Sunspot [Magical Girl Mutations]

Yuuka took me to the rooftop.

It was a cold, clear afternoon in Tokyo, the kind I'd become somewhat used to by now, those pale-blue winter days that made the cityscape feel as though it were simultaneously looming straight over me as well as impossibly far away, floating somewhere in the sky, an endless vertical assemblage of glass and steel that presented no hints as to what might lie beyond, neither western mountains nor eastern ocean anywhere to be seen. That sense of isolation was aided by the fact that the usual sounds of the Tokyo streets—the rumble of cars, the blare of obnoxious advertising trucks, the various chimes and dings of convenience stores and crosswalks and all the infrastructure of a city, and of course the ubiquitous sounds of people walking and talking—were completely inaudible from twenty stories up. It was only me, Yuuka, and the wind, which was cold and hostile, grabbing at my ears with icy fingers and sending that familiar, aching chill seeping into my hand. She had donned a long, heavy coat, though it was unzipped. I'd thrown on a hoodie and was sort of wishing I owned a more significant outer layer.

Yuuka's jetbike, a dark and angular thing closer in scale to a speedboat than a motorcycle, sat redundant in its space near the top of the roof stairwell, available for her use but dwarfed by the magic circle launchpad that dominated the rooftop, standing ready for the Radiances to deploy high above the skyline at a moment's notice. Painted indicator lines and hazard stripes framed the precise zones and distances of safety that one could stand from a mantle's explosive takeoff sequence. It was mostly for noise cancellation; only a full-force emergency launch produced enough backblast to harm those standing nearby, and even then, you would have to be standing within arm's reach.

In fact, I was standing within arm's reach of a Radiance, but not for imminent takeoff. Both of Yuuka's eyes stared at the roiling pulses of too-white Flame emanating from my arm as I held it aloft. Even in the harsh winter sunlight beneath a clear sky, the light of my Flame flung odd, hungry shadows off our bodies.

"It's still really fucked up," Yuuka opined.

"How so?"

"Just, y'know. In general."

"Huh. Not in the sense that it's damaged, you mean?"

"By fighting Suga-shitfucker? Nah, looks the same as it did before then. Burned the fuck outta him, didn't ya?"

I cast my eyes down to the border of my burn scars, the spot where they blended against the regular skin of my upper forearm, where the flames cut off abruptly. "Something like that. He kind of ran from it when I touched him."

Something sharp flitted across Yuuka's face. "Good. Maybe it'll be enough to put him down next time." She turned away from me to cast her gaze across the skyline, craning her neck up at the glittering skyscrapers around us. "Maybe. I don't like 'maybes'."

"That's what the eye is for, isn't it? Is, uh, this helping at all?" I asked, gesturing with my normal hand at my makeshift torch. Yuuka had used the word "searchlight," which felt a little inaccurate to the omnidirectional spray of my Flame's ripple-light. I had to begrudgingly admit that "lighthouse" fit better in spirit. Mechanically, though, we were more like a radar system, with me casting ripple—or perhaps somehow amplifying that which was already there, which made more sense than me putting off enough "Light" to illuminate all of Tokyo by myself—and Yuuka interpreting the silver echoes on return to see into the future.

"Yeah," she confirmed. "I'm looking. Stay mad."

She didn't mean it as an invective or taunt; I was doing my damnedest to channel the anger I felt that something like Sugawara was running free, feeding it into my Flame to keep it lit. I'd felt the direct, corrosive presence of his thoughts, the threadbare remains of his malice, during those moments of contact, and even the memory was so repulsive that I found it easy to summon up some righteous wrath. Nothing like that should be permitted to exist. The Vaetna would not allow it, and neither would I.

There were some holes in that thinking, of course. The Vaetna had never assisted the Radiances in toppling Sugawara. But this was a rare case where it behooved me to ignore that clever and reasonable voice in my head and instead focus on the fiery and raw emotional drive to make right what had been set wrong. So I held my Flame aloft and illuminated the future for Radiance Heliotrope. I wasn't sure exactly what her crimson eye saw in the unborn silver echoes, but she definitely saw something as she scanned toward the east, where my shaky knowledge of Tokyo's geography told me the bay was.

