Despite my objections, I allow myself to be escorted away from our power training class and silently guided back to the building and through the halls until I end up in a medical room. A nurse escorts me to a room almost immediately, taking careful extractions of my blood with gloved hands to ensure we don't make skin contact.

…Though I guess I don't need her to make skin contact to steal her template anymore. As exceptionally uncomfortable and overwhelming as the process of absorbing information on a dozen different organisms at once was, it still… y'know, worked. The information is churning in my mind, clawing at the inside of my brain and demanding to be made useful. It's a bit disturbing, but also empowering, and… weirdly pleasant? I'm still pissed off, though, extremely frustrated that my first day of so-called 'power training' has resulted in me not being allowed to train my goddamn power. It's not like they can stop me from expanding my domain, though. I could steal templates from the medical staff here, gloves or no. And it could be useful, but… no. No. Just let that thought pass by and put it in a box.

I'm aware, consciously, that repressing all my emotions and frustrations isn't a healthy coping mechanism. That's like, Psychology for Idiot Babies 101. But there's a difference between unhealthy suppression of the self and having the basic decency to not follow every stupid whim, right? If I know I'm pissed, I know that I should be compartmentalizing, at least temporarily. It's perfectly fine to hide annoyance, ride it out, and come back to the situation with a clearer head. That is the healthy response. Interacting with people is about doing what you should be doing, not what you want to be doing.

The nurse leaves after stabbing me a bit for science, and in the fifteen minutes between then and when she finally comes back, I manage to calm myself down a little.

"Your blood is quite normal," the nurse comments, sitting down in front of a computer in the room.

"I'm not sure what you expected," I tell her honestly. "If you want abnormal blood, I can make that too."

"That won't be necessary," she chuckles. "At least not today. The doctor wants to give you a few MRIs, though. Is that alright?"

Huh. Do they have all that advanced medical equipment in this building? I guess they really want to keep the new supers separated from everyone else, even in an emergency.

"My consent is largely irrelevant, so feel free," I say, letting the comment slip out before I can stop it. Shit! Okay, maybe I haven't fully calmed down.

"Ms. Morgan, your consent is extremely relevant," the nurse insists, swiveling her chair to face me and giving me a serious look.

Aw, she really believes that. How cute.

"I consent, then," I say firmly, looking her in the eyes. I have to double down on seriousness since I let the cynicism slip out earlier. If she doesn't believe my consent is valid, she might not accept it, and that would be annoying even though she would be completely correct and definitely doing the right thing.

I'm pretty sure that refusing consent would work, to be clear. I believe that she cares about it and I believe that she'll support me on the subject of not taking an MRI today if I refuse. But then, oh whoops! My refusal to participate in a brain scan goes on my permanent record! But surely that's fine, right? It would only be a red flag if they thought I might be an alien or something. Oh wait.

So yeah, this MRI is happening. And besides, I'm pretty sure that my brain won't have anything weird in it as long as I don't shapeshift during the scan.

MRIs, it turns out, are very uncomfortable. They warn me that it might make my body feel really warm, and I might even feel like I'm peeing myself, but I won't be. Which… I'm not really sure how to react to, so I just nod. I don't have any idea what peeing myself actually feels like, and… I'm surprised to learn that it is apparently expected that I would know? Do normal people often pee themselves!? The doctor just said that like it's no big deal.

You learn something new every day, I guess.

They scan me normally for a bit (it absolutely feels like a flush of warmth inside my body, which is very strange, uncomfortable, and hard to tune out) but then they ask me to shapeshift into other forms during the scans, and… I'm not really sure how to handle that. For obvious reasons I don't want to give myself an alien brain while I shapeshift, or ideally change my brain at all. So I do my best to very, very carefully shift into Emily's body, but with Lia's brain. Everything else to template.

"Huh," the doctor says, and walks over to pull me out of the machine.

"Is that a good 'huh' or a bad 'huh?'" I ask.

