunts, trying again. Nothing.

She can see Bubble behind her, one hand grasping a column.

“Move,” the giant says.

She ducks to the side. Bubble pushes its free arm forward, palm open. A sphere of dim, silver light shoots forth, expanding as it travels. Bubble’s fist closes as the sphere envelops the elevator doors. The space seems to freeze, motes of dust suspended in midair.

Bubble pulls the fist back and the sphere follows, tearing the doors and part of the frame from the wall. Bubble slips forward with the action, its other hand leaving marks on the column.

Mitosis sticks her heads through the hole, peering down the elevator shaft. She can see the car, about a floor and a half down. An emergency hatch is cracked open, just a bit.

“Hello! Anyone in there?” she shouts.

The hatch swings up, and a man’s face pokes out.

“Oh, thank Christ,” he says. “Can you get us out of here?”

“Just hold on!” she answers, jumping onto a cable.

With four hands and two legs she can climb about three-fourths as well as a spider, and she reaches the car quickly. Mitosis leaps down through the open hatch, and surveys the car’s occupants.

Three men: one young, in a nice suit; two middle aged, wearing janitorial or maintenance uniforms. Two women: an older lady in a turtleneck, and a thirty-something in a striped suit with a black skirt. A pallet jack is in the corner, holding a fairly large safe.

“Okay, ladies and gents, who can’t climb through that hatch?”

The older woman raises her hand. Shortly after, one of the maintenance men does.

“Bad knee,” he says.

“Okie dokie. So, y’all three who can climb, you’re going to help get these two out of here first. You boost ‘em, I’ll lift ‘em.”

Mitosis leaps up, hauling herself through the hatch, getting into position.

She helps the old lady get out and on her feet, then helps the man do the same.

“Where are we going to go?” the woman asks, slightly panicked. “There’s no doors here!”

“I’m gonna climb each of you guys up the cables, and hand you off to Bubble, up there,” Mitosis explains, pointing up at the hole.

As the other three climb out onto the car’s roof, Mitosis draws on her power, modifying her feet. The bone cleats liquify, wicking into her flesh. Growing things is easier than modifying, and she draws on her reserves of material, lengthening her toes into finger-like digits, long enough to touch her heel. The muscles and tendons of her ankles shift, completing the transformation of her feet into makeshift claws, capable of gripping the lift cables.

“Okay,” she starts, addressing the group, “are we ready?”

No one steps forward. Typical.

Mitosis grabs the young man’s wrist, hoists him over her shoulder, and then uses her remaining limbs to start climbing the cable. Once at the top she hands him over.

“Can you stay here and help, if Bubble needs you to?”

He nods.

“Thanks.”

She descends, picks a person, then begins the next ascent.

Each trip feels slower than the last, as the building creaks around them. Debris falls down the shaft a few times, impacting the elevator car.

The thirty-something is the last to be rescued. She would have been third, but she had gone back into the car and only returned now, a briefcase stuffed with papers in her hands.

Typical bankers.

Halfway through their ascent the building begins to shake. She picks up her pace, scrambling up the cable. The shaking intensifies, and she can hear metal groaning, concrete cracking.

The top of the elevator shaft breaks apart and a chunk falls down, crashing through the elevator car. The thirty-something cries out, holding the briefcase over her head.

She throws the woman through the hole, preparing to jump after her. At that moment Bubble’s hands clap together, and a silver sphere envelops the area. The thirty-something stops in mid air, just above the carpet.

Mitosis finds herself embedded in the sphere, her upper right side sticking out of it. She struggles and tries to push herself deeper, only to find it impossible. It feels like she’s covered in clay and buried in concrete, the slightest movement a struggle, a constant pressure keeping her in place. She manages only the shallowest breaths.

She realizes she can’t save her right head: the process is too long, too tedious. She only has a minute, maybe even seconds.

Mitosis looks at the back of her left head, safe inside the sphere, and places her bet.

Her lower right arm is unnatural, letting her power dissolve it, reducing the flesh into a slurry of material and sucking it into her body. What reserves remain outside the sphere are drained as well.

The structure around them shifts, sunlight pouring down into the elevator shaft as more pieces come free. She wraps her right hand around the cable, clutching it tightly.

She hears an ear-splitting twang. A cable whips around the sphere’s surface. It cuts through her rib cage and she screams. Her peripheral vision catches the blood splatter, trailing upwards.

The building plummets into the earth, bringing her with it.

Her eyes open and take in darkness.

Am I dead?

The thought materializes in her mind, a product of neurons crossing signals as her brain transitions from sleep to wakefulness. She would hesitate to call it her thought. She merely owns it, in the way someone owns the dust under their bed.

Her legs quiver as she stands, doing her best to balance. Not the easiest task when she’s got two left arms weighing her down.

Today would be day… two? Three? Hard to be sure—being underground has certainly ruined her circadian clock.

White light floods her vision. After several blinks her eyes adjust: the man with a bad knee, Abe, holding his phone up, flashlight on.

“Hero girl, you up?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Wouldn’t happen to have any snacks, would you?”

Mitosis shakes her head.

“Nope, just the water bottle.”

“Shit.”

“Look, I’m hungry too, but it’s not been that long.”

“There’s something wrong with Janice. She’s been feeling light-headed. Liv’s keeping her company.”

Janice… right, turtleneck lady.

“Bring me to her.”

Abe nods and turns around, with Alyssa following the phone’s little cone of light. The office floor had remained surprisingly intact, thanks to Bubble’s quick thinking. Their first day had been spent trapped by Bubble’s power, waiting for the shaking to stop, for the ground to settle. That day had been hard for the civilians, but easy for her. Being a victim of decapitation wasn’t so bad when you had a spare, and she’d used her power to seal the wound then will herself to sleep. The towering hero remained standing in the center of their little corporate cavern, a raised fist projecting a sphere into the rubble above, keeping them safe.

The tiny torch sweeps over a doorway, illuminating a chunk of office space. Liv, the thirty-something, sits on a desk, Janice in the chair next to her.

“Jan, wake up. Hey?”

The older woman’s eyes flutter, not quite open all the way, and she manages to lift her head.

“Huh… yes?”

“Mitosis is awake. The hero. Tell her what’s wrong.”

The woman holds a hand to her forehead, rubbing at her eyes and face.

“I—Terribly sorry, I just need one thing to eat, a snack, a bit of candy maybe.”

“Sorry, lady.” Mitosis shakes her head. “I got nothing.”

“Oh dear. Oh, that’s really not good. Oh no.”

“What’s not good?”

“I’m diabetic,” Janice says, patting her abdomen with her free hand. “I got a pump implanted years ago, for insulin. I practically eat the same things every day, so I keep the control at home, half the time I forget it’s there.”

Fuck

“I take it your sugars ain’t doin’ too great?”

Liv nods, grimacing. “We managed to get my phone to talk to it and turn it off, about an hour ago. I think it said fifty, then.”

“Oh…”

“Is that bad?”

“Ye—let’s just stay calm, okay? I’ll think of something.”

Food, think, food…

She didn’t bring any; there’d been no reason to. Closest she has is the water bottle that’s already run dry.

Bubble?

No—Bubble is probably a robot, given that it hasn’t budged in what felt like days, and has rarely spoken.

Which leaves nothing. Unless…

There’s me.

Her body contains a reservoir of sorts. A hydraulic network she modeled on the lymph system, its vessels woven into the fascia underneath her skin. The network is densest on her thighs, hips, and stomach for convenience, but it extends beneath her entire surface. Smooth muscle lines it, allowing her to pressurize the contents. When she needs it she opens valves or grows them for the purpose, squeezing out proto-human goop that she can mold like living clay.

Okay, proto-human isn’t quite accurate. It’s more like a zygote, in source and composition, but she won’t tell anyone that much. Problem is, she’s got so little left, and they might be down here for a long time.

Not to mention, it’d be weird.

But…

Mitosis looks at Janice—she’s starting to shake, with beads of sweat on her face.

…But she’s gonna die if I don’t do something.

Mitosis focuses her power, sculpting out new channels. Easiest in her lower arm, the power-built flesh shifting almost effortlessly. Special cells take root along the edges of the channels, growing into glands that bridge into her network. The new paths coalesce on the back of her hand, a final route winding around her middle finger and opening up at its tip.

She unhooks the bottle from her belt, sticks her finger into it, and kicks the glands into action.

“Hey, Janice, you’re not lactose intolerant, right?” Mitosis asks as she holds up the bottle, white liquid sloshing within.

It’s hard to tell if the woman’s appalled, or if the insulin shock is making her that pale.

“Is that…?”

“You’ve got a choice between this, my best attempt at tartare, or going into a coma and dying. What’s it gonna be?”

Janice’s eyes settle on the floor, lids barely open, for several moments. Just as Mitosis starts to worry, the woman lifts her head up.

“Liv, could you hold the bottle? I don’t want to spill it.” Janice’s voice is shaky, but she sounds calm, now.

Mitosis hands the bottle off, and the older woman makes eye contact.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. Really.”

Mitosis monitors her body as she rouses. Breaths become deeper. Her heart beats faster. She tempers the process, optimizing for efficiency. She needs every bit of energy her body can provide, and she needs it to last.

Her reservoir is usually laden with slurry, forty-two pounds of it. Being forty-two pounds ‘overweight’ isn’t fun, but it’s a small price to pay to use her power at its fullest.

Normally she’d have enough to live off of, at least for a while. But she’d spent fourteen on the second head. Another fourteen on the extra arms. A pound here for more strength, a pound there to fit the task at hand. She’d been down to eight during the elevator rescue. Reclaiming one arm gave her about six back—some is always lost, burned to fuel growth. She spent four to heal from her partial decapitation.

And the past five days had seen her final ten pounds get used up, eaten, mostly by her. A few given out here and there, to those in need.

All she has left now is a single ounce, an ounce she won’t use. If she did, she’d have to grow a new cell line from scratch. She’d still have her power, and despite the empty reservoir she’d be able to regrow, but it would be costly. Six weeks of downtime to culture and nurture a new reserve, another two due to her injuries. Any power use would mean self-cannibalism in the meantime.

Mitosis rolls onto her stomach, crawling along the floor slowly and deliberately, one hand stretched outward. They have been in total darkness ever since the civilians had run out their phones’ batteries, not too long ago. Her own phone still has a charge, but she’s kept it off, saving it.

Her hand bumps something round, something metal. She raps on it lightly with her knuckles.

“Good afternoon, Mitosis,” Bubble whispers.

“Damn, guess I overslept, huh?”

“It is good to sleep. Uses less air.”

Mitosis nods. “How are our financier friends doing?”

“I have asked those who are awake to be quiet. I believe I heard something earlier, and I have been trying to listen.”

“What was it?”

“An explosion. Some sort of blasting, I think.”

“You, uh, sure it’s not another quake?”

She can hear a motor whine—Bubble shaking its head.

“This was too regular. But I haven’t heard it for some time.”

“Lift me up?” she asks, pointing at the ceiling. “I’ll have a listen.”

A hand wraps halfway around her torso, hoisting her into the air and onto Bubble’s shoulders. Even with the giant hero’s height, the ‘roof’ is too far away, her head brushing against the drop ceiling supports. She walks over Bubble’s head, her claw-like feet holding her steady, and climbs the giant’s other arm, her hand finding a grip on a clenched fist. Mitosis balances herself atop it, clutching a sprinkler pipe for stability, and presses her ear to the metal underside of the floor above. She focuses on the ear and mutes her other senses, amplifying this one.