"Yep," she sighed. "They're still coming."

"The PCTF," I guessed. "How coming do you mean?"

She skewered me with a glare for the accidental innuendo, making me shrink. She let out a little tsk. "Two weeks, call it. Not ready for an open fight, but…" she leaned forward a bit as she stared eastward. I imagined that her gemstone eye would have squinted if it could. "Well, there will be fighting. They want Sugawara's remains, I think, leading me…oh, fuckin' hell. They want you, too."

I crossed my unused arm over my chest to support my raised torch, feeling a little small versus the sheer scale of the PCTF. Todai's twenty-story building suddenly felt dwarfed in more ways than one. I tried to put on a brave face, remembering the newspaper clipping in their head lawyer's office that said they'd beaten them and gotten away with it before. "We sort of already knew that, didn't we?"

"Yeah, but not like how I'm seeing. There's a guy on his way, who…we'll kill. Alice will, I think."

"So it'll come to blows?" I looked in the same direction she did with trepidation. You could see a little further in this direction, some of the buildings giving way to a park-like strip of green below us that was punctuated with more skyscrapers. "More murder."

"That's not the point. Murder's whatever with these fuckers; we'll kill as many as we need to." In the corner of my vision, she crossed her arms in the same way I did. I tried to ignore how her chest rested atop them compared to my own flat front. It was a stupid thing to be thinking about during a conversation like this. "But Alice killing them, over you, means they want you bad. As in, more than I'd expect. Stop looking at my tits."

"S—sorry." My face was hot even in the chilly air. "Why? Uh, not why should I stop looking; I get that, promise. Why would they want me?"

"Aside from the fact that you're some kind of glyph genius?" She almost laughed the last words, not exactly incredulous but certainly irreverent. "Probably because your Flame's all fucked up. Don't know how they would know that, though. We don't have a spy, I don't think. You had others in your group, right? Two others? Three?"

"Three, but one went inferno, so two. You think their Flames could be all…like mine? Whatever that means," I added.

"Probably. So if the Peacie shitlords got 'em…"

"Ah. So in terms of consequences…war?" The word was heavy and thick, too big to be coming out of my mouth. "With Todai?"

"Maybe. I'll keep an eye out. I come up here every day, but I should start bringing you as the day gets closer. If you can stop staring at my tits."

"I'm not! I swear!" I stared out at the skyline instead, pointedly removing her from my field of vision.

"Uh huh."

"I'm just…it's not sexual," I babbled. "I'm not coveting your flesh or whatever. I don't mean to be gross."

"If you were being gross, I'd've pushed you off the roof. A little envy's fine, I'm used to it, just control your eyes better than your girlfriend."

"Envy? That's not—"

A jolt of urgency in her tone wiped the confusing comment off the map. "Hold that. I think I found Sugawara."

—

By "found Sugawara," what Yuuka really meant was that she had found a place where he would be in the future, a single point ahead of us in the timeline where he might appear again. Technically, it was discovery by proxy; the thing she actually foresaw while staring east was a conversation between two people she could only identify as PCTF-related, who would actually be the ones to find Sugawara with their own detection methods and would mention the approximate location to one another while planning to collect him.

That was good information. It did admittedly make my head hurt a little: as I understood the time travel-y implications of Yuuka's power, it seemed likely to me that us knowing this information would somehow lead to those PCTF people having that conversation in a few weeks, and therefore things would never have come to pass at all if Yuuka hadn't foreseen them coming to pass. It felt like cheating. Magic was confusing. Yuuka tried to explain that the flow of events wasn't so set in stone, and that what she'd foreseen was only one version of events that may or may not actually come to pass, so we weren't entering into some kind of guaranteed time loop. The one thing that was confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt was that Sugawara's soul had not dissipated into incoherent ripple as we'd been holding out hope for; we'd have to put him down ourselves when the time came. But that was what Yuuka and I wanted anyway.