"The contrast disappeared when you shifted," she says. "So just a 'huh,' I guess. I'm going to give you more."

"Oh, um, alright."

Huh. I guess 'everything to template' means I can shapeshift blood contaminants straight out of my body somehow. It… honestly kind of makes sense, but it still feels a bit odd. How does that work? Where does the contrast go? I mean, I guess any crystals I grow just sort of un-grow themselves whenever I want, too. My power is so weird. I am once again flushed with an uncomfortable heat, and the doctor heads back to what I assume are the MRI controls.

"Alright, we're going to try again and see how consistent this is," she says.

Uh. Hmm. That means I have to decide how consistent I want this to be. Now that I know what's happening, I'm pretty sure I can keep the contrast in my blood more or less the same way I can keep Lia's brain in Emily's body. I can feel it inside me, now that I'm looking for substances in my blood that don't match my prior templates.

It's kind of interesting, actually. My power doesn't tell me what any particular chemical in the great red slurry of my arteries is, but I can absolutely tell how many different chemicals make up that slurry, and each of them has its own distinct… I don't know. Feel? They have an individual, indescribable chemical qualia, I guess. Now that I can identify this MRI contrast, I can shift it out of my body at will. I could probably do the same to any of the other chemicals in my blood, which could potentially be useful but seems kind of stupid to experiment with blindly.

Definitely gonna experiment with it later anyway, though. All the safe ways I can think of to pull it off would require me to tell people about it and maybe consult with experts on hormones or whatever and I think I'd rather just trial-and-error through it on my own, partly because I don't want to tell people about my minute control over my endocrine any more than I want them to know about my ability to replace my own brain, and partly because holy shit, I can replace my own fucking brain, so I doubt this is going to be any more capable of killing me than that.

So I guess that answers my question, huh?

I slowly remove the contrast from my system as I move through the MRI machine, fast enough to make it obviously abnormal but not so fast that it's instant. I want to give the impression that my power is 'healing' it off particularly quickly. Of course, there's the slight problem that I didn't do this the first time I got sent through this horribly uncomfortable machine, but the one saving grace I have is that I was in Lia's body at the time. To keep things consistent, I just have to not mess with the contrast while I'm in Lia's body, and flush it from my system whenever I'm not. Hopefully, it'll be taken as 'evidence' that Lia's body is my real one.

I let the doctor try to get a few more MRIs on me, trying to look similarly confused and annoyed whenever she mentions the contrast disappearing. Soon enough I'm out of the stupid MRI machine, but I apparently have something even worse lined up immediately afterwards.

I've been assigned a personal therapist.

And unlike the MRI, no one even acts like I have an option not to see them. I have an assigned time after power training class where I am required to see the therapist who lives on-site, and that's just in my schedule now, I guess. The soldier they sent to escort me and break the news tries to assure me that everyone with powers has to see a therapist, but I'm not stupid. I can do math. I ask if my therapist is the only therapist on-site and they say there's one other. My schedule says that I'm supposed to see this therapist every day. It's literally not possible for two therapists to host a session for every powered person on base every day—it's not even possible for them to host a session for every newly powered person every other day. I'm being singled out, treated as fragile. The thought burns.

But perhaps more importantly, this therapist could completely blow my cover.

Even in the hypothetical reality where I do need significant amounts of therapy, it doesn't matter, because I can't take advantage of it. This is an Army-hired therapist for fuck's sake. I can't talk about the vast majority of my life without admitting I'm not really who I say I am. This is worse than useless to me. This is a threat.

So I enter the office I'm directed to, declining to shake hands with the man who meets me inside. My therapist looks to be in his low thirties, with small, round glasses and a bald spot already encroaching on his otherwise-youthful features. He retracts his hand without any sign of offense or probing questions, simply sitting in one of the two comfy lounge chairs that flank either side of a low, glass table. I take the other one, since I am obviously supposed to.