A scream meets her ear, shrill, yet distant. A rumble just after. Then more rumbles. Impacts, of some kind.

“Digging, I think,” she says softly. “Sounds like they hit your orb and can’t crack it.”

“Hmm.” Bubble’s voice resonates in the room, even at a whisper. Mitosis can hear some movement, a yawn or two, as at least one of the civilians wakes up.

“You are certain?” Bubble asks.

“I mean, what else would it be?” Mitosis answers with a shrug—weird, when she only has one shoulder.

“‘Sides, it’s good news.”

“I hoped they would come from an angle. This is… complicated.”

“Can’t you just, I dunno, lift the sphere up?”

“No.” The motor whines, again. “It is too heavy. I would be moved instead. Even if I could lift it, the debris would cave in.”

“Right. Hm, well, how’s about you let that sphere drop, and freeze everyone again?”

“Risky. The structure might collapse, and our envelope would have to be smaller to let them dig us out.”

“Which they will.”

“Or, they will assume we have died.”

Mitosis shrugs.

“We’re going to start dropping dead in a few days, anyway. We need to do something, or our rescuers will move on to people they can save.”

“This is true. Agreed.”

Bubble claps its free hand against its chest with a bang. The sound evokes a gasp, panicked shuffling, and a groan from the darkness.

“Everyone, please listen carefully,” Bubble begins, having waited a moment. “Mitosis and I believe we are close to being rescued. I will have to stop using my power to keep the debris at bay, in order for us to be excavated. The floor might collapse when I let go, so everyone will have to be locked by my power again. Do you understand?”

The civilians say ‘yes’ or some variation. For her part, Mitosis nods.

“Please get as close to me as you can, and in a comfortable position. We may be stuck for some time.”

Mitosis climbs on top of Bubble again, anticipating a minor crush of bodies. Careful footsteps give way to the occasional bump or accidental grope. ‘Sorry’s and other apologies follow. A few expletives, too.

She tilts her head, keeping one ear pointed upwards.

“Brace yourselves,” Bubble warns.

Earth above her shifts. A wall blows out, rubble flowing in.

Bubble’s hands slam together with a deafening clap, locking them in place as the floor collapses around them.

Metal teeth drag at stone and concrete, breaking it, shoveling it away. On the second pass one such tooth grazes the sphere right above Mitosis’ ear, pushing them slightly deeper.

After five days underground even moonlight would be blinding. Spotlights worm through cracks as the excavator scoops rubble off of them, beams suspended in the dust burn purple lines across her vision. Darkness returns as the excavator bucket pushes through the rubble on both sides, closing around the sphere. It lifts them upwards, and nausea works its way to her throat as they move.

Mitosis screws her eyes shut as the bucket opens, the capillaries of her eyelids stand out as red webs against pink flesh in the glare of the lights. She can hear workers’ voices, muffled by the sphere’s boundary, joined by the rumble of engines.

Bubble drops the sphere. Mitosis stays still, holding on to the giant’s armored shoulders. She can hear a few of the civilians crying, others laughing, celebrating. She waits until the workers lead them out of earshot, then climbs down and finally opens her eyes, blinking as they adjust.

There’s a group of civilian workers in their work uniforms and reflective vests. Two of the normals are different—soldiers with hardhats. One of them approaches, an officer probably, with a castle patch on his sleeve.

“Aliases and organizations?” he says.

“Orrery,” Bubble volunteers. “Community Guard, Pacific division.”

The officer nods, then looks down at her.

“Mitosis. I’m with Conduit’s team.”

“You two did some great work, keeping these people alive. The air ambulance will be leaving soon, if either of you need transportation.”

“I will walk,” Bubble declares. The giant projects a sphere into the distance, and another into the ground. A shove and a pull is all it takes for Bubble to become airborne, bounding out of the ruins.

“I think I’ll find a truck or something, if that’s okay?” she asks.

The officer holds up a finger, motioning to the phone at his ear.

“Hold on a moment.”

Mitosis shrugs.

If he’s got signal, then… she thinks, reaching for her own phone. It’s a bit difficult, with both her hands on the other side. She nearly drops it, fumbling as she pulls it out of the small pocket sewn into her spandex costume.

“Conduit, this is Warrant Officer Brooks. We’ve found your missing teammate.”

She listens to the officer’s call as her own phone turns on. She can’t quite make out Conduit’s response, but she can tell he’s surprised.

Thanks for the confidence, buddy.

Her phone goes to the lock screen. Even with Conduit’s modifications it’s still a consumer model, and it doesn’t recognize the face she’s wearing. She dries the tip of her tongue with her costume and licks the fingerprint scanner instead, unlocking the phone. She dials Paragon’s number, and selects video call as it rings.

“Hey, it’s meeeee,” she says as the call connects, holding the phone out.

The image is bad. Closer to aliased blobs of color than an actual picture, though she can make out Paragon’s formal mask.

She uses her other left hand to poke a thumb at where her right head was.

“I’m guessing righty didn’t make it?”

The response is garbled. Or, it would be garbled, if Mitosis had been able to make out any words. It sounds more like static run through a blender.

“Hey, uh, the signal’s terrrrrrrrible here, so I’ll try to call again later, okay?”

More blender-static.

“Bye-bye!” she says, and slips the phone back into its pocket.

“Mitosis,” Brooks says, grabbing her attention, “there’s been a change of plan. You’re to be medevaced immediately.”

“Look, bu—uh, Sir, I know this”—she pats the skin covering the hole in her torso, where her shoulder was—“looks pretty bad, but it’s fine.”

“Conduit requested it. He said you’re needed at the hospital.”

Mitosis grimaces.

“Uh, yeah, I don’t need that. I take care of myself.”

“One of your teammates is dying, and she needs your help.”

Alyssa feels enslaved by her nerves as the helicopter approaches the hospital. Every time she quells them, stamping out signals with her power, another urge to fidget rises from her subconscious, another limb starts to tremble.

She steels herself as she steps onto the pavement and walks through the hospital doors. Pungent odors assault her nose, markers of disease and disinfectant. Her vision shifts, narrowing, letting her only see the hall ahead and distant walls.

Just keep walking forward. Just keep walking. Don’t look. Just walk.

Alyssa darts past the elevators and enters the stairwell, climbing three steps at a time despite her gait. She holds the floor and room number in her mind, focusing on them, shoving other thoughts aside.

This floor is busy, commandeered by the trauma center below. She does her best to slip past nurses, patients, and doctors without getting in their way. She doesn’t hesitate to shove her way through, either.

The room is in a quiet area, the isolation wing. Its blinds are shut, obscuring her view. A blast of warm air hits her face as she opens the door, and it resists her attempts to close the door behind her.

Conduit and Paragon are there, in costume—or at least Conduit is. Paragon is wearing her dress mask and a hospital gown, floating a foot above the floor, a metal frame around one leg.

Alyssa bounds over to Cindy and wraps her in a hug, or tries as best as she can with two left arms. It’s a bit awkward; usually her forehead would bump against Cindy’s collarbone. With Cindy floating in the air, Alyssa finds her face pressed against Cindy’s abs instead.

“Oh my god Cindy, I—” She chokes on her words, trying to speak past sobs as pent-up emotion overflows. “Are you okay? What happened?”

Cindy grabs her by the shoulder and gently pushes her away.

“I’m fine, but—”

“What?” Alyssa interrupts. “But—but, your leg, and—and they said you were dying…“

Alyssa shakes her head; it doesn’t make sense. She notices, now, the sound of a heartbeat monitor, beeping quietly, but Cindy doesn’t have any leads on her.

“Look,” Cindy says.

Cindy guides her to turn around, facing a bed occupying the center of the room. Several wires and lines run under the bed sheet, along with a tube. She approaches the bed slowly, cautiously, then folds the sheet back.

“Holy fuck,” Alyssa whispers, her eyes wide.

Her right head lays on the pillow, an oxygen mask on its face. What was her right arm is folded up beside her missing upper ribs, skin-wrapped bones cradling a naked heart. It beats, slower and weaker than it should, but it beats nonetheless.

“How?” she asks, looking at Cindy.

“I found her, and I helped her. She’s been fighting every day, but she’s getting worse. Can you, I don’t know, put the two of you back together? Will that help her?”

Does it matter? she wonders. But she knows that’s not what Cindy wants to hear.

“Yeah, um, gimme a minute.”

Alyssa reaches out and places her hand on what was her right shoulder. Her power makes contact, and she can tell something is wrong. Rampant infection, fever, buildup of waste. There’s something more, something that feels too… real. Her lower left arm, being a creation of her power, feels unreal, temporary. She could dissolve it right now, if she wanted to.

When she had been whole, the same was true of the inner halves of her two heads. Her power is finicky with her brain: it doesn’t let her change it as much as the rest of her, but she has learned to copy it. It was simple, really. Just split her head in two and use each half as a template, filling in what was missing from each.  But now everything feels permanent.

It kind of made sense. She’d lost permanent parts before, and any replacements she grew became permanent. This was the same thing.

Maybe I need to hook-up first.

Alyssa draws on her power. The stub of spinal column that her right head sprouted from is still there, hidden under skin. Alongside the spinal cord is another neural bundle: corpus callosum. It is the structure that links each half of the brain, and to keep both of her heads in sync, she had modified it. Lengthening it when she had bisected herself from the sternum up, keeping the two halves in contact. When she had filled in each half to create two heads she expanded the structure, crossing the pathways to keep the heads in sync while preserving their independence.

With the final ounce of her reserves she pushes that specialized nerve bundle out slowly, layer by layer, wary of the pain. By the end she manages a foot and a half of neurons, more than a bit raw. Taking the end in her lower hand she leans over the bed, guiding it to the matching stump on her right half. Her power lets her draw the skin covering it away, and she connects the nerves together.

She can feel signals propagate. Thoughts enter her mind. Images, words, speech, distorted and dreamlike.

The lights in the room grow unbearably bright, smears with painfully white outlines. The beep of the monitor blurs into a piercing whine.

Alyssa feels her body spasm, and the world goes black.

Waking up is difficult.

Alyssa has dealt with the problem before, of her mind being awake while her body is still asleep. It happened a lot after she got her powers, the sensations of her body rousing her from sleep before the paralysis could fade. She was used to it, now.

It still fucking sucked, though.

By the time she has everything in order and her senses return to normal, or as close to normal as she can get, now, she can feel a large bump swelling up on the back of her head. The neural cord’s end is frayed, burning. She digests it quickly, before the pain becomes too much.

She opens her eyes, finding herself in a chair in the isolation room. Her right half is still in the bed, breathing raggedly through the mask. Cindy and Conduit are still in the room. Conduit is looking at the medical equipment. Cindy has her mask off, her face creased with concern.

“Hey, uhm, what happened? Why does my head hurt?”

They both look at her.

“You, um, you both had a seizure. You fell on the floor, and you dragged her with you,” Cindy says, and Conduit nods.

“You went into cardiac arrest immediately after,” he says, holding up one hand, a spark crossing from palm to thumb. “I revived you both, only for it to happen again. We had to sever your connection.”

“Oh,” Alyssa says. “Shit.”

She stands up, careful, and walks over to the bed.

“Don’t try it again. Please,” Cindy whispers.

Alyssa nods. She wasn’t planning on it, anyway.

She sits down on the edge of the bed, placing a hand on her former half. Like before it has that permanence, forbidding her from dissolving it. Through her power she can feel its thoughts, in a brain that doesn’t quite feel like hers anymore.

That’s why, she realizes. We’re different.

