> duckling, phoenix; postworld

>

> 004 dusted off Dawn

  Melanie’s head kind of felt like an army of those wacky little cymbal monkeys had settled down and started families, raised communities, and founded a small nation-state inside it. The cymbal monkey government had become a dictatorship after a particularly brutal coup, and now controlled the economy, which ran on Skittles from the looks of it. Judging by the colours swirling in her field of vision, the purple ones seemed like they were worth the most, although maybe she was only seeing pocket change. She wasn’t sure.

  “…What,” she groaned, rubbing the fever dream delirium out of her face. She knew that going back to sleep had been a mistake.

  She felt awful. She broadly remembered having a fairly miserable day yesterday. She didn’t remember a whole lot of much about the details, so it was probably the perfectly regular sort of miserable day that simply happened from time to time. Hadn’t her swimming coach gotten sick of her? Something like that was usually the cause of something or other…

  Her waking thoughts swam vaguely as a slow but critical question shyly took center stage in her awareness.

  It was the middle of the week. Why hadn’t her alarm gone off?

  She opened her eyes, and the final echo of her world was destroyed instantly by a single realization.

  That’s not my bedroom ceiling.

  It was at first like dream logic. She acknowledged it, and thought nothing of it. It took a moment to notice the feeling of lucidity of wakefulness, her brain beginning to warm to life, that the sight began to sink in.

  That means this isn’t my bedroom.

  There was no way she could have forgotten what her bedroom ceiling looked like. She made some ridiculous mistakes in the past, but surely this was beyond her. But this certainly wasn’t a bedroom ceiling. A bedroom ceiling was not meant to be this pure white, this sterile. This looked more like a hospital.

  She remembered… pain, of some sort or another. Did she hurt herself? She sat up, looking about at the pure white room. Her bedclothes were white, the walls and ceiling and floor were white. The doors, one in front and the other to her right, were white. The table by her bedside was white, and the plastic shell of the alarm clock was white. Even the digital display lit up in the shapes of letters and numbers in white.

  “September 14th…” she read aloud.

  Yeah, it had been a day. Nothing drastic at all had warranted such a big change.

Frowning, she put her feet on the ground, stood up off the bed, and almost fell on her face. Her legs didn’t give out - rather, they stood firmer than she expected. Something about the space didn’t add up, like the floor was closer than she thought.

  No, not the space… It wasn’t that the floor was closer, it was that her feet were closer to it… Her legs had somehow changed. Stumbling around when she had grown in the night wasn’t unheard of, but this was probably the first time she’d noticed having done so. Maybe it was because everything else was so different…

  Her clothes weren’t anything she remembered owning. A short white thing that was probably supposed to be a hospital gown was sticking to her skin.

  Corollary: her skin was sticky. Gross.

  There had to be a bathroom somewhere, right? One of the doors, she supposed. Any running water would do, she wasn't picky. She reasoned that she had an intuitive enough grasp of the structure of a building to go looking──

  “Ow.”

  Her movements had yanked at something, and a pain rang in her arm. She'd drawn blood from her elbow pit, and a tube was rattling against…

  Oh, it's an IV stand.

  They obviously expected her to be here for a while… Maybe she'd have to put it back in later, but she felt fine right now. Well, not entirely fine. She was still sticky. She left the drip be, opening the side door.

  Exactly as she’d hoped, there was a small bathroom on the other side. A toilet, a sink and mirror, and even a shower cubicle. Glancing at her face in the mirror felt almost dizzying somehow, but she didn’t have time for that sort of thing in the face of a wash so direly needed.

  How did she get in this state anyway, she wondered? Yesterday was just regular swimming, and maybe she'd just forgotten to shower after that, but this seemed a bit much for just the pool. Maybe it was just a particularly extreme example, but since when did pool water make her sticky?

  It was at this point she would usually be told she was overthinking it, but that sort of thing didn't satisfy her. Unfortunately, she also knew she didn't have the brains to figure it out just by thinking about it, so she would have to look it up later. With that resolution, she stepped into the cubicle and turned on the water. It sprayed her gown that she was still wearing and she backed off so hard she almost fell over.

  “No, it’s like I said. That’s all I know.”

  “And there were no clues as to what he might have been wearing underneath?”