Getting to the area in question meant taking Yuuka's jetbike, as it was on the outskirts of metro Tokyo, where the skyscrapers and apartment blocks gave way to rolling hills of densely packed single-family homes. My last experience flying over Tokyo had been one of screaming in Hina's arms and then almost vomiting when we landed, and I had little desire to repeat the experience, but that was where the bike showed its value; it turned out to be an improvement in every conceivable way. Even though the seats were open to the elements—Yuuka deployed a second one behind the first, backrest and all, saving me from having to hold on to her waist and invite further admonishment vis-a-vis her proportions—the ride was silky-smooth and near-silent, much more like one of the armored limousines we'd taken to Hikanome's ill-fated barbecue than a flying motorcycle. It was quiet enough that I could ask questions. Magic ones, of course.

"Is this what it's like flying with a mantle? Like, quiet and smooth?"

"Sort of. You're building one, right? They haven't put you in the test rig yet?"

"Test rig?"

"Y'know, right, the thing with the sensors and the brain-plugs. The analog version of the pod where your body goes."

"The pod…?"

"Oh, c'mon. The space-folder contraption your body goes to when your consciousness is plugged into the mantle?"

I made a quiet, embarrassed sound that can only be described as "???."

Yuuka twisted in her seat to look at me like I was stupid. It was a powerful expression on her, one that demanded I immediately do whatever it took to make the pretty girl less mad at me. Her voice was caustic and mocking, like when she'd cornered me in the penthouse's gym. "You made upgrades to all of our mantles, and you don't know how they work? Dumbass. Boke. You coulda folded us up into little chunks of meat!"

"Look at the road—the sky," I whimpered, acrophobic panic overriding my embarrassed confusion until Yuuka shrugged and complied. Then I found the wherewithal for some indignation. "I mean—I know how they work: it's an LM construct shaped like your body with a bunch of combat and sensory tech, and it feeds all that info back to you. And your real body just gets, um, folded up and away into fourspace?" I winced, realizing how unsure I was about that part, and rushed to defend myself. "Listen, all the modifications I've made have been to do with the LM and combat capability side. That's what Alice wants me around for. I haven't looked at the neural and psychomotive stuff; that's not my wheelhouse." To regain a little control of the conversation, I added, "And you'd have known if my changes were dangerous, right? Precog."

"Magic genius," she taunted back. It didn't sound nearly as hostile, though. Maybe I was speaking her language.

—

Even without me acting as a future-lamp from the backseat, Yuuka managed to zero in on the exact building where she foretold Sugawara's reappearance by spotting none other than Izumi down below. Apparently, she was easy to spot with Yuuka's eye now that her nature was understood; near-identical ripple changing the future in two places at once was a dead giveaway, enough so that Yuuka seemed kind of annoyed at her past self for not putting the pieces together before.

Izumi herself had been perched on a house's rooftop, her flesh body standing down on the street corner below. She hopped down in one graceful leap while Yuuka put down the jetbike right in the narrow street; I was a little worried about obstructing traffic but was waved off with a cryptic "nobody comes by here." Izumi greeted Yuuka in Japanese and nodded to me, laughing while Bloodstone grumbled, but grew somber as she led us down residential streets to where she'd correctly guessed Sugawara might go—where Yuuka's eye claimed he was supposedly destined to appear.

It was a shrine, not much more than a small building nestled behind a foliage-lined pathway. It loomed derelict and untended despite sitting in the middle of a residential neighborhood, half-overgrown into a miniature jungle of vines and ferns. Within, the shrine looked as though it had survived a fire, timbers charred black but still standing. Between that and the foreboding shadow cast by the canopy, it was dark and unwelcoming, a memory of violence smuggled into the otherwise-placid landscape of dense suburbs.

I had a guess about the significance of this place, one I didn't like. "Is this where…?"

"Where Hikanome began," Izumi confirmed.

Neither of the flamebearer women dignified the ruin with any more discussion except to plan and lay traps. Yuuka wove quickly and with controlled anger, building something that looked like a net, harkening back to the thing she'd warned Hina to avoid at Sugawara's hospital-compound, something to detect and trap the rogue spirit of a dead man. Blood-red shimmering fibers of thread spun together and shot into the darkness, anchoring themselves against every surface of the shrine and its patch of overgrowth.