The thought weighs on her, for what it implies, and she follows some of its logic. If her other self’s brain were to die she could probably reabsorb it, unhindered by that separate will. Her power works on the other, and the other already sits so close to the edge. It wouldn’t be hard.

She wouldn’t want to be reduced to this. She would rather die, and they’d been one person, just a few days ago. It would be what her other wanted.

Cindy says something, breaking her from the thought. Alyssa turns to face her.

“What?”

“Um, I said: can you regrow her?” Cindy replies, fidgeting. “I know that everything would be too much, but, you have a reserve, right?”

Alyssa shakes her head.

“I’m out. Spent the last of it while trapped. It’s gonna be a month, maybe a month and a half, until I’m full again. Plus a week or two, to regrow my arm and shoulder,” she answers, looking back at her other.

It would be so easy. Her other wouldn’t suffer. She would be whole again.

But she can see the way Cindy looks at her other. The fear in her eyes. Whatever had happened, whatever Cindy did… It was important.

Recovering from this, though? Her other can’t do it alone. Alyssa would be stuck to her, playing the role of human life support.

“It’s gonna take months, if she even makes it that long. With how sick she is, maybe years…” Alyssa says.

At the same time she can feel that weak heartbeat, how she could stop it with a thought. No one would blame her. They wouldn’t even know.

She turns toward Cindy, and can see a mix of emotions on her best friend’s face. Relief and hope clash with worry, and yet, she wears a small smile.

“But I can help her.”

Now

Plastic discs rattle against plastic cases as Alyssa’s truck goes over a pothole, disturbing the bag of DVDs under her seat and reminding her of the growing knot in her stomach.

She looks up from Cindy’s phone for a moment. Cindy is, of course, driving the truck, gripping the wheel firmly. Left hand at nine o’clock, right at four, with her elbow hovering near the gear shift. The stick moves on its own as they return to speed, cycling to higher gears.

A handful of neurons fire as she watches, the signal cascading through her brain. Specific areas activate: one for language, the other for hearing.

Cheat day, huh?

The quip appears in Alyssa’s head and after brief consideration, she lets it fade away unspoken. The drive hasn’t been quite silent, but it’s been quiet. Another twenty minutes of letting Cindy focus on the road is all she needs to avoid what would be a very unpleasant conversation.

Five minutes of quiet come and go. Alyssa wiggles a bit in the passenger seat, finds it unfit to her liking, kicks off her flip-flops, leans it way, way back, and props her feet up onto the dashboard, sunlight glinting off her pink toenails.

Cindy glances over, first at her feet, and then at her face, frowning. Alyssa smiles and shrugs in response, just as Cindy’s focus returns to the road. Within moments the truck slows down, by about five miles below the speed limit.

A routine swallowing of saliva stimulates the thirty individual strips of tongue lining her esophagus, bombarding her sense of taste with as many flavors of ice cream in quick succession. Each one has had its nerves tweaked to reproduce the sensation of a given flavor, regardless of stimuli, copied from the tongue sitting in her mouth.

As it turns out, mixing thirty flavors together doesn’t really match up to thirty flavors individually, the end result being sweet, cold, and little else. She’ll have to fix that, which will take time. And, since operation ‘distract Cindy by forcing her to drive even safer’ has so resoundingly succeeded, Alyssa now has that time.

It’s an issue of presentation: her other half isn’t really going to get all the mouthfeels of texture or consistency, only a bit of temperature and raw taste. Manually activating each tongue one by one is the simplest solution, but it would be tedious, not to mention jarring for the intended recipient.

She activates the tongues at random, one by one, to remind herself which flavor is where. Cycling through, she gets an idea. A cascade of flavors, each one tapering off into the arrival of the next, some long, drawn out, even blending, with others spiking in suddenly. Like, like… music, really. Mouth music.

Alyssa starts weaving nerves together, stringing them from each strip of taste buds to the next. Working out the best ways to organize the flavors, to blend them. Growing loops of neurons to act as delays, or to sustain stimulus.

So wrapped up in her work, Alyssa only notices the truck leave the highway from the way her stomach shifts on the off-ramp, pulled against the turn by centrifugal force.

She gets more than a little nervous when Cindy apparently misses a turn and pulls into a gas station instead, stopping at a pump.

“I’m going to fill the tank and get a coffee. Do you want anything?”

Phew

“Uh, sure. Slushie?”

Cindy leaves. Alyssa goes back to her work, more or less done already, putting the final touches on and smoothing out any kinks or muscle spasms. She finishes by tying the whole thing to a dead-end nerve, one that can only be activated by her power.

There’s a knock on the window and Alyssa looks up to see Cindy holding her drink. She opens the door to grab it, slurping down a few ounces in the time Cindy takes to walk around the truck.

Cindy gets back into the driver’s seat with one step, where Alyssa would have to practically climb in. The truck starts up with a bit of a sputter, rolls forward through the lot and straight into a parking spot. Cindy engages the hand brake, shuts off the engine, and takes a sip of her coffee.

Drat

“Hey, uh, I think I gotta pee real quick.” Alyssa conjures up the easiest excuse, not a total lie after swallowing half a slushie, grabbing the door handle.

It moves, but the door doesn’t budge.

“Cindy… did you break my car?”

“I’ll fix it when we’re done,” Cindy says with a smile.  “You’ve had nearly an hour to think. Now, we need to talk.”

Fuck

“I, uh, well, ya see…”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t. Please.”

“I tried, okay? This is just… it’s hard.”

“This isn’t about you.” Cindy’s voice rises, briefly. She pauses, shakes her head, and sighs. “I’m sorry, but you can’t avoid this, you’re not the one at risk.”

“I know she’s depressed, Cindy, alright? I can feel her brain. I fuckin’ get it. I tried to help her and she pushed me away, ‘cause of course she would, it’s what I would do. So how am I supposed to do anything about it?”

Cindy’s eyes close, and she takes a few sips of her coffee.

“Alyssa, she… she showed me everything. I know it’s hard, but it’s been a month since I last visited and there’s still so little of her, and—and I promised her that she’d be okay.”

Alyssa notices beads of moisture form around Cindy’s eyes. The knot in her stomach starts to subside.

“What happened?”

“We talked.” Cindy dries her eyes, looking Alyssa in the face. “She’s angry that you have everything she had, and she hates herself for being angry at you.”

“I, uh, I can understand that.”

“She feels like this is her fault, and that guilt has led her to a very dark place. Maybe not enough to want to die, but—she said it would be… better for us, if she hadn’t survived.”

Alyssa knows the mindset, or something close. Her reasons had been different, selfish—

No, not selfish. Self-focused.

It meant she could use her relationships as leverage, use the turmoil and loss she’d leave behind to talk herself away from the unthinkable. But if she saw herself as the burden…

A chill runs up her spine.

“The worst part was when she got mad at me. For visiting you more. I rationalized it, then, and she accepted that. Now I’m thinking about what wasn’t said, and I think she was right.”

“So…” Alyssa cocks her head. “She accused you of treating us as, I dunno, interchangeable?”

Cindy shakes her head.

“Not that. The same. I call you both ‘Alyssa’, and I know which of you is which, but I don’t always have a way to tell who is who. She picked up on that, and I’m worried I’ve somehow validated her darkest thoughts.”

Considering the perspective is… disturbingly easy, and the pieces fall into place.

“That if she dies, we’ll be happier. I’ll get to go home. You’ll still have me.”

“Yeah.” Cindy’s voice wavers, halfway to sobbing. “And I was careless. I led her to think that.”

“No.” Alyssa shakes her head. “You didn’t. I did.”

“But… you weren’t even going to talk to me about this; she wouldn’t have talked to you.”

“It’s, uh…” Alyssa looks down and fidgets as the knot reclaims her stomach. “It’s complicated. Um, Cindy, you’re going have to promise you won’t get mad at me, okay?”

“Okay,” Cindy says quietly.

“If you hadn’t been there, at the hospital, I think I would’ve killed her.”

Silence follows.

She looks up at Cindy’s face, expecting sadness, repressed anger, or something like that. Instead she is greeted by wide-eyed shock, and… fear?

“What?” The word is a rasped whisper, breathless.

“I was down two arms, a shoulder, half a lung, and all the gunk I’d need to grow them back. She had all I needed, and was kinda dead already. But you saw something in her that I didn’t, and I realized it’s the same thing you saw in me when I was at my worst.”

She pauses to let Cindy speak, and is met with a slow nod.

“And, um… I felt like, if I killed her, then all the bad things I’ve thought about myself would be true.”

Cindy takes a deep breath, releasing it slowly.

“Okay, that’s—that’s a relief. We have to figure out how to help her, with this.”

“I don’t think we can. Not until she gets better.”

“Will she?” Cindy says. “I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but from what she showed me… it’s like she hasn’t made any progress since last month. I know this is a, um, unique situation, but your power is usually pretty fast, I thought.”

“Well, yeah, if I could just grow her back to size she’d be up and walking around”—Alyssa draws on her power for a second, testing its response—“sometime last week. But it’s complicated.

“That’s what we tried to do during month one, but, it didn’t really work out that well. She didn’t have her own immune system until this week, so every bit of new growth just got infected, or went cancerous when I wasn’t watching. I got her to where she is now and then spent the rest of the month fighting to keep her from going septic, or worse. And as you can see―”

Alyssa gestures at herself, running her hands down her sides. At one hundred and five pounds, she’s fifteen short of her usual, sans-reservoir weight. Not exactly gaunt, given how short she is, but with her power it’s not a good margin.

“―that really did a number on my curves.”

Alyssa half-forces a laugh, and Cindy giggles a little.

“Anyway, um, after that it was just laying groundwork. Switching from a blood-based link to a placental one, making her more self-sufficient, that kinda stuff.”

“Can she get back on track, then?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t like it when I do things for her, like, growing things, but everything she does is slow, or she messes it up somehow and has to start over. I’ve had some ideas, but she doesn’t want to hear them. We tried some when it was too early, and now she thinks it’ll all get fucked up if we try again.”

She thinks for a moment, considering what was said earlier.

“She listens to you, Cindy. Maybe, uh, I come up with a plan, and you sell it to her?”

“No.” Cindy shakes her head. “I’ll help with the plan, if I can. I’ll give you advice. But you need to talk to her, alright?”

Alyssa resists the urge to squirm as her stomach feels like it’s trying to turn itself inside-out, channeling the desire into a drawn-out sigh instead.

“Ooooookay, fine.”

Nausea lingers in her gut; she manages to quell some of it, quieting nerves until only the psychic aspect remains. With the feeling diminished, a new nuisance presents itself—sputtering signals from a lower organ.

Suspicious, she shakes her slushie and finds it empty.

Guess I wasn’t lying.

“Uhhhh… Cindy, I really gotta pee.”

She pulls at the door handle to emphasize her point.

“Oh, right. Here.”

Alyssa leans back to let Cindy reach over. She can hear metal move within the door for a moment before Cindy pulls on the handle, only for nothing to happen. She gives Cindy an accusing look.

“I could swear I put that screw back,” Cindy mutters.

“Cindy…”

The door appears to pop open on its own as Cindy smiles nervously.

“It’ll work when you get back. Promise.”

“It better,” Alyssa growls as she hops out of the truck, “or you’re doing all the talking.”

Then

The ground shakes. A tower in the distance tilts, its facade falling off, glass and metal glinting in the air. It reaches the point of no return, collapsing as its structure fails.