And then I stare at him, projecting as stone-cold of a poker face as I can manage.

"Well, let's see… Lia Morgan, right?" he smiles at me, being very much not right. "I'm Dr. Henry Morrison. I'd like to start today by just going over a few things, discussing confidentiality and other…"

I tune him out a bit, mostly autopiloting as I agree to all the basic bullshit I have to agree to. It's more important to figure out my strategy here. The safest option, by far, is to belligerently deny speaking to the therapist at all. Anything that I say can and will be used against me, and even if I try to maneuver this guy into a story to convince him that I'm the real Lia, I'm not actually Lia, and I'm not a perfect liar either. Eventually I'll slip up, and this guy's whole job is to catch that.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure refusing to speak is an option. I'm already viewed with so much suspicion that refusing to speak to a therapist would be another red flag on a record that already has too many of them. I need to reverse that downward slide and create a rapport here. Having bad therapy marks could be pretty terrible for my future, but good therapy marks could be the sigh of relief the upper brass has been hoping for.

Because like, come on. Nobody wants for it to turn out that I'm an alien spy. Nobody wants the new wing-ripper to be insane. Everyone's bias is on my side here. I just have to give them something to believe in.

So. I need to be a normal girl with normal problems. I need to commiserate with the therapist like I'm supposed to, but it has to be about things that aren't too worrying. I can do that. That's pretty normal conversation tactics.

"...So, that's pretty much it," the therapist finally finishes. "With all that in mind, is there anything you want to talk about in the time we have remaining?"

"...I'm not really sure," I say hesitantly. "A lot has happened in my life recently."

"I can only imagine," he smiles.

God, what do I say? All my problems are kind of fucked up, actually. I can't whine about getting kicked out of power training class for trying to train my power, although I absolutely want to. I definitely can't talk about any of the things that actually scare me about that power, either. Should I talk about my worries with Anastasia? That would be pretty humanizing, but if he tries to reassure me she'll be safe in the fucking Army I might blow up on him. Oh, I know. I can talk about Christine.

"...I'm a little worried about my roommate," I admit.

"Your roommate?" he repeats with apparent surprise.

"Yeah, Christine," I nod. "She doesn't exactly have a soldier's disposition. She has a lot of issues that make it difficult for her to, y'know, fight aliens. But she's going to have to, and I just… I'm not sure how to help her with that."

"Hmm. What do you mean?"

"Uh. Not really sure how else to put it. When we were out in the incursion zone, she literally couldn't fight to save her own life. It's only now that we're out of the incursion zone that I've seen her actually experiment with her abilities a little, but even then she spends a lot of her time complaining about how we're being treated rather than just… learning to manage it, you know?"

"Hmm. What do you mean by that? 'Learning to manage it?'"

That stops me a little short.

"...Is there more than one thing that could mean?" I ask.

"Mmm, I try not to assume," the therapist shrugs. "It caught my attention, is all. You don't have to elaborate if you don't want to."

Hmm. Do I not want to? Nah, this should be fine. Unless Peter specifically hears this—which is exceedingly unlikely—I think it counts as a believably Lia-ish philosophy. She was, if nothing else, a woman of action.

"In life, you will never stop having problems," I explain. "It sucks, but it's reality. You either develop the ability to handle those problems, or you don't."

"I see. And what happens if you don't?"

"You become a burden on others," I answer. "The problems don't go away, after all. They just compound until they bleed out into other people's lives and force them to solve things for you, whether because they empathize and want to help or more likely because your problems are just in everyone else's way."

"That sounds like an easy thing to resent," the therapist comments. "Other people's problems being in your way, I mean."

Ha. You think you can trip me up with that?

"I think anyone who resents people for letting their problems spill over doesn't really understand those people," I answer. "I mean, resentment is generally about being treated unfairly, right? It's about saying 'hey, what the fuck, I have problems too. How come I don't get as much help as that person who is barely even doing anything?' There's a component of envy to it, but the reality is that there's nothing enviable about those people. Not being able to solve your own problems doesn't mean you get waited on hand and foot. It means your life is completely, utterly miserable. It's a horrible existence."

