But she didn’t want to confront Tanairy.

“Oh, good afternoon, guys,” the blonde in unfortunate question greeted, calmly upright in the backseat of the car with her arms crossed over her lap. Despite the posture, her face looked bright. But, like a throbbing pain in the neck, Cosima felt the woman’s beady eyes smiling towards her, breathing down her already aching neck. It was a large, filthy chip on her shoulder, weighing her to a slouch and chipping away at whatever tolerance she managed to carry from her hospital bed. “You guys alright? Hospital must’ve been hellish.”

The hell?

The front seat next to the occupied driver’s seat was vacant.

“Oh, afternoon,” Sinjin responded politely, shelling as much exhaustion as he could to wing mirth at the other woman. He clutched the grab handle from outside the car. Cosima flinched. “Yeah, uh, hospital was… fun, I guess. But we’re alive.”

Cosima’s body burnt all over as she shifted from Sinjin’s tight grip and slid faster than she needed into the middle seat of the car. Sinjin hid it well, but she knew he’d turn down an offer to sit in the front seat to avoid sitting next to a stranger he didn’t intend to have to meet more than once. She didn’t wish to go to the front, too; the other two would be in the back.

She was the smallest of the three, anyway. So, it was a necessity that she was in the middle.

“Ah, good, good. Glad you’re alright.” Tanairy placed her purse down from the chair and onto the dusty mats to accommodate Sinjin, the latter sitting at the edge of his seat, wearing a lopsided smile on a grim exterior. The blonde checked her seatbelt, fastening the wrinkled strap. There was some silence, but she managed to interrupt it freely, reaching for the air conditioning port and mumbling, “Man, it’s hot. I’ll turn on the AC—”

“1 casualty.”

The AC switched on. They froze at Theta’s interruption. The older man looked up from his phone, switching it off as he stared at them through the rearview mirror. He started driving, a cacophony of collisions from a pile of trinkets swishing around in the car’s boot and shaking the air.

“1 casualty in yesterday’s accident,” Theta reiterated, discarding his phone as he forced the car into full motion, sharply driving towards the exit of the crowded hospital complex. Seatbelt buckles clicked just as fast as the car. “A woman. Impaled by high-speed shrapnel. Headshot. A lot were severely wounded as well.”

The car vents sputtered as cold air drenched them. Sinjin clicked his tongue the second time that day, drawing out an audible hiss as if his cold shoulder had begun melting. It would be easy to brush something like this away if they were far from the melting pot of people who faced such a destructive accident. But the two of them were there, living and breathing the moment against their own will. She couldn’t key into the willful ignorance this time; she couldn’t escape from this truth.

She glimpsed at Tanairy; the woman appeared to have swallowed the bitter pill long before they had. The blonde looked out the window with a frown that didn’t fit her, keeping herself compact and rigid as she watched the buildings roll by as the car hit the ground running. The woman wore pity; she wasn’t at the catastrophe, though. She could run a mile and sweeten the pill if she wanted, but she chose not to. Cosima couldn’t wrap her head around that.

“The dingus cat-woman managed to beat the rap and escape from authority once more. But the actual cause of that death was arrested.” Theta tapped the dashboard’s touchscreen, one hand rapping against the wheel as he drove. “So it’s not all that bad, I guess.”

He slapped his lingering hand back onto the wheel, breaking the uncomfortable silence with heated exuberance. “Anyways—uh—thank you for calling me this morning! I’m very eager to hear about the shell shock experience, Mistah Sinjin.”

Sinjin pursed his lips tightly, and Cosima swore she could hear his bloodshot eyes roll. Carpooling in Theta’s car wasn’t something Sinjin was willing to roll up his sleeves for. She knew it would be a bumpy ride ahead for him because, even with the free ride laid out for them on a silver platter, he wished to keep his speech silver and his silence golden. To him, Theta was a one-or-two-time thing—nothing more. But with the prying eyes of the driver attempting to prize open his mind, he knew he couldn’t avoid the man’s curiosity. So he blew out a breath and his cover.