  “Could’ve been nothing for all I could tell you.”

  Blaze had tried very hard to keep her patience intact, but she was starting to run low on the energy she’d reserved for this. She had expected the train of questions to end eventually, but it had been twenty minutes now.

  Dr Stoker, the head of the Medical Department, was a damn handsome man. She had to admit that much. He was easily the tallest person that she had ever met, and his long dark hair never had a single strand out of place even as it was tied in a simple yet somehow artistic style that probably would have been in fashion at a ren faire. The flawless nightlike colour framed his pale blue eyes well enough that he was immediately striking from just a glance. He was probably topping the list of teachers whose students would appreciate pinups of, but Blaze was reminded more than ever as she sat in front of him that his good looks belied a personality that was… difficult to assess.

  He had been staring at her this whole time with a gaze that was skewering her alive, incessantly wringing her for anything she had to say about her fight with the Rogue yesterday. She had already said it all. Frankly, she didn’t have a clue as to why he of all people was in charge of collating all of the accounts, but it probably had something to do with the injured person she had brought back.

  Stoker at last reclined in his seat, sighing. “Okay, I think this is all we can do for now,” he finally admitted. “It’s basically nothing to go off, but I suppose that’s just how it is.”

  That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you this whole time, came the silenced words that Blaze barely trapped behind her teeth. She’d changed some details, like shooting to make the driver crash, but nothing that would hinder tracking down their fugitive ─ not least because she barely knew anything useful about that to begin with. “So can I go now?”

  “No point keeping you here,” he said. “I just have one last thing.”

  Blaze felt conniptions bubbling under her surface. “What?”

  “You mentioned that his mask came off.”

  “I told you, I didn’t see his face.”

  “I know,” he replied, “but I’m more interested in what happened to the mask.”

  A bell rang in her skull. “It fell off the bridge and into the Channel.”

  “I see.” He gave a slow nod, scribbling something into his notebook. Blaze couldn’t see his handwriting, but she could only imagine from the movement of his hand that it was as illegible as any doctor’s. “That’s all I wanted. Thank you for your help.”

  “Yeah,” replied Blaze, getting to her feet and heading for the door. She didn’t look back, eager to be out of there, but the sight in the corridor somehow made her as angry as if she had been called back. She restrained herself as Jett raised an eyebrow.

  “You’re still here,” she observed.

  “I was waiting for you. ‘Fell into the Channel’?” he echoed in a low voice. “Why didn’t you just tell him you gave it to Lulu?”

  The very Lulu in question was beside him, smirking like a cat. “Isn’t it obvious? They’d want it from me, which means that I wouldn’t be able to finish my investigation and give Blaze first dibs on that sweet, sweet vengeance.”

  “It’s not about vengeance,” Blaze narrowed her eyes. “I want answers. He said some shit that I’m going to make him elaborate on.”

  “Oooh, scary,” she stuck her tongue out. “But whew, am I glad I was playing hooky. If I got dragged outside in my undies, who knows what would’ve happened!”

  Her tone was theatrical, but her phrasing was enough to betray her sarcasm. Blaze supposed it was probably a lot easier for someone who had missed the party to not take it as seriously as it warranted.

  “If you weren’t playing hooky, you would’ve been dressed,” Jett helpfully pointed out with a voice dry as sandpaper.

  Stoker’s voice interrupted, calling from inside his office. “Lulu, you’re next.”

  “Buh. But I didn’t even see anything…” she whined, dragging herself in.

  Blaze watched her shamble past, and then turned away without a second thought.

  “Not waiting for her?” asked Jett.

  “Hell no,” she shot back. “I have better things to do with the rest of my natural life.”

  “Well, okay,” he shrugged. “Going home then?”

  “No,” she said again. “There’s something I wanted to follow up on from yesterday.”

  He raised an eyebrow, but she shook her head.

  “It’s a long story,” she said, “but I’ve got a feeling you’re about to be real fucking lost if you don’t hear it. Come on.”

  The sensation of water running over her skin was something that Melanie was practically born familiar with, but it hadn’t taken her much more than a few seconds for her brain to almost completely short-circuit at the feeling.

  This wasn’t right.