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Why do you say that?"

I laugh.

"Because other people can never solve all your problems, obviously!" I answer. "Not unless you're lucky enough to be born with the wealth of a queen and the servants to match. Any problem that gets bad enough for people to reach out and try to help you with only gets help to the point that those people can go back to ignoring it, because they all have their own shit to deal with. You're living a life where you have a closet bursting at the seams with issues. You can't hide them all in there so they keep spilling out on the floor, and you just have to sit there and watch as everyone else keeps cleaning that floor for you, and usually hating you for it! Not to mention, of course, that you still have all the problems in the closet. It's awful. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. There is no greater hell than being unable to fix your own life."

"Huh," the therapist says, "could you give me a moment to think about all that?"

"Uh, sure, I guess," I frown. He goes quiet for a while, leaving me to fidget and shift a bit while he thinks of an answer.

"It sounds to me like you've developed this view from a lot of personal experience," he eventually comments.

"Doesn't everybody develop all their views from personal experience?" I counter blandly, not wanting to get into any conversation about a past I'm not safely able to talk about.

He laughs like it's a joke.

"I suppose overall," Dr. Morrison agrees. "Still, I mention it because it seems important to you. Rather than resentment, it sounds like the emotion you feel might be closer to pity?"

I let out a sigh through my nose.

"That would just be patronizing," I disagree. "If you're talking about how I feel towards Christine specifically, I guess I'd describe it as obligation."

"Oh?" he asks. "And why's that?"

"Because no matter how much it doesn't solve the underlying issues, someone still needs to clean the floors," I answer. "Maybe if I do that enough she'll find the time to clean some of the closet."

"Hmm. I like the metaphor," he smiles. "I think my job in all this is to open the closet, look around, and help set a plan on where to start cleaning. Because you're right: ultimately, everyone has to clean that closet themselves. I think you're underestimating how valuable help and assistance is to that process, though."

"That's fine," I shrug. "I'll keep doing it either way, even if it feels like a waste of time. It would be nice if I could just clean the damn closet though, you know? Just… fix people."

"Do you consider Christine to be broken?" Dr. Morrison asks.

I roll my eyes.

"Not like that," I insist. "I say I wish I could fix people, but I don't know what that would even look like because no one has ever been fixed. Everyone is broken. I don't think there has been a single human in all of history that wasn't fucked up, some way or another."

"Including yourself?" he asks.

"...Is that not implicitly obvious?" I scowl.

"Well, if you don't mind me asking, I'm curious about how you consider yourself, in your words, 'fucked up.'"

I smile at him the way I smiled at the couples that came by looking for kids to adopt.

"Maybe I just work too hard," I answer.

After a bit more talking about nothing, 'therapy' is finally over. I make my way to the mess hall to grab whatever scraps of dinner are still left (since my therapy time apparently cuts into my dinner time), and opt to eat most of it on the way back to my room rather than grabbing a table. My room, after all, is the only place I'm not constantly being stalked by soldiers. At least the wall cameras have the decency to stay out of sight, you know? Way more polite. I make my way inside and, to my pleasant surprise, find Anastasia and Christine sitting on Christine's bed. Upon seeing me, though, Anastasia immediately gets up and sprints over.

"Lia!" she greets me happily, running over and squeezing me into a hug. Her domain engulfs mine, being much larger, though it doesn't try to fight me for dominance, instead just flowing around mine like water around a rock, snug but discrete. I realize, belatedly, that she has a fist-sized glob of blood following her, though my power tells me through our touch that whatever injury she must have sustained to summon it is long gone, already healed off. She must have kept the blood with her for a while.

"Hey, Lia," Christine greets me as well. "Are you doing okay?"