Izumi took a different approach, walking over to the concrete wall that separated the burnt shrine from the neighboring house and slamming her lattice-manifest palm against it. When she removed her hand, the palm-print was scorched into the wall.

"That's not glyphcraft," I guessed.

"It is." Izumi grinned, pointing at the scorch-mark. "That's an {INDICATE} lattice. I can feel what happens here now. I'm a mantle, you should remember. I wove these when I made this body, but now I can just think and use them. Easy."

That trivial ease had such appeal. That was how magic should be, easy and intuitive, designed in advance but deployed with just a thought, rather than an adrenaline-tangled mess of gestures and roasted fingers. I was not a Vaetna, not blessed with such deep intuition and talent that weaving was only necessary for the most bleeding-edge magic; for somebody mortal like me who found weaving under pressure deeply impractical, the pre-loaded tricks of a mantle struck me as a much more sensible marriage between clever design and elegant execution.

"I want to do that," I thought, then realized I had said it out loud. Both of the girls looked at me, Izumi smiling and Yuuka letting out an amused hmpf.

"You can," Izumi agreed. "Now, I think. Or…" she looked at Yuuka, trailing off.

Yuuka nodded. "We're pretty much done. We can go back and do your mantle stuff, if you want."

I blinked in surprise; we'd only been here for maybe ten minutes. "Wait, that's it?"

"For now, yeah. We'll shore it up and refine it if I have useful visions. Problem?"

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"I…just not much closure, I guess. I wanted to hunt." I glanced down at my chest. "My flame's not much satisfied either, I think."

Izumi the assassin smiled dangerously, like I'd seen Hina do on occasion but with altogether more malice. It wasn't directed at me; she turned it toward the handprint she'd left. "We are already hunting. If your Flame isn't satisfied with that, then maybe it reflects your heart, and actually wants something else. I know how that feels."

"You do?" This was a little cryptic for me.

"She's saying getting inside your mantle will probably make you feel better," Yuuka translated. "Not a fan of how much like the bitch you two are sounding. Let's go home so I can watch you fumble around in the doll."

—

"The doll" was a simple, mannequin-like mechatronic body that acted as the physical counterpart to "the pod" Yuuka had described. It was immediately apparent that it descended from the same lineage of design as Ebi's body: familiar teal paneling covered its frame, and its back had the same visible spine. It diverged from Ebi by trading much of her four-dimensional complexity for configurability; its limbs could be adjusted in length, since the proportions of the body's various joints needed to match mine closely if I were to have even the faintest hope of doing anything more than flailing around like a newborn in the synthetic body.

Of course, Izumi and Amane had significant size mismatches between their bodies and their mantles, so there was wiggle room in what I could do for the final product, but they had both taken years to acclimate and accustom to switching. For this very first test run, I would remain exactly at my usual 180-cm-when-not-slouching. That filled me with some small amount of ennui I had yet to properly interrogate.

Aside from that, though, this design suited me fine. Better than fine, even—the doll's figure was smooth, slender, and faceless, all properties I'd kept returning to in my idle fantasies about my ideal form. I had even gained the self-awareness to admit that I found the androgyny appealing. Plus, it even had its right toes, which Hina was confident—and Amane and Ai more cautiously so—wouldn't cause any problems for me, because for the most part I'd never quite become used to my 1.5-footed status thanks to the stabilizer module.

By contrast, the pod was something out of an old horror movie's prop room, somewhere between the exposed-wiring aesthetic of the coffin and an electric chair. A plush seat contrasted nightmarishly with the spiked metal halo mounted above, which was supposed to go over my head to transmit my thoughts and senses into the doll. The transfer logic for that was the one part of this whole thing that I had to actually weave with magic: a red-and-pink data bridge made out of my own Flame. Given that this would be directly interfacing with my mind, I was extremely nervous about the possibility of making a mistake, messing up the tension or crossover in one glyph that would instantaneously render me brain-dead—or worse—when the device was switched on.

Fortunately, I had no shortage of assistance. All five Radiances understood both the delicacy and significance of this and had pulled themselves away from their various work to pack into a lower-level room in the penthouse that apparently existed solely for the purpose of this kind of mantle R&D, around the corner from the gym and firmly out of sight from the common area. There was a certain spirituality in the air, like I was engaging in a coming-of-age ritual. That still wouldn't make me a magical girl, though.