The soldier screams; loud, sudden, short. A wordless shout. Cynthia snaps her head around to look, closing her helmet to hide her face. The woman’s brow is furrowed, her expression stern.

“There’s gaps in the rubble, sinkholes nearby. Won’t hold up long. Paragon, can you get yourself out of here?”

“I can fly, but I don’t want to leave anyone behind.”

“How many were in the building with you? Any civilians?”

It takes her a moment to process the question, to realize what the soldier meant.

“Five. Um, I went to search the basement. Mitosis was with a team clearing the middle levels. Orrery, and, um, three others, I can’t remember. I didn’t find anyone, but—”

She feels the ground give way, falling as a sinkhole opens up. She catches herself with her power, dropping only a foot or two. The soldier hovers nearby, unphased, surrounded by a crackling maelstrom.

“Go. I’ll handle this.”

Cynthia clutches Alyssa tightly, holding her to the flat of her breastplate. Her power projects from within, permeating her flesh, the steel shell she wears. With Alyssa reduced to so little, and held so closely, Cynthia’s power manages to contain her too.

Gravity pulls on her. Not a single force, but a distribution. A field. Her power maintains a matching one: identical geometry, opposite vector. The sum is weightlessness. She creates another field on top of the first. The same volume, containing her body, her armor, and Alyssa. It faces up at an angle, directed towards safety. She adds magnitude in small, gentle steps, and the ground accelerates away.

Cynthia knows, logically, that her power’s force is uniform. That she could push hard enough to lift a car and feel none of it, save for the air whipping past. But she can feel Alyssa through the field, with a thin, reedy heartbeat and labored breathing. It compels her to be careful.

A shattered city fills her vision. Collapsed and toppled buildings. Shelves of earth, where the ground had caved in. Cynthia scans the landscape as she flies, orienting herself. Ruins give way to intact districts, streets choked with cars.

She feels blood pool around her injured leg. Her field contains it inside her armor, forces pointing inward. It stops further bleeding, yet she still feels lightheaded, even in flight.

A highrise catches her attention, tents and vehicles clustered around its base. The hospital.

She closes in, careful to keep the right altitude. The choppy wake of a helicopter buffets her as it passes above, heading back into the chaos. Others swarm the skies, joined by a few flying heroes.

Cynthia uses her power to throw a switch in her helmet, activating her radio.

“This is… Um,” she starts, “Paragon. I forgot my callsign. Requesting medical attention.”

“Number of injured?”

“Two, including me.”

“Severity?”

“My teammate, um, she just needs supportive care. I think—”

Cynthia coughs, spitting up a glob of blood. She can feel it collect in her nose from several bleeds, sliding into her throat when she moves. There are cuts on her arms, minor. Her ribs ache—bruised in the collapse. Her attention moves downward. Abdomen, some cuts, otherwise fine. Hips, fine. Left leg, bruised, beaten, sore, but fine. Right leg…

Several breaks. Splinters and chips of bone driven through muscle. Sundered armor cutting into flesh.

The awareness spreads. Her leg, numb until now, begins to throb with a deep, overwhelming pain.

Her focus falters, and with it, her power. Blood leaks from her wounds. She barely manages to keep herself in the air.

“—I think I’m bleeding out.”

“Can you land by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Pad 5. A trauma team will meet you there.”

Cynthia spots the ‘landing pad’, little more than markings spray-painted on blacktop, a clearing in the tent cluster. She sets her power to drift towards it, focusing more on controlling the bleeding. Once above the pad she lets gravity exert some pull.

The descent is slow, like falling on the moon. It doesn’t take much to stop, and she sets down gently, weight on her good leg. She uses her field to check Alyssa’s heartbeat. Still weak, but not weaker.

Her vision is narrow, blurred. She can hear casters on asphalt, rolling towards her. She turns around. Doctors or nurses in scrubs—she can’t read their name tags to be sure. One pushes a stretcher.

The tallest, a man, starts talking. Cynthia can barely make out the words.

Remove

She picks one out. Remove what? Her armor? Her helmet?

“No, no.” She shakes her head.

Cynthia holds Alyssa out, gently.

“Please help her. Help her first.”

A few of the medics’ eyes go wide. She can imagine shocked faces beneath the surgical masks. One, a woman who kept her composure, approaches. Cynthia hands Alyssa off.

“Thank you.”

The man repeats himself, pointing at her leg.

Oh

Cynthia exerts her power, peeling the armor plates from her leg, letting them fall to the ground. Blood follows, dark on the asphalt.

She picks herself up with her power, rotating her body, placing herself on the stretcher, unprompted. She lets her power fade. Metal whines under the load, but holds.

The world moves around her, blurred. Her legs elevate, and she begins to regain some clarity. She hears the doctors talking, and feels a tool in the space near her leg.

“…have to cut…“

Instinctively she pushes out with her field. The doctor’s hand isn’t affected, but the tool is, moving both away.

“Don’t amputate. I—I need—”

The man’s face enters her vision. His mask is pulled down.

“It’s alright. We just need to cut the cloth. The undersuit you’re wearing.”

Oh, she thinks again.

“O—Okay. Sorry.”

“We need to give you an IV. Can you take off what’s on your arms?”

Her field flickers, creating small forces inside her armor. Interlocks disengage and her armor separates at the shoulders, the plates on her arms unfolding. The clothing beneath is bloodstained, but dry.

Scissors press against her skin, cutting fabric free. Needles sting as they slide into veins.

Her leg rotates as the doctor works at what remains of her undersuit. Fractured bones grind together, sharp edges cut into muscle fibers.

Cynthia locks her jaw with her power. She screams regardless, but the sound is muffled, dampened. She manages to look at her leg: deep gashes, some down to the bone. Skin that is black and purple, slick with blood. 

She loses focus. Tents and vehicles morph into white hallways clustered with beds, fluorescent ceiling replaces sunlit sky. Patients moan in pain, children scream and cry.

The stretcher passes through a set of double doors. The chaos of the hospital quiets, muted.

“Paragon, you’re in the operating room, okay? We need to get you on the table. Can you take off your armor?”

Clicks of metal-on-metal echo through the room as Cynthia unlocks her cuirass, splitting it into parts. Her gorget disconnects from the base of her helmet, folding down into the armor.

“Careful,” she says, “it’s heavy.”

“How heavy?”

“Breastplate and front are, um, about a hundred pounds.”

The doctor nods. Cynthia can hear wheels on the floor—probably a lift.

“I need you to take off your helmet, too. You’re going to be anesthetized, and we need to be able to get to your airway.”

Cynthia shakes her head. Difficult, with her helmet at its full weight.

“I can’t. You—You’ll see my face.”

“If we’re going to have a chance of saving your leg, we need to start surgery now.”

Fuck

Her helmet unfolds, loose enough to be removed from her head.

Someone lifts her helmet off. She squints, blinded by the room’s lighting.

A rubber mask moves over her mouth. She hears a woman’s voice.

“Relax. Count down from ten.”

Ten

Nine

Eight

Se-

A metal frame surrounds her leg. Pins and rods spear through her skin, passing between injured muscles, screws securing them to bone.

It makes Cynthia nervous, looking at it, feeling it. Worries of muscle damage, of scars.

Her right leg had always been slightly shorter than its counterpart, but the way it had been crushed left gaps after reduction. The frame holds the pieces in place, in hopes the bones will heal to their original length. If she is lucky, perhaps they can lengthen it just that little bit.

She pulls her mask out of the way, rubbing at her eyes. The painkillers make her drowsy, but not tired. She catches her reflection in a monitor screen and uses it to adjust her mask. It resembles her helmet, a hybrid of angles and aerodynamic curves, coming to a point at the tip of her nose. It hides her face above her cheekbones, her eyes behind silvered panels. A sky-blue arrow dominates the facade, split down the middle by a white stripe. The design is derived from notation, symbolic of the vectors that describe her power. Her light blonde hair flows from underneath the mask’s cranial dome, sprawling over her shoulders and back, the longest strands reaching the tips of her shoulder blades.

There is a knock on the door, and Cynthia tenses. She moves the bedsheet quickly, covering her leg.

Her phone buzzes—long, short, long, short—and she relaxes.

“Come in.”

A man in costume enters. Taller than average, though an inch shorter than Cynthia. His costume is composed of onyx plating atop a black bodysuit, bronze circuit traces placed strategically, a lightning bolt emblazoned on the left of his chest, framed by circuitry. He turns around to close the door, and she can see an array of bronze cylinders protruding from the back of his chestpiece, capped in black. His helmet matches the aesthetic, a sleek dome that sweeps back, dominated by a bronze faceplate. Bits of dust cling to the edges of plates, dirt buried in the gaps.

He puts both hands on his helmet.

Cynthia raises a hand, one finger out, and shakes her head.

“I was hoping we could speak face to face,” Conduit says.

“I’d like to, but…” Cynthia wrings her hands, mulling over her words. “It’s just, the nurses knock, but they don’t wait.”

Conduit nods. He takes a step back, placing a hand on the door’s RFID scanner. The green light on it flashes orange twice, then settles at red.

“They won’t notice?”

Conduit shakes his head and takes his helmet off, clipping it to a hook on his belt. His face is worn, sporting a few days’ worth of five-o’clock shadow, and his short black hair is slick with sweat.

“This”—he points to a wound near his temple, held shut by several stitches—“kept me cooped up here until this morning. I occupied myself by helping the hospital with their technical problems. I know their system better than they do, now.”

Cynthia lifts her mask off, setting it on her lap.

“Are you okay?”

Aaron nods. “Minor concussion. It scrambled a few circuits, but I’m functional.”

He pulls a chair over and sits down. Despite his costume his posture is small, guilty.

“I am sorry that I didn’t come to see you sooner. The energy grid is still a work in progress, and when they cleared me for duty this morning, we had the chance to get one of the main substations online. It took longer than I thought it would.”

“It’s alright,” Cynthia says. “I’ve been a bit… loopy, since my last surgery. They’re short on opioids, so I’ve been on morphine. Takes some getting used to.”

“How is Alyssa faring? I attempted to see her, but she’s in isolation, and I couldn’t locate her doctor.”

“She is? Finally.”

“Finally?” Aaron asks.

Cynthia inhales deeply, then exhales slowly.

“They didn’t want to treat her, just give her palliative care. ‘Injuries incompatible with life’ or some… some bullshit like that. I said some things that I’m not proud of. I might’ve hurt our reputation. Sorry.”

He shakes his head. “Don’t be. I should have been there to support both of you, but there was—and is—a lot of work that has to be done.”

Aaron breaks eye contact, for a moment.

“Is she recovering?” he asks.

“I hope so,” Cynthia replies with a shrug. “I managed to speak with her before my surgery, which was… two days ago, I think? She wasn’t all there, not really. She has a real heart now, but she was struggling to stay awake. Her nurses told me that they’d let me know if anything changed, and I haven’t heard anything. I hope that’s good, but I’m worried she’s gotten worse.”

“I might be able to check the hospital’s records, if you’d like. They won’t notice.”

“I don’t know…” Cynthia trails off, hesitant to answer. It feels wrong.

Not knowing feels worse.

“Don’t look at anything private. Maybe just what’s been sent to her room? Medication?”

“Sure.”

Aaron’s eyes move slightly, resting parallel to each other. After a minute they refocus on her.

“Saline, dialysis solutions, intravenous nutrition. A ventilator. There’s a request for a liver support device, as of yesterday.”

Her heart sinks.

“Alyssa said she was working on a liver. I guess—I guess she failed.” Cynthia feels a wetness in her eye, and pauses to wipe the tear away. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. I, just—God, what have I done?”