Christine also has something weird, I realize. She's holding a Rubik's Cube for some reason.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I tell them. "I was fine the whole time."

"Uh, you didn't sound fine," Christine frowns.

"You screamed like you were dying!" Anastasia says, though I can't tell how worried about it she was since she's currently staring up at me with a big grin thanks to the hug. I squeeze her a little tighter.

"Sorry about that," I say. "It was a bit overwhelming, and kind of painful. But I'm fine."

The worst that could have happened was removing my own brain, after all, and I'd probably just walk that off. Probably. I mean, it's possible I could have died, but eh. I bet I was just panicking.

"Painful isn't okay!" Anastasia insists.

I boop her nose and smoosh it around a little with my finger.

"You, of all people, don't get to tell me that," I grouse. "What's all that blood floating behind you?"

"The trainer guy said I should see how long I can control it," Anastasia answers, breaking away from the hug and the just punishment of my nose boop. "To see how long until it co-a-glue-ates."

"Coagulates," I correct. "It means to thicken into a more solid mass, like clumps of old gravy."

"Eww!" Anastasia giggles. "But yeah! I've dropped the ball a couple times from getting distracted but so far I've been able to pick it back up! Isn't that neat?"

"It is," I agree. The less she has to hurt herself, the better. "Good job, Ana."

Christine suddenly makes a surprised noise, and I look over to her and see that her Rubik's Cube has exploded. …In a good way, I think. It's now floating in pieces over her hands, while she stares at it in apparent shock.

"Oh god! Okay. Back at the first step," she mutters to herself.

"I'm guessing you got assigned a training exercise, too?" I ask her.

"Huh? Oh, um, yeah. They want to know if I can manipulate the orientation of the parts in the exploded view. Just like… with my mind, or something. I genuinely have no idea if I can."

"I guess taking apart a Rubik's Cube would be the easiest way to solve it, if you don't know how to do it the normal way," I hum. "Could be useful for a lot of stuff."

"I guess," Christine mutters.

"Honestly, Christine, I'm kind of surprised you're practicing on your own time," I admit.

"I mean, it's not like I want to," she scowls. "There just isn't anything else to do."

Hah. That's fair. I wonder if that's on purpose? Stick a bunch of people with new powers in a place where they can't do anything other than use those powers, and they'll start training themselves out of boredom.

“This feels impossible,” Christine scowls. “I can't do it.”

Wow, giving up already? I am truly shocked.

"Come on, you got this," I try to encourage her.

"N-no, I think this isn't a me problem, I think my power… literally might not do this?" she frowns. "Like… hmm."

She reaches out with her hands, shifting the orientation of the outer pieces of the cube using her fingers. As she rotates them in the air, they keep their new positions, and after lining up all the colors she causes the cube to collapse back together, now fully solved.

"I can do that," she says. "Which is… actually kind of cool, I guess. I wish I had my Gunpla. But the trainer said that since I'm already using telekinesis to take everything apart and hold it in place, I should also be able to use telekinesis to rotate things, rather than just using my hand. But I don't think I can? I dunno, it's hard to tell why I can't do something on any particular day, but I think it's a limitation of my power somehow."

"Huh," I say. "That is kind of weird. Your power is clearly capable of fine manipulation of objects, so why wouldn't it be able to rotate it?"

"Yeah," Christine frowns. "I agree it's sound logic, but that's just the impression I get. Powers are weird, I guess."

"Very weird," I agree. "I started to grow bug legs instead of body hair for a bit back there."

Christine gives me this look.

"...I didn't need to know that," she says. "I was too far away to see what was happening to you, but now I have to see it in my mind forever."

"I can show you if I want," I grin, holding up my arm and wiggling my fingers. "Just a million little bug legs."

She immediately looks away.

"Please don't," she says emphatically, so I don't, contenting myself with a little chuckle. Man, teasing people is kind of fun. I can't remember the last time I was close enough with someone that I could just do it without being worried it would cross a line. It's weird.