"I mean, yeah, it was dicey at first. We didn't have any of this stuff! It's a miracle Alice didn't fry her brain," Hina chirped from my lap. She had her delicate, clawed hand clamped around mine, guiding me through the exact motions of weaving a {REFRACT} glyph without error, showing me how to twist the thread and pull my thumb under for one of the more challenging axis crossovers. Her presence and closeness helped soothe my nerves even more than the hands-on assistance.

"Not very reassuring, Hina," Alice sighed. She'd also found a lap to sit on, cradled atop one of Amethyst's massive legs, a surface that didn't seem terribly comfortable to me but did let her tail drape over and down in a way that relieved some of the perpetual pressure on her lower back.

"But it's true! We coulda 'sploded your whole mind. Which makes it even crazier that smoky over there figured all this out by herself!"

She pointed at Izumi, who was standing a little removed from the cluster of magical girls, uncharacteristically shy. Her flesh body was nowhere to be seen; I got the sense that she felt it didn't deserve to be here for this. Todai's erstwhile enemy bashfully muttered something in Japanese that drew a scoff from Ai. I couldn't help but grin; it was kind of satisfying to see that she was as bad at fielding compliments as I had been earlier today.

Hina growled against my neck. "Hey, focus. I'm serious, cutie, this could really fuck you up, and not in a hot way."

"Sorry, sorry," I replied, returning to my attempts to visualize the next maneuvers of thread. We'd been at this for half an hour already; it was the exact kind of unglamorous, tedious work that made even the fizzing, eye-searingly glowing thread between my fingers feel distinctly and disappointingly unmagical. "Trying to keep my eyes on the prize, right."

"It's a good prize," she whispered into my ear. "You'll love it. If you don't fuck it up."

"Yeah. I hope so," I chuckled just as quietly, trying to give this conversation what little privacy I could. "It's not really, uh, 'Ezsuka' or whatever you were calling it, is it?"

She rubbed my head. I'm not sure how; both of her hands were accounted for. "Look at you, admitting you want that!"

"Well, I just meant…I don't know what I meant," I admitted. "Maybe. It's not LM, though, just kind of…robot body. Which is cool, don't get me wrong, but not, er…"

"Magical transcendence?" Alice put in. "I wouldn't worry about that. Not all it's cracked up to be," she groused, rubbing her forehead.

Yuuka laughed at that. "Aww, danchou, are you pissy about your horns? Now you're the one not sounding encouraging. I thought you'd be excited to get the number of boys in this place back down to zero." She slammed her mouth shut as all sets of eyes turned on her at once. Yuuka's head swiveled around the room, fully deer-in-the-headlights before settling on a target. "You were all thinking it too! You especially, kemono, I know you're just waiting to jump on whatever new version of Ezza comes out of this."

"I don't have a problem with cutie being a boy." Hina replied flatly, leaning forward off of me. Then she flashed a fanged grin at her shorter teammate. "That's a you problem, babe. I'm flamebearersexual and cutie-oriented, doesn't matter to me how any of you identify as long as it makes you happy, don't pretend you don't know that. But if you're waiting for a piece of Ezzen until after…"

Amane added something else in twinkling Japanese that made Yuuka stiffen and drew chuckles from all the other girls.

"This is beneath me," Yuuka huffed, and stomped toward the door, stopping to twist around for one final verbal jab. "I'm no monsterfucker, and I'm not interested in one, either." She fled the room, steps retreating down the hallway.

"Anymore," Alice teased after her.

Izumi raised a hand to cover her mouth daintily, faux-scandalized. "So the rumors are true, the fox and the chuuni…?"

I had been a little lost and had elected to back out of whatever web of drama was going on here to focus on my weaving; Hina's hand had remained steady the entire time she was trading quips, and I didn't much care if Yuuka was present or absent as long as her eye wasn't screaming alarm bells that I was about to turn my brain into spaghetti. But I did look up after skimming my limited japanese vocabulary for that last word. The atmosphere in the room had shifted: Alice had a certain done-with-this-shit expression on her face, and Ai looked peeved. Amethyst's spike-face was unreadable as ever, but she was shaking her head slightly. I glanced at Hina's sapphires out of the corner of my eye.