“Cynthia, it’s not your fault.”

“She’s in pain, Aaron, and if she dies here, she’ll die alone and afraid. I’m responsible for that.”

Aaron shakes his head. “No. She asked you to help her, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“She trusted you, and the best thing you can do is extend the same trust to her.”

Cynthia lets out a deep sigh.

“I know, it’s just, when we talked, Alyssa told me she was working with scraps. I barely recognized her. It would be easier, if I knew she had what she needs.”

“I spoke to one of the rescue crews this morning. They were heading over to excavate the financial plaza and search for survivors. I understand it’s a long shot by now, but I asked them to keep an eye out for any bodies matching her description.”

“Let me know, if you get something?”

“Of course,” Aaron says with a nod.

A moment passes. Cynthia dries her face with a tissue, and then fiddles with her mask, examining how the room’s light falls on it. Unlike her helmet the surface is more diffuse, the edges rounded slightly. Lines that start with curves, a form that is smaller overall, easy on the eyes.

“Thanks, Aaron. It’s been hard, sitting here. I just feel so… useless.”

“Actually, I might have a project you can help with. Give me a moment.”

She sees Aaron remove an object from a compartment on his belt out of the corner of her eye. Cynthia looks over—a phone, consumer model. He holds it out to her.

“What is this?” she asks.

“One of the department head’s phones. Cardiology, I believe? He dropped it, and now the display doesn’t function properly.”

“It seems fine to me.”

“I probed it. There’s a chip loose on the board. Specifically, the graphics processor. I’m honestly surprised it boots.”

Cynthia takes the phone, weighing it in her hand. Within moments her power penetrates it: the phone feels like a part of her, on some level, like everything else in her power’s half-foot range. She sends pulses through it, small forces that probe the device, mapping it in her mind. Something rattles inside, bits of solder that had been worked from their pads. The spatial image feels fuzzy, and it starts to slip as she tries to make out the details.

“If you can seperate the solder from the chip and the board, I should be able to heat it.”

Cynthia shakes her head. “I don’t know. I might break it.”

“Here, I’ll get it opened up.”

She can feel his hand as it enters her field, as her power soaks through the fabric of his glove, slowing, but not stopping, at his skin beneath. He picks up the phone, turning it over with his hand.

The room flips upside-down. Acid burns Cynthia’s throat as she barely holds back vomit, and she scrambles to find something to hold onto, one hand clutching the bed’s railing, the other wrapping around Aaron’s wrist.

“Are you alright?”

“I—” She pauses, letting her heart settle. “Give me a moment.”

Cynthia lets go of Aaron’s wrist, resting her arm on the bed. She closes her eyes, waiting for gravity to return to normal.

“Can I help?”

“Water. Please.”

She holds out her hand in anticipation, wasting no time once the bottle is in her grasp. Water sitting in her mouth and flowing down her throat helps reorient her as much as it helps wash the acid away.

“Thanks.” She blinks, opening her eyes cautiously. “That—that was… something.”

“That wasn’t the morphine, was it?”

“It was making me dizzy, earlier. I used my power to try and ground myself, like when I’m flying. The phone felt a bit fuzzy, so I focused on it, and then when you moved it… I felt like I was falling.”

“My apologies.”

Cynthia shakes her head, taking one last swig from the water bottle, placing it on the nightstand.

“It’s not your fault. But I don’t think I should be messing around with my power right now. Sorry.”

Aaron nods.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Keep me company, for a bit? Talking’s nice, but―” Cynthia yawns, briefly interrupting herself. “But I’ve had my mask on for a few days, now. It’s hard to get a good rest while wearing it.”

Concern crosses Aaron’s face, for a moment. Cynthia ignores it.

“If you decide to leave while I’m out, could you wake me, so I can put it back on?”

“Naturally,” he says.

“Thanks.”

She closes her eyes, and lets the world slip away.

Cynthia’s eyes open slowly, adjusting. The windows are dark, the room dim. She looks around: the door lock is still engaged; Aaron is still sitting in the chair, his head supported by one arm. She glances at the clock—five hours have passed.

Aaron appears to be sleeping, though Cynthia knows better.

“You didn’t have to stay this long,” she says.

His posture straightens as he lifts his head up, putting his hands in his lap.

“It’s quiet here, and I decided it made a good opportunity for some programming.” He smiles, and taps the wound on his temple. “Already patched up the bluetooth controller.”

“No news?”

His smile fades, and he shakes his head.

“Nothing. I spent some time getting caught up, though. Sent a few dozen emails. I’m talking with teams neighboring ours, seeing if they can cover our jurisdiction while we get back on our feet. How long is your recovery time?”

“For the leg? Um, two months, if I’m lucky. Three or four is more likely.”

“Hm.” He hums for a moment. “I’ll have to put in extra hours, even with cover from other teams. I could pull some favors, but then we’d owe them once you’re back in action.”

Cynthia shakes her head.

“Aaron, I’m not—I’m done.”

“Done?”

“With this.”

Aaron’s expression darkens. Bits of confusion. Hurt.

She expects him to say something; he doesn’t.

“I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you differently, somehow, I don’t know.”

Aaron mutters something, too quiet for Cynthia to make out, shaking his head.

“I’m aware of how important it is, for you to keep this separate from your civilian life, and I know that’s been difficult at times. But I’ve always been mindful of that,” he says.

“Aaron, the past few days have been… a lot. When I pulled myself out of the ruins of the bank, when I found Alyssa, it was a soldier who reached us first. One with powers. The way she acted… she expected me to act like a soldier, because of what I am. We’re civilians, Aaron. Just like the police are. Having powers doesn’t make us soldiers.”

“I never asked for you to be one.”

Cynthia nods.

“No, you didn’t. That’s why I agreed to be on your team. Because you weren’t just about the fights, or defeating supervillains. You were there for the aftermath and the interim. Working on infrastructure. Contributing.”

She pauses, letting her words sink in.

“And I loved doing that. And I’d love to say that this past year and a half has been fun, but, I can’t help but think of all the close calls. I’ve fought people who could turn me into a bloody pulp on the ground, if it weren’t for my armor. I’ve been shot at. I’ve been shot. And now? I might never walk naturally again. My best friend, who I’ve known since before I could read, might be fighting a losing battle. If I brush this off as yet another close call, what happens next? When do I draw the line? When I lose an arm? An eye?”

The plates of Aaron’s armor rise as he inhales, letting the breath out in a long sigh.

“I’m sorry, Cynthia. I started the team out of hope that we could change things. I suppose that was naive.”

“It’s not your fault. This… It just made me realize that this, being a hero, it’s not a future. Not for me. I need something reliable. Something constructive. Maybe once I have that, I’ll reconsider. But I can’t risk everything, not for this.”

“I understand,” he says, quietly, “it’s something I wish I understood a few years ago. I’ll get your retirement papers in order.”

“Thank you. I’m transferring to another hospital, soon. Maybe I’ll be stable enough to be flown home. If I don’t see you before that happens, then, I guess I’ll see you on campus?”

He nods, then puts his helmet on. “Naturally. I’ll keep in touch.”

Conduit moves towards the door. He reaches out to the RFID sensor, then stops. His hand moves to the side of his helmet. Cynthia can make out the sound of a radio speaker, the words unintelligible.

“You found her body?”

Cynthia’s heart skips a beat. She has to fight the urge to stand.

“Hold on, hold on, what do you mean, you found her?”

Cynthia opens her mouth to speak. Before she can, her phone starts to ring. She grabs it—a video call. She frantically pulls her mask on, and answers.

The footage is distorted, partly pixelated, but Cynthia can fill in the details.

A girl’s face is on the screen, with red hair and light blue eyes, wearing a pink domino mask. Mitosis’s face, derived from Alyssa’s, courtesy of powers. The shot excludes most of her body, but enough is visible. Her head is offset to the left, a patch of scar tissue covers where the right of her rib cage would be, tattered fabric of her costume lining the wound.

“Hey, it’s meeeee.”

A hand enters the shot, a few pixels that must be a thumb point to where a second head should be.

“I’m guessing righty didn’t make it?”

Now

“That will be three-ninety-nine, please.”

Cynthia reaches into her pocket, or tries to. She can’t just drop the crutch, so she attempts to reach through it, but it converges just where her hand needs to go. She shifts her weight onto her left crutch and leg, giving her the room to twist the right one around and finally grab her wallet. A bit too late; she can feel the line growing behind her.

Of all the times to not have a purse.

“Sorry,” she says, handing the kid a few dollars.

“It’s no problem, ma’am.”

Cynthia hurriedly shoves her wallet back into its pocket and retreats to the pick-up counter. It’s not far, a few paces at most, but the crutches make her movement awkward, her hips tilting left to keep her right leg from bearing any load. With her power she could float, or even walk. All she’d need is to mimic the forces on her left leg, transpose them to her right, and cancel the load as her weight settled on each leg. There’d be imperfections, little differences thanks to asymmetry, but nothing harmful. No one would notice.

She uses the crutches anyway.

Alyssa is somehow still at the window, arms crossed over the countertop and her head resting atop them. She glances at Cynthia, then returns to gazing through the window.

“What exactly did you order?”

“Just a tiny little treat,” Alyssa says, licking her lip.

“There were five people between us in line.”

“Well, she dropped the first one. I told her I could wait, since you weren’t here yet.”

Cynthia puts her crutches out, letting her lean down to peek through the window. She sees a teenage girl carefully place the finishing scoop on top of a waffle cone, already stacked high with what looks like half the flavors on the menu. A matching technicolor smear of melted dairy product adorns the teenager’s uniform. Cynthia expects the girl to bring the finished cone to the window. Instead, she puts it aside and gets a second waffle cone, filling it with scoops from the next row of freezers.

“Jesus, Alyssa.”

“Cindy, I haven’t had real ice cream for two damn months. I’m sick of that—that fuckin’ colored ice at the hospital.”

“How much did you order?”

“One of each.”

“You ordered… what, thirty scoops of ice cream?” Cynthia asks, shaking her head. “I can’t believe they let you.”

“They weren’t going to, but General Grant paid a visit to their tip jar and said a few words in my favor.”

Cynthia refrains from commenting. She knows Alyssa’s extremes, but this is a new dimension of excess.

“Oh mama, here it comes,” Alyssa says, picking herself up off the counter, visibly biting her lower lip.

The girl appears in the window, carefully passing the waffle cones through. She holds one out to Cynthia.

Cynthia waves it away.

“Um, sorry, I got the medium rocky road.”

At the same time Alyssa reaches out and grabs the second cone, fast enough that the girl jumps a little.

“That’s mine, thanks.”

A second girl arrives next to the first, holding out a sugar cone with two scoops. Cynthia holds her hand out, then hesitates.

“Hey, um, could I have that in a cup?”

“Sure thing!”

The girl pulls the cone back, flips it into a paper cup and adds a plastic spoon, then holds it back out. Cynthia leans in to take her order, then notices the second girl’s customer service cheer has vanished and been replaced by mild horror, eyes focused on Alyssa. She can make out bits of whispered conversation: ‘Holy crap’ followed by ‘I told you.’

“Girls, it’s fine, I’m eating for two,” Alyssa says through a smirk, jabbing an elbow in Cynthia’s direction. “All thanks to her, too.”

Cynthia feels her face flush as the two teenagers laugh nervously.

“How about we go sit over there?” she says, pointing towards a table. It’s in the shade, and more importantly, it’s far away from here.