  She’d had some minor suspicion, she realized, lurking in the back of her mind since she first stood up off the bed, waiting patiently and silently in the folds of her confusion for her to properly arrive at it. But now, feeling the water trickle over flesh she didn’t remember having, it was laughable, impossible, to avoid it.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  In some sense, she had become someone else.

  Her first assumption was that she had woken up in someone else’s body; someone who was supposed to be in that white room with an IV drip in their arm. She knew, somehow, that it couldn’t possibly be that simple ─ that it had to be more complicated, because that didn’t just happen ─ but this was unequivocally not her own body.

  For a start, her height was completely off. She felt like she’d grown an entire foot. Her hair was supposed to be shoulder-length, but this dark waterlogged mane that was clinging to her waist was entirely unlike the mass of pine bark-coloured frizz she’d had attached to her scalp. The water was no doubt throwing the color way off, but this already looked more like stone than wood, and there was one particular patch on the left side of her head that just felt thicker somehow.

  And while she was on that, her limbs felt heavier too. Not in the sense that they were hard to lift. Actually, she noticed as she stomped on the wet floor of the cubicle a few times, they were much easier to lift than before. She felt less sluggish, like she had more momentum. The bizarre balance of multiplying her weight and her strength in equal measure didn’t add up to zero as she would have expected; she could absolutely feel the extra force she was so easily exerting. Yet, for some reason, it wasn’t as though they had radically changed. They were longer, certainly, but that was roughly where it stopped. There was a little extra muscle on these arms and legs, but not any more bulk than would fit the height.

  Actually, she was very well-proportioned… Her waist felt comfortably tighter than before. The difference between her hips before and these wasn’t so much that it was totally alien, but in hindsight, that was probably the main reason for her difficulty standing and walking earlier. On top of that, this chest was visibly just that much bigger than her own. Combined with the posture that came naturally to her, she had to wonder if this body belonged to a model, or maybe an athlete… Now she thought about it, maybe even a swimmer, a real swimmer. The proportions and muscle mass were absolutely perfect for it, after all.

  An oddly bizarre tang of pride and envy crossed her mind at the knowledge that this figure she was wearing was both fantastic and something she’d have to find a way to give back to its real owner. The world was practically taunting her with this.

  Perhaps she could just keep it, she wondered. Maybe just let someone more capable than her take over her regular life and get it in order while she conveniently picked up where they left off in their own…

  “As if,” she smiled to herself.

  That’d be silly, not to mention rude and a generally pretty bad decision. In the first place, it wasn’t like she was smart enough to steal someone’s identity, not even considering how awful it would have been to do it. On top of that, whoever she’d swapped with was probably panicking and trying to get their real body back right about now, so the least she could do for them was help them with getting things back to normal…

  Well, assuming that’s even possible, she silently mused.

  For all she knew, this could have been irreversible. Maybe it was like trying to unscramble an egg, or maybe there was just nobody out there who could figure out how to do it. After all, it wasn’t like there was going to be some convenient thing to swap them back the moment they tracked each other down, and she doubted that this was something to do with some cosmic moral lesson where the two of them had to learn some special truth to swap themselves back. More likely, this was some kind of freak accident ─ a one-in-a-hundred-billion stroke of bad luck that would require a one-in-a-hundred-billion-hundred-billions stroke of good luck to turn back again. Was that how probability worked?

  She doubted that there were many experts on randomly body-swapping with a stranger and how to fix it. Now she thought about it, how far away was she from New York? Was she in another state? Maybe even another country? Did she speak the language? Was she going to get locked up as a crazy person who had forgotten her real identity?

  …What if, hypothetically, that was actually true…?

  Well, it wasn’t as though she would be able to figure it out by just thinking real hard. She could reach any conclusion she wanted without ever finding a single clue, but she knew from experience that whatever she came up with was probably going to be wrong. The best thing to do was ask around, probably. Assuming there was anyone even here, of course, but she had a feeling that it wasn’t fairies who’d hooked her up to medical equipment, or left all this soap and shampoo here. She’d have liked conditioner too, but beggars weren’t in any position to be choosers.

  Having cleaned up to her satisfaction, with just one more coat of shampoo than she thought she needed to be on the safe side, Melanie carefully stepped out of the cubicle, cautious not to slip - her legs had already proven themselves to be traitors when her feet weren’t wet, shower mat or no.