"Wait, what? You and Yuuka? Even though she, uh, hates you?"

"Old stuff," Hina sighed against me, sounding not at all happy. "Not anymore. Hate, love, one big jumble with her. Don't wanna talk about it. Focus on the thread, cutie."

I filed this moment away for later analysis and got back to work.

It took twenty more minutes for me to finish the lattice and thirty after that for all of the remaining Radiances to be satisfied that I'd dotted my "i"s and crossed my "t"s. This was one of those cases where the thread remained visible even once the weaving was done; strands of my Flame extended between the pod's headpiece and the head of the doll like the puppet-strings they were, magic bridging physical mechanisms so my soul—insofar as such a thing existed—could ride those gossamer highways to animate the shelled form of the doll. With the drudgery of weaving out of the way, my excitement was building once more; that was real magic.

The thumping of my heart overrode my trepidations about the pod's mild torture-device aesthetic. Hina and Ai helped too, encouraging and explaining as they got me situated, seemingly on the same page and working in sync. For once, their goals aligned, and it made me happy to see them both so energized, especially after that awkward moment when Yuuka had left the room.

"It'll feel suuuuper weird," Hina warned. "Like you're falling. Uh, y'know, like going outta realspace and into the w-axis soup."

"Like at the barbecue," I reasoned. "Can't say I loved that."

"Sorry for that," Izumi sighed, bowing slightly in belated contrition. I waved it off hurriedly; I hadn't actually meant to make her feel bad about it.

"That's not what will actually happen," Alice clarified from the sidelines. "But it will feel that way."

They had sat the doll-body down in the same pose as I was sitting in the pod, facing away from me, since apparently, it was a bad idea for me to see my body from the outside immediately. Ai fiddled with a small handheld LCD readout, connected by a long wire to the back of its head. Hina had quipped that that was called "the leash," but that was even more unofficial than the names for the other elements of the setup. Ai smiled at me reassuringly. "It'll only be for a moment, then you should just feel normal. Once the transfer happens, the important thing is to not think about what you can't do. Act like normal."

Hina poked my chest seriously. "No blinking, no breathing, no mouth to move if you have to talk, but don't try to adapt to that. Just act like everything still works as normal and your brain—and the weave—should fill in the rest. We'll slam the eject button if you start to freak out, okay?"

"Okay," I nodded. "No face, but act like I still have a face."

"No face good," she agreed, dazzling me with a toothy grin and those beautiful eyes. "If everything seems like it's going good, we can bring in a mirror, that helped for Amanyan. Uh, other risks…we think your hair won't interfere with this stuff, but we won't know until it's turned on. Kind of a first."

"It won't turn your brain into scrambled eggs, at least; we know that for sure. If it breaks anything, it'll be before the transfer even starts, during the handshake process," Alice reassured.

"Yep!"

"What about Sugawara?" I asked. "He was looking for a host, right? When I'm not, uh, in my body, could he show up and grab it?"

Hina blinked, having apparently not considered this. "I mean, we'd gut him for trying, but…" She twisted to glance at Izumi, who shook her head.

"No. Whatever your Light is, he fears it too much to try that, I think. And…I think he would not want your body anyway. It may be male flesh, but you aren't a man. Not a woman either," she was hasty to correct herself, eager to show that she understood, "but I think there is too much…hate in him. He only tried to take my other body as a true last resort, and only because he was already connected."

"Enbies stay winning," Hina hummed.

With all possible failure modes addressed and my worries assuaged, the halo was lowered over my head in short order. Once out of sight, it just felt like a weird hat, which was a little undignified for the occasion. Hina squeezed my hand one last time before drawing away to stand with the others.

"Ready?"

"Ready."

Ai hit the button, a hum filled the air, and I fell. The stomach-dropping sense of being pulled downward, pulled away, was unmistakable, a tug at the bottom of my chest that made my organs slosh around and my sinew creak with strain. It was no fiery blossom of pain like so many of my other experiences with my Flame, just inexorable motion.