She starts to crutch away, only to realize a problem. She can’t grip the crutch and hold onto her ice cream with the same hand.

“You uh, need some help there, Cindy?”

“Nope. Nope. I’ve got it.”

She brings the cup to her mouth, grabs it firmly between her teeth, and then sets off towards the table in earnest.

The air is cooler than she expected, though it does little to dull the sun’s heat. Not enough to make her sweat, even with her wearing jeans, a button-down, and undershirt, but enough to make her uncomfortable. It’s worse for her leg, the brace pinching where her jeans bunch up around it, jarring little movements that propagate through her bones as fabric catches on the ends of fixation wires sticking out of her skin.

Wires weren’t advised for someone of her age; they would hold the bones in place, but not support weight well. Still, Cynthia had insisted on them, because they weren’t permanent. The request had perplexed her doctors; with a well done procedure, internal fixation felt no different. And maybe she wouldn’t have felt it. But her power would.

A few extra months on crutches were worth avoiding that lifetime nuisance.

Cynthia takes care sitting down at the table, easing herself into the chair, letting her good leg bear the load. She then starts on her ice cream, savoring the frozen treat.

Alyssa has stuck one of her waffle cones into one of the gaps in the table’s surface, and is engaged in consuming the other in half-scoop bites, wielding the cone in both hands as she works her way through it.

“Could you not do that again?”

“Do whath?”

“Make jokes like that.”

“C’mon, Cindy,” Alyssa says, shrugging, “it’s not like I said something wrong.”

Cynthia sighs, then frowns.

“Everything I said was totally, one-hundred-percent-true. Whatever those little shits make of it is their problem.”

“You knew exactly what you implied, Alyssa, and you included me in it.”

“Yeah, like, that’s the point. It’s true, but what they think is so obviously ridiculous. You shoulda seen the looks on their faces.”

Cynthia shakes her head and returns to her ice cream. Between her measured pace and Alyssa’s one-scoop-is-bitesize approach, she manages to finish just as Alyssa is licking the remnants out of her first cone.

A mischievous idea occurs to her: a little bit of payback. She smiles as she reaches over and grabs Alyssa’s second ice cream.

“Hey!” Alyssa says, futilely groping for the cone as Cynthia pulls it past her friend’s reach. “Cindy, what the fuck?” 

“You made a joke at my expense, I’m just taking my due.”

To Cynthia’s surprise Alyssa clambers onto the table, following the cone. The table bends under the load, yet holds as Alyssa crawls across it. Cynthia swings her arm out, getting the waffle cone well outside Alyssa’s reach, and uses her free hand to grab Alyssa’s forehead.

“Give!” Alyssa mutters as she tries to push forward, throwing her hands out in a futile attempt to grab for the ice cream. Cynthia pushes back in return, hooking her good leg around the table’s central support for leverage. 

“You already had yours, Cindy!”

“And do you really need another fifteen scoops?”

“It’s not just mine, it’s hers.”

Cynthia relaxes her grip, and brings the waffle cone a bit closer. Alyssa takes the chance to get off the table, but she doesn’t grab for the cone.

“She can’t eat.”

“I told her I’d remember a flavor for her, but she couldn’t pick one out. So I figured, I’d remember all of them.”

“Alright. Here,” she says, handing the cone over. “Just, don’t make me the butt of a joke, okay?”

“I’m sorry, Cindy, it’s just, I dunno.” Alyssa pauses as she sits down, slumping a bit. “I’m kinda going through a lot, ya know?”

Cynthia nods, silent in spite of herself—now isn’t the time to pry.

“So, uh, how’s the leg?” Alyssa asks, pointing.

Cynthia blinks, taking a moment to process the sudden deja vu.

“Hello? Earth to Cindy?”

“Um, sorry. I just—I’m pretty sure she asked me that exact question.”

“Damn…” Alyssa mutters, taking a few more bites of her ice cream. “Guess we are identical, huh?” 

“You aren’t, and I’m really thankful for that.”

“Aw, c’mon Cindy, I’m not that bad.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Alyssa makes a face.

“She’s not bad, either, it’s just… God, I hate to bring this up now, but she’s not in a good place.”

“I could kinda feel it,” Alyssa says, nodding slowly.

“Has she talked to you about it?”

“Nah. We, uh, we don’t really talk much. Or we haven’t in the past, like, month.”

“Wait, you haven’t talked with her in a month?”

“I mean, we’ve had like, smalltalk and shit. What she wants me to eat, or when she wants a shower. Normal kinda stuff, but nothing like, deep.”

“How was she, emotionally?”

“She kinda… wasn’t. Like, she’s depressed. Which, like, duh. She was kinda chipper last night, though. She was really looking forward to seeing you, and having some time to herself.”

“That’s…” Cynthia trails off, pieces coming together. “…Oh my god.”

She scrambles for her phone, going for her right pocket. Except, it’s not there, because the brace is in the way.

“Whoa, Cindy, what?”

She finally pulls her phone out, rushing to unlock it.

“Hey! Cindy, wait!”

Her thumb hovers over the call button.

“Alyssa, I left her alone. She told me she’d rather be dead and I fucking left her alone!”

“Look, I know you probably know her better than I do, but I’ve learned a lot about myself these past two months, and if you call her, she’s going to be really upset.”

“I—I know, but, if she did something, and I just let it happen…”

“Cindy, you’re her emergency contact. If anything happened, you’d get a call. Have you?”

Cynthia looks back at her phone—no missed calls, no messages.

“No.”

“Then just trust her. And I know how ridiculous that probably sounds coming from me, but—”

“Last time I trusted you in a situation like this, you almost jumped off a bridge.”

“Yeah, almost. And, like, I totally would’ve survived that jump.”

“This is serious, Alyssa.”

“I know, I know, but what am I supposed to do? This hasn’t been easy for me, either. It’s been a huge mind fuck. Like, balls deep in the graymatter. And right now I just want to hang out and forget about all that shit for a while. Is that too much?”

“I’m sorry,” Cynthia says, cradling her head in her hands for a moment, “I’m worried.”

“Look, how ‘bout when we’re done here, we’ll get some movies for the three of us, and I can think about this stuff and we can talk on the way back. Okay?”

Cynthia looks at her phone, Alyssa’s contact still open. She hesitates, then puts it away.

“You promise?”

“Promise.”

Alyssa opens her mouth, hoping to scream, cry, breathe. Blood trickles from her lips without so much as a gurgle, the air in her mouth and throat stale, metallic. Nerve bundles in her neck send out frantic pulses and yet she chokes, the fog in her brain pierced by the burning in her lungs. She hauls on the nerves, magnifying their signal, following it through. The wave reaches her chest, muscles contracting and relaxing in concert.

Her effort bears the sickly squelch of flesh sliding apart, leaving a void between her ribs. The fog thickens.

She struggles to sit up, pain shooting through her mangled left side as muscles pull inward, catching on jagged bone. Her right arm burns as it tries to obey, the muscles within torn from strain. Her eyes flutter open, slow to adjust. Ruins surround her, a cloud of dust settling among them. The muscles in her neck protest as she directs them, wrenching her head upright, chin against sternum.

Half a lung sits before her, soaking in a pool of blood amidst rubble. A gruesome wound bounds her body, splintered ribs jut out from shredded flesh on her right side, the cut arching up across her sternum and out through a once-fused clavicle, tattered fabric sticking to the edges of her torn skin. Alyssa’s eyes close, and her head hits the ground.

Other sounds reach her now: sirens, shouting. She shuts them out, focusing on her power. Blood blankets her immediate surroundings, tendrils wicking through the rock and dust beneath her. She draws on it, feeling the cells dissolve, directing severed vessels and veins to close in exchange. Not enough.

Anyone else would be dead, even with her power. She has backups, redundancies, failsafes. Muscles lining major vessels, supplementing flow; valves that close in the event of injury; vacuoles packed with oxygen. Enough to keep her alive if shot in the heart, or to stave off blood loss. She even planned for decapitation, but not like this.

Alyssa’s focus wavers and chaos greets her ears, almost deafening. Moments pass as her hearing adjusts, voices emerging from the cacophony. One stands out, barking orders over the noise, bombarding her eardrums. The pile of rubble shifts, and Alyssa manages to turn her head to look. An armor-clad woman emerges about a dozen yards away, scrapes and gashes marring white and blue paint atop once-polished steel.  The woman’s faceplate clatters against the ground as she rolls onto her back, gasping for air.

Alyssa’s eyes widen. The muscles of her throat work, desperate to speak, futile as it may be.

Cindy. Help.

Cindy’s breathing relaxes, and she gets to her feet with a motion halfway between standing and rotating upright. Sunlight glints off her helmet as she looks around, eyes obscured behind a silver visor. After what feels like an eternity, her gaze lands on Alyssa.

“…Oh my god.”

Her first steps are halting, favoring one leg, before she breaks out into a full run. She stops abruptly at the blood puddle’s edge, as if briefly pinned in place, then drops to her knees.

Steel gauntlets take hold of Alyssa’s face, cool on her skin, and gently rotate her head. Tears flow from beneath the visor, and Alyssa tries to imagine the eyes that shed them.

“I’m so sorry. I—Oh god, Alyssa, I’m sorry.”

Alyssa tries to form words, and fails. With the last of her strength, she manages a nod. Not acceptance. Understanding, forgiveness.

“Oh fuck. Oh my god. You’re still alive. Oh god. Um, okay, hold on. I’m here. Um. Don’t panic.”

Cindy brings a hand to her helmet. Alyssa can hear the buzz of radio static.

“Come on. Come on. Get through.”

A masculine voice answers, but she can’t make out the words.

“Conduit, it’s Paragon. I need help. Mitosis is injured. Badly. We’re at the financial building, what’s left of it.”

“Understood. Keep her stable. The situation’s gotten out of hand, it’s hard to track down resources at the moment.”

“Stable? She’s dying! I can’t—”

The radio buzzes, then shuts off. Cindy pulls her hands away, briefly clenching them into fists. She places one on the side of Alyssa’s ribs, below the armpit. The other on the side of her head. The lines of her face harden in focus, determination.

Alyssa feels a pulse from each hand, a ripple through her flesh and bones, and then… weightlessness, slowly rising into the air as Cindy stands.

A knife floats out of a compartment on Paragon’s armor, hovering between them.

“Alyssa. This is going to fucking hurt.”

The blade slips beneath her vision, cutting into the seal formed across her severed aortic arch. It darts out and back, opening what’s left of her vena cava. She expects blood to gush out; instead, it flows, and the fog clears.

Pain floods Alyssa’s body as dying nerves are revitalized, her face twisting and contorting, denied the release of screaming. She seizes the nerves at their stem and severs them; pain will distract, and this miracle might give her seconds at best.

Then she feels it: a ribbon of blood unraveling into countless threads, weaving together as they return, guided through the air by an unseen force, untouched by dirt or dust. The same force picks up her lung, gently returning it. Blinking back tears, Alyssa looks at Cindy, who smiles.

“It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

Cindy tilts her head, and a crackle of static echoes from her helmet. 

“Okay, now, just hold on, alright? Let’s get some help.”

Alyssa nods, barely. She focuses on her lung, sealing its edges, securing it.

The radio static clears, Conduit’s voice coming through.

“Situation?”

“I’m keeping her stable, for now.”

“Good. How long can you wait? First responders have their hands full, and we can’t spare any medics.”

“I can’t hold this for long.”

“You said she’s stable?”

“I—Here, can you see my helmet’s feed?”

“Negative. Last quake took out most communications. Tell me what you need.”