  Looking around, there didn’t seem to be any towels to hand. Kind of an inconvenience, but one she could live with.

  What caught her eye more was the utter lack of fog on the mirror. It wasn’t as though the room was steamy, but the glass seemed almost ambivalent to that fact.

  She’d heard about this. By putting a heated panel behind the glass, it wouldn’t be cold enough for water vapor to condense on its surface. She hadn’t expected to see one, but if this was a proper hospital, it was possible that they had the budget for it.

  …This was a hospital, right? There was going to be someone around to tell her if that IV she’d accidentally pulled out was important, right? It was probably fine. Statistically. Maybe. She didn’t know anything about statistics. She’d find out later.

  More importantly, she’d figured out what had thrown her off when she had glanced into the mirror before, and it was throwing her off now too.

  First of all, she hadn’t been mistaken. That really was her face. She had recognised it so well that it hadn’t even crossed her mind. So if that was her face, where did this body come from?

  But the eyes she was making contact with in the reflection were different. They weren’t hers.

  “Oh, that can’t be good,” she whispered.

  That was not a normal color for human eyes.

  She was expecting brown eyes. Her eyes were brown, that wasn’t something she could have mistaken this entire time. Yellow eyes she could have understood, maybe. She didn’t think yellow was a proper eye color, but she could have accepted that yellow eyes existed somewhere. There were lots of things, after all, that were yellow in nature. There were even yellow things in the human body. Fat was yellow, so she recalled, and teeth could yellow as well if they weren’t properly cleaned.

  Melanie was absolutely sure, however, that she hadn’t been missing her eyeball-flossing sessions. In fact, she was quite certain that she was regularly flossing her eyeballs a total of precisely zero times every day, which was the exact correct number of times to floss her eyeballs.

  But it was irrelevant, because it wasn’t even yellow. Leaning in and squinting didn’t change a thing. She had seen before a mineral by the name of pyrite, and as she looked into her own eyes, she was reminded of the jagged golden faces like sunlight in shattered glass.

  This was no different. She could clearly see the sparkling gold in her irises.

  “It looks pretty cool though,” she found herself muttering, just before that train of thought reached the end of its line. “Wait, wait. No. Shut up. It’s bad.”

  No, that really wasn’t meant to be that way. How was that even possible? The inside of her eyes, putting aside the reflectiveness, would have had to be jagged across its surface. That was definitely going to mess with her vision, right? Putting aside whether it was jagged beyond the pupil, wasn’t the point of the iris to adjust to different levels of light? Wasn’t that going to be basically impossible if her eye was shaped like that?

  Her first reaction was to look around, immediately pinning her gaze on a string dangling from the ceiling. Pulling it, the lights responded by shutting off right away, plunging the room into─

  ──darkness?

  It was definitely dark. In the most literal sense, there wasn’t enough light to see. She could tell that much right away. There was a tangible difference between this and the lighting in this room before she’d switched it off, but it wasn’t…

  It wasn’t ‘dark’.

  She lacked the vocabulary to make the thought coherent. There wasn’t a word for this, not one that she knew. It was dark, pitch black, but it hadn’t actually submerged her in blinding blackness. She could see the blackness, but it was as though the shadows were somehow transparent.

  Melanie turned the light back on. She would think about this later. There was such a thing as too much too fast, after all. Shaking her head free of the questions overflowing on it, she stepped out of the bathroom.

  And, perfectly synchronized, the other door in the room on the other side also swung open.

  Perhaps it was the density of bizarre happenings that had demolished her common sense, but her first reaction on seeing that was to wonder whether or not these doors were linked somehow.

  Luckily, reality corrected her in short order as two figures stepped inside. One was very tall, the other… not so much. The tall boy frowned at the empty bed, and the short girl muttered something as she looked around in what seemed like frustrated confusion. They both made eye contact with her at the same instant, and stopped in their tracks.

  Wait, they’re looking at me.

  Melanie’s sense of presence came back to her all at once. Other people were here, and she wasn’t one of them. Suddenly, she existed in the real world again, and this whole room was no longer a strange hypothetical puzzle to be solved. The parts of her mind dedicated to human interaction started to light up, and──

  Wait, I’m naked.

  Reaching for the first reaction that came to mind, she took a step back and quietly shut the bathroom door.