“It blows. Hurt.” He paused, rubbing his scalp as his head bumped against the vibrating window. He murmured again before Theta could butt in to diminish the silence. “Hated it.”

“I see… I see.” The man made popping noises with his lips, leaving the three in the backseat to their thoughts. Cosima couldn’t think with the shaking vents and rumbling trunk, but questions swam in her mind that she wished to ask. A benefit of getting a free ride from Theta was that she could catch up on the session she missed the previous day. However—either the air was thick, or the subject of her main query was clogging her windpipe—she couldn’t get a single word out.

This is awkward…

She didn’t want to cough—all eyes would be on her. Back then, she’d spill her thoughts without coughing or choking up. But being out for too long drained her. Even with all these thoughts in her head, vanishing into thin air seemed like a feasible option to escape this tension.

She couldn’t escape; she was between a rock and a hard place.

“Y’know, you two are pretty lucky to have been part of that whole fiasco,” Theta blurted out, speeding into his following sentence in a flimsy attempt to clear any hint of insensitivity in his words. “And, er, what I mean by that is that it’s not every day you get to be in the actual site of a crime like yesterday. Especially when it includes something as big as lightning manipulation and all that other plasma jazz.”

Tanairy’s mouth shot open. But she fled from her rebuttal, her defeat shown in the silent breath she let out. The pent-up energy had instead rerouted to her tapping foot.

“In vitro is nothing compared to in vivo by a long shot. Going beyond your comfort zone and seeing something new with the naked eye is something I enjoy personally.” Theta’s eyes lit up in the rearview mirror, far beyond the glassy-eyed gaze the passengers wore. “I’m pretty hands-on. I see something cool from a distance? I want to experience it in its entirety and gain a full sense of it.”

His eyes landed on Cosima; she shivered in her hood. He added, “So I’m sorry if I’m being nosy. I do everything in good taste.” He lowered his voice. “My wife’s working on the garden, so luckily, she isn’t here to pinch my ear like I’m some ‘effin child. Love her to smithereens, though.”

They stopped forcefully at a red light in traffic. Cosima coughed dryly into her elbow. A “bless you” quipped from the driver’s seat as Sinjin urgently coddled her, patting and rubbing her back.

“You ok?”

“I think”—she coughed up more hot mucus—”so.”

I need to ask about this.

“Tissue?”

Tanairy waved a tissue in front of her face. Cosima wished to wave the concern from the woman’s face, hesitating to accept the offer. But she didn’t want to shy away from it—her body screamed. It would be foolish to decline the small gesture, but as she accepted the tissue, she felt herself shrink under the woman’s grace. Sinjin kept soothing her despite that.

But she still felt like crap.

“Thank you,” Cosima muttered reluctantly to Tanairy, cleaning away at the mess she had become accustomed to, both the green and purple ones. She’d been doing that a lot this week.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Now,” Theta began, scratching his messy hair. The green light blinked, the car revving into motion. The man spun the wheel one-handedly. “Miss Cosima, how have you not awakened—”

Ah, yes. I’m the professional in the car.

“—with your toad thingie? You were in the same accident yesterday with your hubby, and that should’ve been enough mental stimulation and trauma to forcefully activate it.”

The sentence was stimulating in itself. All that came to Cosima’s mind were the distressed cries of Sinjin as he barricaded them from the crumbling world. But now he barricaded himself, lost in thought in the moving scenery behind the window and sticking to his carapace. Still. Agitated. Distant.

It was enough to bring her to her senses; she had to open up eventually. Everything felt like a wake-up call to her at that moment. She wore mutated skin. She had a mutated toad in her genes. She fell victim to a mutated crime. She was too deep into the chaos, and the harmonization was irreversible.

She was pursuing a journey of reversal.

I’m too far into this. I need to start being curious.

It was the only way to close the distance.

So she distanced herself from fear, just for now. After all, there weren’t many people around—just three adults.

Theta hummed a tune as he drove, waiting for her answer. Sirens whirred on the road, closing in before fading out, giving Cosima time to collect her thoughts.