Then the world shut off. It's wrong to say that the world went dark, or that my ears went quiet, or that the sensation of the halo and chair vanished from beneath my body—the senses were just gone, and the very intuitions that rode upon them vanished along with. It was not darkness, it was emptiness. It was not silence. What even was silence? I reached for the concept and found nothing. There was nothing.

There was only me. And what was I, really, when I was denuded from the meat, from any shape at all? Surely, this was what a soul was, if I could continue to exist like this, boiled down into something abstract rather than the firing of electrical neurons inside a wet lump. Was this liminal nature endowed by my Flame? Was this what the Flame was like before it reached its host? Was I my Flame, and the gap between it and I only imagined through the presence of flesh to call "me?" Was I something at all, or simply another part of the nothing, a fraction of zero?

It wasn't so bad, in a static and infinite sort of way. Whatever I was, it was simply me and the nothing, and that was…well, it simply was. I simply was, or was not, and the difference didn't matter much to me. I'd spent so much of my life barely existing that this could even be an improvement. No frustrating, confusing desires of the flesh, no loneliness, no smoldering dreams or imagined legacy or uncertain future. There was nothing to miss out on, nothing to do, nothing to be. Perhaps there had never been anything other than this, just momentary dreams fluttering to life in the nothing and vanishing just as quickly. That made me sad in a way that I was no longer equipped to understand. Perhaps I would stay a while. Why had I cared?

Then everything reminded me it existed. I crashed hard back into reality. Nothing became light as I reached the end of the tunnel. Nothing became sound and touch and shape and an entire world, worlds upon worlds, a reality infinitely broader and deeper than we had ever understood. Fire and blood, the transcendent forms of the Vaetna, Hina's eyes, a chair under my butt and a wall in front of me and hard teal carapace and motor-actuated ball joints sheltering my fragile soul and its passenger and bright lights—

I remembered what it was to stand and did so as quickly as I could, tearing myself out of the chair, stumbling forward. I had never been so happy to feel the steady weight of gravity pressing the world up against my soles.

"I'm alive," I said with a mouth I didn't have. "I'm here. It's all here." I looked down at my hands, then up at the wall, then remembered everybody else was here. I turned around, and there they were. "It's me."

"It's you!" Hina giggled, purest cerulean acknowledging that I was, then she launched herself at me. There was a chorus of yelling, people telling her to get off me, but I didn't care. I was here and she was here and until this moment I felt like I had been dead. I lifted her up, feeling her flesh deform under the surfaces of my body. She laughed and kissed my not-face. "How do you feel?"

Like a rainbow shearing through the clouds. The dull haze that had clung to every thought, every feeling, had been scrubbed away, unable to thread the needle and pass into the new body. Even without rushing blood or a beating heart or skin, I felt life pulsing through me. Perhaps it was actually because I lacked those things, but I felt there was more nuance there. It wasn't so much that this new body was perfect as that I felt freed from the cage of the old one. I ought to be outside, feeling the sun on my shell.

"I'm alive," I repeated. "I can—I'm whole. I've never felt alive before. I want to—I don't know what I want, but I want. Holy shit, how was I supposed to…to accept not being?" Through the edges of Hina's mane of brown hair, I saw Alice's eyes glimmer with tears. Lacking a face or eyes, I pointed in her direction to acknowledge her. "Alice. Is this what it's like? Is this what it's supposed to be?"

"Yeah," she sniffled. "Yeah, it is." I heard Izumi agree in chorus. "Are you—Ezzen, you have to understand that you can't stay in this body. I know you want to, I know what this is like, but you can't—"

"I know, I know," I insisted, trying to figure out how to transmit the enormity of what I was experiencing. "It's not—it's not only gender euphoria or whatever. This is good, it's so good, it's great, it's more correct than I've felt ever, but it's not just that it feels better, it's not just this body. It's having a body, it's being instead of not being. I want to keep being. I'd never felt that before, I don't think. I feel high, but it's not just from the body, I think, I don't know."

"It's good," Amane warbled.

"It is! I need that mirror."