  “Don’t just leave!” came an explosively high voice from the other side.

  A few minutes passed, maybe about half an hour. It wasn’t as though a lack of dignity was some foreign concept to her, but this was getting a little extreme, even by Melanie’s standards. Contrary to the girl’s cry of protest, the two had told her to stay put and immediately left the room themselves. Left by herself as she wrapped herself up in her now-dampened bedclothes for the barest hint of warmth and modesty, she had soon been parted from even that by a titanically tall man with black hair and glasses. He had pored over her, inspecting her skin and muscles with his eyes and fingers, with only the assurance of ‘I’m a doctor’ to combat her embarrassment.

  It must have been about twenty minutes - no, realistically, it was probably more like three or four when he put her down and stood back.

  “Well, you’re certainly healthier than you should be,” he muttered. “No signs of atrophy or even malnourishment.”

  Melanie blinked, mentally dusting herself down. “Am I supposed to have those?”

  “Well, don’t feel obligated,” he replied dryly. “It’s a good thing that you don’t… Although honestly, I’m at something of a loss as to how you managed to avoid them.”

  “Ah,” Melanie perked up, “I go to swimming club every week, so I bet that’s part of it.”

  It was his turn to look blankly at her now. “I get the distinct impression I should be getting Ellen for this,” he muttered. “I think she’s in class, so you’ll have to make do with me.”

  The atmosphere in the room had shifted, as though some kind of troublesome dust had blown in. For all the expression on the man’s face was that of someone slightly fretting over a minor inconvenience, as though wondering how best to sand down a bump on his furniture rather than trying to deliver some dire diagnosis to an unwitting patient, Melanie somehow got the impression that it was going to be slightly more severe than a pothole from her perspective.

  “To be honest,” the doctor folded his arms, “I’ve never actually had to tell anyone this before, even under more mundane circumstances. I suppose there’s a first time for everything, at least in practical terms.”

  She frowned. “Am I going to die?”

  “Hm? No, not at all. It’s the opposite,” he replied. “Until somewhat recently, you were dead.”

  The words felt like they had somehow missed her, literally flying over her head. She didn’t really have any context for this to make sense. Actually, it was more like the declaration itself hadn’t made sense. No matter how she tried to frame it, she couldn’t quite make it fit.

  “S-sorry, I don’t…”

  “Really, you had a pulse, and there were some nominal vital signs, but brain death did absolutely occur. There was no activity in your nervous system whatsoever,” he explained. “It’s quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot.”

  She frowned again. “That… doesn’t make sense, does it? I mean, you’re a doctor, so I don’t want to question you too hard, but isn’t brain death different to, like… a coma…?”

  He nodded. “Yes, very different. Obviously, if there is no nervous activity at all, then it makes no sense for even involuntary functions like the beating of the heart to continue. And yet, quite interestingly, you continued to have a pulse regardless. There was no breathing, but there was a degree of bioelectricity within your cells. I recall that once we installed your tank in the on-site storage, despite being totally submerged, you immediately began speaking in what I can only call gibberish for three days without stopping,” he recounted. “Various parts of your body continued to grow. I’m sure you’ve noticed yourself that your height and physique have substantially changed. All this without any coordination or so much as a hormonal trigger. Very strange. I’m afraid I have no explanation for you.”

  This was… certainly absurd. He was speaking at some length in a very level and measured tone, and none of it made a lick of sense. Aside from completely contradicting everything she knew about basic biology, most of all…

  “How long was I asleep for?”

  “Dead for, you mean? Well, you may still be brain-dead even now,” he said. “Clinically, I mean. I haven’t checked. Your intellect seems fine at a glance.”

  “How long?”

  “So far… Well, it was September 13th, so…” he paused. “That makes it almost exactly eight years and one day.”

  Everything collapsed.

  It was as though she had just realized that she had died. The foundations of her world gave, and it caved in to fill the pit of uncertainty she had been hovering over. A parade of questions fell around a single cataclysmic answer. Her thoughts were so loud she couldn’t even hear them, and the sediment of chaos began to coalesce in her mind as she began to remember the last moments before the moment she’d───

  Gold. Gold. Gold. Gold. Gold.

  “Yeah. Yeah,” came words, “I guess I should’ve seen that coming.”