“Someone who can dig.”

“Understood. Hang in there.”

“Alright,” Cindy says, then looks around. “Alyssa, do—do you know where the rest of you went?”

Alyssa blinks twice. Easier than trying to move her head.

“Is that a no? How about, a wink for yes, two blinks for no?”

Alyssa winks.

“Okay. Well, um, you just do your thing? I’ve got you. You’re going to be okay.”

Alyssa draws on her power, shifting her awareness, feeling for damage. Neurons at the brink of death, risking their sister cells. Entire swaths of flesh starved of oxygen for too long, necrosis setting in. She uses her power to displace the effects, culling healthy cells to rejuvenate vital ones.

A sudden crack bombards Alyssa’s eardrums, breaking her focus. Her sight returns in time to see a woman drop from the air by the road. Despite being more of an impact than a landing, the woman doesn’t even bend her knees. Open-faced, militarized helmet; camouflaged armor, minimal decor. Government hero. By the flag and star on her sleeves, probably Army.

“Are you Paragon?” The woman’s voice is close in Alyssa’s ears, despite the distance. “You have a trapped teammate?”

“Yes. Um, yes, and no. She’s right here, but not all of her.”

Cindy’s voice cracks as she speaks, a trickle of blood leaking onto her chin. Her face, flush just moments ago, now teeters on the edge of pallor.

Alyssa looks down, eyes settling on Cindy’s leg. It bends in places that shouldn’t, with blood leaking from gaps and cracks in armor plates.

“Kid, are you alright? You’re not making sense.”

“I’m fine. Just, please come here. I—I need to focus.”

Dust and dirt swirl around the woman as she approaches. Alyssa can hear words muttered in Spanish, some kind of expletives.

“Paragon, what are you doing?”

“She’s alive. She needs help.”

Alyssa tries in vain to move her arm or head in affirmation, finding herself limp in Paragon’s telekinetic grip. She manages to lock eyes with the soldier, if only for a moment.

“I’m sorry, Paragon. She’s dead. You’re injured. You’re in shock. You’re not thinking straight. We need to get you medical attention.”

“No. No. She can heal. When we find her body, she—”

“If we find her body, and if it isn’t dead. Think of the long term. You’re risking your own life to prolong her suffering, if she’s even still there.”

“I can’t—I can’t leave her. I won’t, I…” Cindy chokes on the words, and then takes a deep breath. Her helmet unfolds, the visor rising out of the way. Fresh tears seep from her blue eyes, stray strands of blonde hair stick to her forehead.

“Alyssa,” Cindy whispers. “I don’t know how to save you, and I—” She chokes again, suppressing a sob. “I don’t want you to suffer. If you want me to stop…”

Moving her neck is harder now. A force emanating from Cindy’s hand pulls on her skull, keeping her head upright against muscle tension and gravity. She tries harder this time, forcing the fibers to contract, and manages to shake her head to the right.

Please help. She mouths the words, exaggerating the motion of her lips, jaw, and tongue.

“Tell me how. Show me.”

Alyssa reaches out with her power, taking stock. She doesn’t have much left. Her head, one shoulder, half a ribcage, half a lung, one arm, a tit. She can afford to lose the tit, not that much would come of it. A bit of fat, glands, skin. But the arm, with its muscles, tendons, bone…

Long term. Alyssa repeats the soldier’s words in her head. She can regrow the arm, given time and sustenance. Everything else?

There’s so little of her left, barely anything vital. No intestines; she’d have to get intravenous nutrition. No liver, kidneys…

She’d subsist for a few days, weeks even, on stored fats and external supplements. She could try to regrow lost organs, yet that would only increase her body’s needs. Most likely, her fate would be to waste away.

She has to try. Even if she fails.

Alyssa cuts the vessels and veins of her arm, shunting the flow away at the shoulder. She instructs connecting tendons to die and grows boundaries in the surrounding flesh, culling the intervening cells.

She looks Cindy in the eyes, then looks down to her shoulder, repeating the movement twice more.

“Your arm?” Cindy’s brow furrows. “I can feel… You want me to take it off?”

Alyssa nods, looking from her arm to what remains of her chest.

Muscle. Heart. She mouths.

The arm comes loose, leaving behind a pit of scar tissue. She can feel the blood streams move out of the way, as her arm is tucked into what is left of her torso. It becomes scaffolding and resource both as she sets to work, flaying the arm’s skin to seal her lung, mining its cartilage to reunite trachea and bronchi. She carves out pockets in the bicep, weaving muscle strands to create chambers and valves. An artery sprouts from one end, a vein from the other, and they crawl upwards to meet with their greater counterparts, careful to avoid the incisions. Fat fuels the process, leaving her gaunt.

A single nerve winds down from her severed spine, burning as fresh neurons come to life, and the makeshift heart beats at its touch. Cindy takes the cue and directs the levitated blood inward, allowing her to seal the last wounds.

Her chest finally rises, filling her lung with air.

“Thank you,” she whispers, and lets the exhaustion take her.

5:45 AM

Alyssa blinks.

5:47 AM

Damn.

Alyssa has slept for about six hours. Her doctors say that she needs twelve hours per day, though she reckons it’s closer to ten. Either way, six is not enough.

A pair of cords—one rooted to her vena cava, the other sprouting from her aorta—pierce her diaphragm, winding together as they leave her body. Plastic shrouds the vessels, disguising them as medical tubing connecting to the equipment behind her bed. They wind and loop, emerging from a panel behind the neighboring bed, where a short girl sleeps, snoring softly. The cord connects with what was the girl’s navel, where rings of muscle form a series of valves, and passes through connective tissues. It enters the girl’s uterus in the way the optic nerve enters the eye, splaying out into a network of capillaries all across the organ’s inner surface, where waste is given away in exchange for nutrition.

Her power lets her feel the girl’s inner workings. Cells press together where her weight settles, small hairs bend where clothes and bed sheets sit on them. The right of her chest flexes just slightly more with each breath; the bone is soft, young. That side’s clavicle straddles the boundary, one half ossified, the other largely cartilage, a mirror image of Alyssa’s own. The arm beyond is weaker than its counterpart; its muscles have yet to endure years of regular use. Her spine bends slightly from the midpoint of her torso, offsetting her neck to the left in the same way that Alyssa’s is set to the right, though months of healing have nearly straightened both.

Deeper still, Alyssa can feel the girl’s thoughts. She cannot read them, but she can detect the release and uptake of chemicals she knows the purpose of, even if she cannot name them. The girl is dreaming.

It reminds her of her predicament. Going back to sleep is not a difficulty; it is a matter of neurotransmitters, which she can create and release at will. She does not want to sleep because she will have her own dreams, and they are something else she shares with the girl.

They are not good dreams.

She blinks again.

5:50 AM

Again.

5:51 AM

Again.

“Hey,” Alyssa whispers at the girl.

“Hey.” Again, at normal volume. No response.

“Hey!” She punctuates the shout with a spike of adrenaline, wrenched from the girl’s kidneys.

The effect, if any, is brief. Another will exerts itself over her power, quieting the target glands, flushing the hormone from the girl’s blood.

She settles on the nuclear option, unpleasant as the thought is.

“Alyssa, wake up.”

The girl startles, bolting upright, putting tension on their shared tether.

“Wha?”

The girl’s voice is high pitched, nasal in tone. The girl turns to look at her, rubbing at oversized brown eyes set in a round, immature face, centered by an up-turned button nose and topped by a mess of brown hair. A cute face, were she a child. On a teenager it’s a face that’s goofy, laughable. On a woman it’s awkward, pitiable.

The girl reaches for the nightstand that unites their beds and picks up Alyssa’s phone, casting her face in a blue glow.

“Dude, it’s like, nine.” Alyssa can feel the girl scratch her head with her free hand, bringing it down to chew on a thumbnail. “‘Thought we were waking up at eleven.”

“Can’t sleep.”

The girl’s expression softens.

“Bad dreams?”

Alyssa nods to answer the question. “Didn’t want to sleep. Too excited.”

The girl cocks her head, about to ask, then arrives at the answer with the firing of countless synapses.

“Oh, right. That’s today.”

Alyssa is angered, even jealous, but she keeps it hidden, purging the emotions with her power.

The girl’s hand smacks the wall behind the nightstand, turning on the room’s daytime lighting. They both blink in unison as their eyes adjust. The girl’s hand moves to her stomach, wrapping around the cord. The double valves close and the tether separates while the girl swings her legs over the side of the bed. The girl drops the tether’s end in the sheets, and she disappears from Alyssa’s internal senses.

“I’ma go get breakfast. You, uh, need anything?”

“Kinda low on vitamin C. And calcium. Lots of calcium.”

The girl nods, stands up, and makes her way to the door.

“Hey, wait,” Alyssa says, and the girl stops. “The phone.”

“Whoops, sorry,” she responds, backtracking a few steps, handing the device off. “Forgot.”

The girl opens the door. There’s a bit of a sucking sound, a slight drop in air pressure, and then she leaves, closing the door behind her.

Alyssa holds the phone up, and it unlocks as it scans her face. She resists the urge to check her social apps, knowing they won’t be as she left them. She chooses messages, instead. Like the apps, things are different. Conversations she did not have, messages not meant for her. She selects the one labeled ‘cindyyyy’

Even here, things are amiss. Messages sent and messages received in the time since she went to sleep. She ignores them.

heyyy
its me
uh
a/2

Oh, hey.
Can you wait for, I dunno,
ten or fifteen minutes?
My plane just landed and
I’m about to go through security.
I’ll text when I get picked up.

k

Alyssa puts the phone down, flat on her chest. She scoots herself up onto her pillow with her arms, making it easier to view the room. It feels more… lived-in than a regular hospital room would, with the posters her family put up, the picture frames atop moved-in furniture, curtains obscuring the glass walls. Red tape on the floor divides the room, beds and window on one side, the door and chairs for visitors on the other. Her laptop sits on one of those chairs. The girl has been using it, because she can’t, not for more than a minute or two. But she gets the phone.

At least, she’s supposed to get the phone.

A vibration propagates through her ribs, originating atop her sternum. Text message.

I’m in the car now.
Did you just get up?
Your parents mentioned
you’re still sleeping a lot.

yeah
it sucks

Feeling alright?

talk when u get here
how soon?

Should be about an hour, I think?

dad or mom driving?

Your father’s driving.

hour fifteen then

Have you, um, eaten?
I was going to get brunch.
I could get something for you.

no need
aw getting breakfast
hospital ‘food’

Okay. Tell her I said hi.

k

Are you sure you don’t want to talk?

when u get here

Alright. See you soon, Alyssa.

u 2 cindy

Alyssa sets her phone down, picking up a stack of magazines in exchange. She’s read most of them, but as she sifts through the pile she finds some new additions. Satisfied, she returns the rest, and settles in.

Concentrated fructose and artificial maple overwhelm Alyssa’s sense of taste, the sensation of teeth cutting through mush providing the only clue identifying the food as a bite of stale pancake. A tongue moves the food into the space between teeth and cheeks, making room for a forkful of sausage, followed up by a strip of bacon. The meat gives the slurry a salty taste as it slides down a throat, washed along by a gulp of orange juice that is more acidic than it is sweet.

The girl eats ravenously, just like she would. A nerve inside the tether lets her experience the meal by proxy. Without a stomach or intestines, she doesn’t feel hungry, though she tires between meals, her metabolism shifting from blood-available compounds to those stored in fat. Now, her body eats in lieu of her, fresh sugars and proteins delivered through the tether. They do not mix with her blood directly; a small lobe of liver intercepts them at the tether’s entry point, processing the inbound nutrition.