“I, uh”—she coughed, clearing her throat—”I’ve started coughing up… like, hot snot—”

“Oh?” Theta’s interest piqued, eyes darting from his wheels and training on the sickly woman from the mirror. Tanairy stiffened next to her as the car shook uncomfortably. “Sorry—tell me more.”

“That’s… it—”

“Ah—”

“Is it linked—”

“So it obviously may have some acidic properties. That’s to be expected, honestly—”

“Oh—”

“As you know, alongside all the womp-womp stuff that came from the CME, the radiation causes some bodily features and capabilities to enhance. From skills like strength, size, and speed. From more ‘human nature’ things like genes, brain structure, hormones, yada yada—we’ve all been through this.” Theta glimpsed at Sinjin and Tanairy. The two adults were in their own worlds. “Some people have insane, enhanced acid reflux, like you, at the moment. So you must be throwing up… not acidic, actually, but alkaline mucus, potentially mixed with small amounts of stomach acid. It’s cool, no worries.”

Cool? What does he think this is?

“Um, why—”

“Any other questions?”

“—doesn’t stomach—”

“Oh, ma bad. Continue.”

Cosima collected herself; she was making some progress.

“Doesn’t stomach acid… Doesn’t it, like, burn you?”

“Ah, that’s an easy one.” He hummed a triumphant tune as he blazed past a soon-to-be-red light. “It’s all about the parietal cells, which help in gastric acid secretion. The reason why your stomach acid isn’t currently burning a hole through your effin’ stomach is because of a layer of mucus and bicarbonate that lines the stomach wall, which means that the acid can’t damage it.”

“So…”

“So, I guess the mucus is still very much alkaline but has enough parietal cells to make it hot. But not completely burn off your skin. Or something like that. I don’t have the apparatus to even test that, but I know I’m mostly right.”

“Ah—”

“Because, who knows, cells are still organisms, as y’know already. They can be mutated, change potency, and possibly even refunctionalize themselves. It’s really interesting, so I should probably soon cop a microscope—”

Now he’s just rambling.

“—to observe that.” He cleared his throat. “Anyways, back on track. We have to expect the unexpected a lot nowadays, as I told you two days back. Those parietal cells, the mucus, your body in general—all these things we can expect to morph and change. For better or for worse.”

It was clear what the world chose for her body in particular.

“Of course, some things are true, and er—eff’ me, drive well!” He slammed the car horn, scowling at a nearby car clearing out of his way. He mumbled colorful curses at the vehicle as the three passengers gave each other disturbed looks. “Parietal cells will continue to aid in the function of gastric acid secretion. Well, unless the radiation destroyed that function somehow. But you obviously still have normal functioning and can clearly digest your food when needed.”

He frowned and said, “Some things stay constant and have to stay constant in this new life. Like the stupidity of people.” His eyes dotted around the crowded road as the car stopped at a red light at an intersection.

He smiled and bubbled, “But some things are variable and do change. We should never try to be limited; thinking big and beyond basic expectations is what we should start doing more because this horrible radiation makes us more advanced and pushes the world forward.”

The lights flickered green. “It’s evolution.” All vehicles burst into motion. “We should never turn down evolution.”

Cosima’s thoughts burst into motion, evolving in her head. She wasn’t too versed in the semantics of his speech, but she understood the surface-level notion.

The nurse’s words surfaced in her head.

‘Stick to what you have now’... or something like that. Why would I want that?

She wasn’t a stranger to opportunities. But she forgot when she became so indecisive about them, like now. According to the experienced man’s logic, there was potential for change in some things and zero potential for others.

Did she fit the bill into something that could change? Or something that had even an ounce of potential?

She didn’t have to look at herself to gauge that, nor did she want to. It had become a common habit, but her image seared into her mind. However, if humans could evolve and use smaller organisms to change their bodies, then being able to improve herself wasn’t farfetched. The power they all wielded was potential—an opportunity.

She raised herself better than that; she’d never turn down opportunities. She’d deny doctor’s orders.