"Ugh," Christine mutters. "Most people I know would kill for your power, and you use it to turn your hair into bug legs. I've half a mind to be offended."

"Hey, I don't usually do that!" I protest. "It just kind of happened. When I expanded my domain for the first time I ended up getting templates for a ton of living things all at the same time, and I just… instinctively tried to turn into all of them at once, I think? I don't know. Some parts are clear, but other parts are pretty fuzzy. It was… overwhelming."

"Yeah, fair," Christine sighs. "I guess I picked up on that from all the screaming. Hopefully you'll be able to get a handle on it tomorrow?"

"I could try to get a handle on it now," I muse. "There are probably bugs in the walls and whatnot that my power could pick up on. And you guys are training your powers, so I don't want to be left behind."

"Uhh, are you sure that's a good idea?" Christine asks.

It's better than doing nothing. It's better than being afraid of what will happen. It's better than being a failure.

"I don't see why it wouldn't be," I say.

"There are way more animals outside than inside," Anastasia agrees. "It'll probably be easier!"

"Yeah, exactly Ana," I smile at her. "Look, I've gotta get used to it sometime."

"...Just don't turn into whatever giant spider is probably living in our walls, okay?" Christine begs.

"I promise," I nod. "If I turn into a spider, it will be totally normal-sized."

Then I close my eyes and prepare to expand my domain while she sits there sputtering. Okay. I got into trouble last time by doing this way too fast and ending up with too many different insects and other critters all crowding my brain at the same time. So this time, I'm going to learn my lesson and do this slowly. I do my best to encapsulate that feeling I had when I was pushing back against Commander's domain, feeling my power as a part of me that can, in fact, be felt. Carefully, I nudge it outwards, increasing the radius bit by bit, and when I inevitably touch something with it other than Anastasia and Christine, I stop.

It is, in fact, a spider. I feel the urge to try out its form, but with a shiver I push it down and just focus on understanding the template and its potential uses. Like the aliens, spiders have hydraulic musculature, but it's dramatically less powerful and efficient, not scaling up to the sizes I mainly care about.

That's the main problem with most of its body, really: it's only optimized for its size, and its size is unlikely to be particularly relevant to me most of the time. I can't reasonably implement the majority of its body into other forms. With one obvious exception, of course: the spinnerets.

…Not that those are without problems, of course. Again, I can't just take a body part and increase its size like I'm scaling an image on a computer. It completely destroys the structural integrity, and I think it might ruin the specific mechanism used to weave the silk. But maybe if I put a huge number of them close enough together I could make something that effectively functions as a scaled-up spinneret?

I'll look into it later. For now, I have the template. Let's keep going.

I repeat the process a few more times, carefully expanding my range and stopping whenever I hit something new so I can take the time to process it without my whole body freaking out. This happens over and over, all with little bugs I have no real use for, until I'm suddenly overwhelmed by something unexpected.

My domain brushes up against one of the soldiers outside.

The information floods into my head in a storm, my power happily gobbling up the first example of human male physiology I've gotten so far. It's… I mean, it's not that different from the human bodies I have access to so far, but I really could have gone without the exact anatomy of a penis being burned into my brain forever. I resist the instinctive transformation even more firmly this time, and though my body insists on copying some of the objectively superior muscle definition for a while (he is a soldier, after all, whereas Lia is just some teenage girl) I shove myself back to 'normal' with great discomfort. Ugh. This is getting more and more difficult to do. I hate being in Lia's body.

I open my eyes, resolving to take a break, only to find that Anastasia isn't in the room anymore, and Christine is in bed. Huh. I never stopped feeling Anastasia, but I guess she just went to her room after my domain became large enough to reach into it a bit. Expanding things out to this size is a bit exhausting in some weird, ephemeral way. I feel almost lightheaded, my mind crowded with the constant position and biological status of everything in my range, barring Christine and Anastasia themselves, whom my domain can't even try to scan with how stretched thin it currently is. Instead I only feel their own domains, Christine's pulled tight against her body while she sleeps whereas Anastasia's still radiates out from her a good six feet in every direction.