Despite all this, the smell tempts her. She glances over at the girl’s tray and her own mouth waters in anticipation, forcing her to swallow. The excess saliva collects in a modified esophagus, where simple vessels allow the absorption of water and enzymes, and nothing more.

A knock at the door grabs Alyssa’s attention.

“Come in,” she says.

A young woman enters on crutches, a brace clasped to one leg. She is muscular and tall, about a foot taller than Alyssa used to be, with a blonde ponytail that drapes over her left shoulder and falls on her black satchel bag, just above her waist. Her button-down shirt is cobalt and navy, composed in a plaid pattern. A few pens occupy the shirt’s pocket, clips crowded together beside a teal ribbon pin.

She closes the door behind her, and her posture shifts, the crutches no longer bearing her weight. She sets them aside, leaning them against the wall.

They look at each other. Deep blue eyes greet her with warmth, free of panic, of fear.

“Cindy!” Alyssa shouts, with glee that surprises even her, and she can feel the girl smile.

“Hey, Alyssa. I’ll be right over. Let me just…” She looks around the room for a moment, fingers drumming on her bag. “Um, where should I…?”

“The chairs are fine,” the girl answers.

Cindy puts her bag down, then takes her boots off. She leaves them by the door and crosses the red tape, ignoring the bin of face masks. She passes the girl’s bed on her way to Alyssa, giving the girl a pat on the head and a high-five.

Finally, Cindy reaches Alyssa’s bed and sits down on the edge, holding out her hand. Alyssa grabs it with her own, squeezes hard. It is the first hand she has touched in two months; at least, the first hand that isn’t gloved, the first bare hand that doesn’t belong to the girl.

Cindy squeezes back. She opens her mouth to speak, but Alyssa holds up a finger.

“Wait.”

Cindy’s head tilts, perplexed, and Alyssa smiles slightly. There is something—rather, someone—she has to deal with first. She looks at the girl.

“Could you…?”

The girl nods. She knows, because she can feel Alyssa in the same way Alyssa feels her.

“Sure. Um, Cindy, I’ll be downstairs or something. Cafe, maybe?”

“I’ll find you,” Cindy says.

The girl disconnects, picks up the tray, and leaves.

Alyssa waits, savoring the moment, until she can no longer hear the girl’s footsteps beyond the door. Cindy has visited the girl several times in the past two months, always without her. She has seen Cindy each time, even spoken with her, but always at a distance. A glimpse of her from an operating table, above, observing. A video chat. Phone calls. Short conversations, through a window. Each time, the girl was there.

But this is special. This reunion is hers, and it is hers alone.

“Hey,” Alyssa says, breaking the silence.

“I missed you.”

Part of her reacts with doubt, disbelief. She buries that part, banishing it.

“Missed you too, Cindy.”

Silence, again. A normal part of conversation. Still, it bothers her.

“How’s the leg?” she asks, pointing. The brace starts at Cindy’s right hip, pressing against her jeans, and ends at her ankle, with straps at regular intervals.

“Frustrating. I haven’t gone for a run in forever. But I’m spending more time with my mom, which is nice.”

“Doesn’t she have a job?”

“She freelances, so she stopped taking contracts to take care of me. Which is weird, but nice.”

Alyssa snorts, barely stifling a laugh.

“What?”

“Sorry, I uh, I thought of her trying to help you up some stairs.”

“Hey, she’s not—she’s not that bad anymore.”

“C’mon Cindy, doesn’t she have like, a cane for every day of the week?”

“She does have a collection. About a week ago my doctor said I could start using a cane soon, if I wanted. My mom offered to let me borrow one.”

“Ha ha, ouch.”

“Yeah. I told her I’m more comfortable with crutches, even when they’re in the way. Another month of them, though… that’s going to suck.”

“Ya know, if it’s healing slow, I could maybe help? Nothing big, just some hormones and proteins.”

“Alyssa, I’m fine.”

“I know… I just, I wanna make sure you’re okay, Cindy.”

“Thanks. It’s been hard sometimes, but I’m feeling good. You don’t have to worry.”

Cindy fidgets with her fingers for a moment, her eyes take a few quick glances that trace Alyssa’s body, outlined in the bedsheet.

“Um, how are you feeling?”

I’m great

Still fighting

Having a blast

Cliche responses glide through Alyssa’s mind, failing to reach her lips. That hidden part of her digs itself out.

“I… I’m really tired, Cindy.”

“Aw, I’m sorry. Bad night?”

“No—I mean yes, but no. I’m just, I’m so tired. Of this.”

Cindy nods, slowly, solemnly. She reaches over, tousling Alyssa’s hair.

“I know it’s hard, Alyssa, but you’ve been so strong. You can do it. I’m here for you. Your parents are here for you. Everyone’s rooting for you.”

“I’m tired of her, Cindy.”

“Her?”

“You know who I’m talking about.” Alyssa’s voice is low, almost a growl. The anger isn’t meant for Cindy, and yet, it comes forth. “You call her by my name. Don’t play dumb with me, Cindy.”

“I—”

“You always visit her, and you leave me behind. Alone.”

Cindy’s eyes tear up, and her lips tense.

“It wasn’t worth the risk. I could’ve caught a cold or the flu on the plane, and given it to you.”

Alyssa hesitates. Her parents had to stop visiting in the first month, when her mother had mistaken a viral infection for summer allergies. Mom had gotten over it in a few days; Alyssa had gotten pneumonia.

She crosses her arms.

“Then why come at all, huh?”

“She’s struggling too, Alyssa. I came to support her, because she’s my friend, and so she can support you.”

Guilt and catharsis overcome her anger, returning reason to her thoughts.

“I know… It’s just—She’s been using my phone.”

“Is she not supposed to?”

“We had a deal. I can’t use the laptop, so she gets the laptop. The phone is supposed to be mine, but she keeps using it.”

“Okay.” Cindy rubs at her eyes with her sleeve, drying them. “Here. Maybe when we’re done, we can all have a talk, get some things sorted?”

Alyssa slowly shakes her head. “It won’t work. I’ve tried changing the passcode. Five times. She doesn’t even have to guess, she just, she knows, somehow, and I don’t think she even questions the change.”

She takes a deep breath, hoping it will calm her.

“I don’t have any fucking privacy, Cindy. I’m stuck to her, almost every minute of every hour, because if I’m not I won’t grow, or worse. She gets me my clothes in the morning, and throws them in the hamper when I change. She gives me showers. She has to hold me when I brush my teeth. She—She literally goes to the bathroom for me, because I can’t even piss for myself. And when she finally fucking leaves, I…”

Alyssa trails off, feeling anger rising again.

“I have to watch her walk away on my legs, watch her go talk to my doctors, to my parents. To my best friend. To my siblings, who don’t even know that I exist, because what the fuck am I going to say to them? And I fucking hate her for it.”

“I’m sorry,” Cindy whispers.

“The army lady was right,” Alyssa mutters. “I should’ve, I should’ve thought about the long term. It takes years to grow a body, even a shitty one like I had. I—I should’ve said stop.”

“What? Alyssa, no, no. Don’t say that. You’d—”

“I’d be at home right now. I’d be putting off my summer reading, instead of reading the stupid book for the eighth time. I’d be hanging out with my friends. Buying new clothes. Flying out to visit you. We’d go to the beach. We’d play video games.”

“Alyssa, you’d be dead.”

“Cindy, I—” Alyssa’s voice cracks, and she fails to hold back the tears. “I should be dead.”

“Don’t think that way. I know things are hard. I’ve been there before, when my mom was sick. But you’ve made so much progress. Things are getting better, Alyssa.”

“Are they?” she asks, choking on the words.

Cindy says something, but Alyssa isn’t listening. She wiggles her arms into her shirt, taking it off and tossing it onto the floor, throwing the bedsheets off in the process. She has an underwire bra on; stuffed with tissues, worn to create an illusion. She tears it off, breaking the clasp.

Cindy has turned away, one hand to her temple, blocking her vision.

“You have to look, Cindy. Look at me. Look at me and tell me that this is progress.”

Cindy’s head turns back, slowly, her hand lowers, and her eyes open.

Alyssa follows her gaze.

A rib cage, covered in patches of skin and scar tissue, thin enough to see muscle and bone beneath. A single nipple, flat, looking more like an oversize mole. Skin wraps around her lowest ribs, forming a cavity that pulsates in and out as her diaphragm works. Below, a column of vertebra, shrink-wrapped in flesh, protruding outward, slotted between two pillows that are roughly the size of legs. And of course, the cord. Her lifeline. Her chain.

There is only silence. Minutes pass.

“Alyssa, do you remember after the earthquake? Those first few days?”

Alyssa nods.

“The doctors said you weren’t going to make it. Even after we found your other half, they didn’t think you’d last long. They wanted us to leave your side. They said you were a lost cause. You didn’t give up.”

“But—”

“Shh. Close your eyes.”

She does.

A hand touches her chest, palm pressing in, slightly calloused. She tenses, briefly.

“Don’t say anything. Don’t think. Just listen to your senses.”

The compression amplifies her heartbeat, as the large bundle of muscle pushes flesh out of the way. Her pulse roars in her ears.

“Do you feel that?”

Alyssa nods.

“You did that. You built that. In those first few days you grew a heart from scratch. No one else, no other hero, could do that.”

Cindy moves her hand away. Alyssa pulls the covers back over her chest as she opens her eyes. By habit she reaches for her shirt collar, intending to wipe at her tears, finding nothing. Cindy hands her a tissue box, taken from the night stand.

“I, I have these dreams. Dreams that I’m still me. That I’m her. That I have my whole body back but I’m stuck in this fucking hospital. This place that I hate. That she hates. That this pathetic, pitiful thing keeps me chained here. And then—then I wake up, and I’m that thing. I’m a parasite chained to her leg, keeping her here.

“Cindy, this… this wasn’t supposed to happen. None of it. When I, or she, or we had the brilliant fuckin’ idea of growing a spare head, that’s all it—all I was supposed to be, in the end. A backup, insurance, whatever you want to call it. But since I’m such a selfish cunt, I just had to stick around, and keep her from just… moving on with her life.”

“Alyssa, from everything you’ve said it sounds like you do care. That you want the best for her.”

Alyssa manages a nod.

“Then why do you hate her?”

“Because I hate myself.”

She expects a response. An argument. The silence drags on, and she realizes that Cindy is listening, waiting.

“She’s done so much for me, Cindy, and I—I don’t know why. And all I’ve done in return is hate her for it. Hated her for… for being the person I want to be.”

“Alyssa. She cares about you. She loves you. Like family, or some kind of self-love, or, whatever, that doesn’t matter. She’s doing this because she wants you to be in her life.”

Alyssa nods, slowly. Part of her resists, but that part feels smaller now.

“Cindy, can I have a hug?”

Cindy leans towards her, practically looming over.

“No, not like that. A real hug.”

Alyssa lifts herself up, the tip of her spine brushing against the bed. It’s a struggle, but not impossible.

“Just like, pick me up. I’ve been lying down for like, weeks.”

“Oh, wow. Um. That’s, uh, that’s really weird to watch.”

“I try.”

“Do you want me to get you a shirt…?”

“Hug first. Please,” Alyssa insists. “I don’t have anything left to hide, anyway.”

Cindy lifts her up, gently, and they embrace. The anger and jealousy fade, not entirely, but enough. Enough to manage.