“We shouldn’t be concerned with things like divine order… natural order because this world—now more than ever—works in mysterious ways.” Theta laughed to himself. “For example, sometimes the things we ensnare permanently force themselves out without our permission. You should know that; you’ve seen examples.” He pointed to his caracal ears.

Cosima flinched.

“It’s the natural process of, y’know, evolution we should accept.” The man’s face adopted a childlike wonder. “Like—Miss Cosima, who knows, you could start adopting bullfrog traits from out of nowhere! Haha!”

She shivered. The air conditioner gusted harder than she wished.

“You could start growing warts on your body!”

She shivered. Tanairy instinctively broke out of stiffness and turned down the air conditioner.

“Or your mucus begins to cover your skin like a cocoon.”

She shivered. She was still cold.

“Or even more bizarre, you could start breathing and drinking from your own skin!”

She shivered. Her spine shivered; she questioned if she even had the backbone to take any more of the cold truth.

It was ugly—she would be ugly.

“Maybe even—”

“Real quick.” Sinjin’s voice chilled the air—a veil of passive-aggressiveness laced his words, something only she could detect. Despite not lying back in his seat, he comforted Cosima’s dry hand, clasping his fingers around hers tightly. Even without the presence of eyebrows, he attempted to hide his scornful look from the sights of the rearview mirror. “I… uh, need to ask if you guys know anything about the policy when it comes to… uh… getting a car back from a road accident like the one we experienced.”

“Oh?” Tanairy shifted her gaze to the couple. “Don’t they… just, uh, close up the road and tow any cars with no driver—”

“I got no effin’ clue as well. I think they all just get towed or something—I dunno, it’s beyond me—”

“I was guessing they send the cars leftover from hospitalized drivers to a tow yard… Google searches barely cover things like this, so my best bet is to find my car affidavit—think I have it in a file somewhere—and show it to the authority—”

“Would they broadcast the tow yard?” Tanairy questioned.

“They must. My car better not be destroyed, I swear to God—”

“I’m sure it’d be fine—”

“It’d probably take a few days for them to broadcast it on the news, right?”

“I think so. It’s weird—”

“Hmm—”

“It would take forever to—”

Clear. Cosima’s mind grew hollow. She couldn’t absorb the flowing discussion around her. She was focused on bigger things. Her breathing. Her posture. Her goals.

Even when Sinjin expertly diverted the conversation away from her, Theta’s explanations of random evolution tormented her mind. She knew the reasons people would resort to ensnaring animals. In the world they lived in, the need for protection trumped all things. But, by doing so, she didn’t seem to acknowledge that she needed to protect herself from the reality of going down such a path. Theta didn’t mention the possibility of her permanently having a cannon sticking out of her mouth. Her throat burnt just thinking about it.

How will I even get to the cure? It’s mostly just a coincidence I find an animal or plant with it.

She remembered her freakish nature without having to waste energy on introspection.

But the more I take into myself, the more traits I get. That would probs mean I get stronger. Right? Right?

Theta’s words replayed in her head, horridly spliced with her own thoughts.

Warts… mucus… skin…

No matter how she looked at it, things were bound to get ugly. Or they already had.

If I gain more traits, I get strong enough to defend myself from cure-onlookers…

Sinjin’s grip tightened around her as he spoke to the other woman—a psychic confirmation of their loyalty.

But he wants a pacifistic route. I won’t disobey that.

She tamed her breathing. She tamed her posture.

So… So, I need some connections somehow. More connections.

She tamed her goals. But she could’ve just been too optimistic for her own good. The aspiration she had in mind could easily bite back at her. She could writhe in aching sores. She could lose herself to the hunt. She could die.

She could become uglier simply by wanting something coveted by everyone. But if there was anything she was familiar with, it was that barriers to entry existed. Some people pushed forward and changed, while others were left behind and remained unchanged. The world was always scouting for successes, testing the capacity of everyone living in it to exert themselves and push the limits of their own doubts to achieve greatness. To survive in a society like this, she had to accept the ugly truth behind wanting to succeed. But how long could she go? How much could she do?

How far was she willing to go for her body?