I start to shrink my domain back down, but as I pull away from Anastasia her power's radius suddenly expands, as if trying to catch me and stop me from leaving. She reaches towards me, tendrils of presence questing out from the edge of her domain like fingers looking for a hand to hold. My domain usually conforms to the contours of my body or expands into a perfect sphere, so I'm not sure I can reciprocate, but I give it my best shot, threading myself into an awkward interlace of our powers and giving her a light squeeze. She pulls away, and I finish retreating my domain to its usual size.

I still need to take a shower.

Stifling a desire to groan, I quietly make my way to the bathroom and strip down, glowering at the angry reflection of someone else's face in the mirror. The glower nearly turns into a full-on growl, and my face starts to shift into something else. I don't know what, just anything but this! I twist between every face I already have and every combination thereof, I grow scales over my entire body, then suck them away and replace them with alien skin. I grow and remove tentacles, I twist my organs between their alien and human counterparts. But in the end, I have nothing to settle on. Nothing that's actually me. Lia is nothing but a mask, and she's chafing hard enough that the welts are starting to bleed.

Lia. Lia Morgan. Ms. Morgan. Recruit Morgan. It's all I fucking hear!

"Julietta," I whisper at the wall, knowing I probably shouldn't. Julietta is dead. I don't get to be her anymore. Not where anyone can see, and I am always being watched.

"Julietta!" I growl again. Where were all those wretched, scarred lumps on my face again? It's not as though I ever enjoyed looking at myself, but now there's nothing else I'd rather see. I start inflaming the tissue of my face, building masses of flesh in an attempt to copy my old mess of a body, but it's not the same. It's not even close. Even if I knew how to make the scar tissue right, I never looked at myself enough to remember what my face even was.

In a fit of unexpected impulse, I almost, almost punch the mirror, barely aborting the motion before making contact. Holding that pose, I stare at myself again, at my aborted mess of a face, at the way Lia's goddamn chest sways uncomfortably while I lean over. I shift it away, replacing it with the chest of the man I copied earlier, but for some reason that just makes me feel even worse so I grow them back, making them smaller instead. Fuck this. Fuck my body. Fuck today.

Be honest with yourself, Julietta. Even if you could turn back into your old body, you'd just hate that too. You can become literally anything, but there isn't anything that you want to be. There is no body that you genuinely strive for, wish for, or desire. Why would there be? There's nothing—not a single damn thing—that could make you look in the mirror and actually feel happy.

I let crystal scales bloom back over my skin one more time, tentacles twisting out from my back and the Angel's eyes blooming across my face. Underneath it all, Lia's body is still there, still defining my shape, but a sharp layer of inhumanity lies between her and the rest of the world, twisting her beauty into something unmistakably alien.

Then I take a deep breath, return to Lia's template, and step into the shower, letting frigid water pound against my skin for the next ten minutes as I wash myself off. Christine was right. Hot water is a lot more pleasant, at least by comparison. In some ways I wonder if that makes cold water the better option; I think I'd prefer to spend as little time alone in the bathroom as possible, and the discomfort is a good motivator to be quick and stay focused.

I could also just shower using an alien's brain, though. I doubt my Raptor brain would have felt compelled to yell at a piece of fucking glass. I hardly used an alien brain at all today, come to think of it. Maybe that's why I was so miserable. I'm suffering from fearlessness withdrawals. I'm addicted to alien biology. That's all it is. An addiction. A simple habit to break.

I go to bed and dream of falling slowly through an ever-shifting void. It feels like anything is possible, but unlike Anastasia the sensation doesn't remind me of hope. Though the presence surrounding me does its best to reassure me, the uncertainty is still a little terrifying.