Hina brought it out with a flourish, and I stared at myself. This face was less sophisticated than Ebi's—in fact, it had nothing at all; it was just a smooth plate. It felt like me. I stared at it for several long seconds, taking in the shapes, then angling the mirror to look down my body. "I look good. Cyan's not for me, but this…yeah."

I was startled by Ai suddenly entering the frame and hugging me as well. "I'm happy," was all the explanation she gave. I hugged her back. Ai was arguably the most removed from this experience of all the women in the room, but that made it sweeter.

"Dollthing," Hina quipped.

I glanced at her and shrugged. "I…yeah. Maybe." Then I had a thought, something that had whispered at me for years but I'd never been able to crystallize into the volition to ask. But right now I felt like I could do anything. "Um. I'm not a boy. We've established that, I think, yeah? But, um, can you try calling me something that isn't 'he'? Like 'they' or, um, even 'it'."

"Trying 'it' on for size, hey, cutie?"

I stared at Hina for a moment before I parsed the pun, then laughed hard and loud, without lungs or shame. Everything felt real and not real at the same time.

"They're happy," Alice ventured to humor me.

"I am! We need to fuckin' do something," I declared. "Soon. Now. Put me back in my old body and let's go out and…I have no idea. Party? But just…I need to do something before this feeling wears off. I need to feel alive. Or, Hina, we could, y'know…" I filled in the end of the sentence by miming my finger going through a hole. I giggled stupidly at the naughty thing I'd just done.

"Whoa," she purred. "Okay, you're definitely high."

Alice's expression soured a little. "Being uninhibited is normal for the first time you really feel gender euphoria, Ezzen, but slow down. Let's get you back in your normal body before we keep talking."

"Awwww, but—"

—

The return trip back to my body skipped the sojourn in solipsistic hell. Everything shut off and turned back on, and I was back in the meat, sitting in the pod, and very tired. Returning to my squishy meat-body did bring a certain numbness, but it only blunted the razor edge of my euphoria. Perhaps it would have been far more agonizing if I was still covered in thousands of tiny, horrible hairs, so I was thankful beyond words at my prior stupid, blood-soaked decision to do away with that. Going from smooth carbon-fiber shell to smooth skin wasn't nearly as bad of an experience as I'd been braced for.

The rest of that evening was characterized by craving. Even as we debriefed, I was practically launching myself into the penthouse's kitchen. I wanted to make and enjoy food; I was shocked that my time in a synthetic body had imbued me with a refreshed desire for the gurgling processes of biology rather than disgust. I savored the knife's handle in my grip as I blazed through vegetables; I briefly wondered what it would be like to bring the blade down on my fingers, just out of curiosity. I didn't, but I was riding the edge.

Hina clung to me practically the whole time as we threw together a huge dinner, and several times, my hands wandered where they probably shouldn't have. Sanitation-mindedness was the only thing that stopped me from sliding my hands between her legs; I wasn't going to be that gross when there were mouths to feed. She was receptive, which made it harder to resist. She whispered some absolutely sordid things into my ear, including at one point the words "fuck me open."

But I think she wasn't really expecting me to follow through on it; by the time we were done with dinner, my manic energy had begun to crash, and no celebratory sex was had. She simply brought me to my room, deposited me in my chair in front of the computer, and hopped onto my lap.

"I'm so proud of you." She kissed my neck.

"Thanks. So am I." I was too glowing to be self-effacing. "But I also…what if I wake up tomorrow and I don't feel like this anymore? I want to feel like this all the time. I don't want to go back to…the haze. The emptiness."

"The other body's right there, whenever you want it. Now that we know it's safe, you can indulge." She drawled the word, clearly relishing the thought almost as much as I did. "But I think you get it now. You've seen what you can be. What it's like to be, at all." She twisted and pointed at the PC. "Now. We're gonna work on your actual mantle until you pass out. We'll make you perfect. And then tomorrow I'll show you how to live. And the day after that, and after that, and after that. As much time as you need. I want to be there for it."

And that's what we did. We designed a future for me until I fell asleep.

Then, once I was freed from my body once more, I dreamt of the Vaetna.