I sat up straighter in my hammock and nodded. “What do you need me to do?”

“Almost everything, unfortunately.” Jun nervously laughed. “If we were back on Sotrien, you’d have to put me on life support to do this, but my armor should keep me alive instead. At least I really, really hope it does.”

Jun spun around in her hammock and dismissed her chestplate, revealing that she wasn’t wearing anything under it. “You’ll have to cut me open from here,” Jun reached around to press a thumb to the base of her neck, then slid it down to the small of her back, “to here. Don’t make it too deep, or else I won’t be conscious for very long.”

“Uh.” I said uncomfortably. “I’m not a surgeon, Jun. And I don’t know anything about Staura anatomy. What if I make a mistake?”

Jun opened her interface and swiped over to her equipment screen. She gripped the side of it and spun it around so it was off to her side and accessible to me. “If you do something that seems like it’s going to kill me, pour the liquid recovery blessings into my mouth and then summon all of my armor. If you can survive what happened to you in your fight with Endra, then I can survive this. But from the records I’ve seen about people who grafted themselves onto someone, they all said the same thing.”

I pushed myself out of my hammock, walking up to Jun and maneuvering her interface so it wouldn’t be in my way. “What did they say?”

“That it was too easy. Far too easy.” Jun chuckled grimly. “That they went too far before they realized what they were doing. Completely overwrote the graftee’s personality and memories in the moments of euphoric connection. Please don’t overwrite me.”

“No way, no how. You’re my Jun, and I’m not going to change that.” I said, a strange possessiveness creeping into my voice that didn’t sit well with me. The thought of someone else taking away what made Jun the person she was made me more than sick to my stomach; it made me fucking livid. “The only thing you’re coming out of this with is a new name. I swear on my life.”

Jun nodded weakly. “You’re the only person I can trust with this. Someone I’ve only known for a few months. Thank you for seeing me.”

That sounded like a goodbye. My voice caught in my throat as I summoned my weapon as the sharpest, thinnest blade I could manage. “What do I do once you’re… open?”

“Once you’ve made the cut, I’ll be bleeding terribly. Find the two biggest streams of blood and close them off. Once enough pressure builds up inside, you’ll see something rise from the middle of my back. Cut a notch into it, then cut your finger and press it into the wound. You’ll know where to go from there.” Jun explained, growing stiller and stiller as she did. She was steeling her resolve. “Once you change my name, let the pressure off and summon my armor for me. As long as the system doesn’t ‘fix’ the fact that you changed my name, I should be Juniper Persephonia for good when you’re done.”

I grimaced and stepped forwards, dismissing my gauntlets and feeling the cool metal of my scalpel-like weapon against my right palm. I knew what I had to do, and knew that Jun needed me to do it, but I really didn’t like the idea of hurting her. My hand started shaking as I moved in closer, pressing my left hand to her bare back to keep myself steady. I was just seconds away from backing out. Though I shouldn’t’ve been. I wasn’t a surgeon, but I’d done emergency first-aid on wounds that looked far worse than anything I could do to Jun.

It was the fact that I was making it that shook me. I could mess this up and permanently damage my friend. She needed me, and I was hesitating. Her breathing was calm and steady even as I was about to plunge a knife into her back. There was no convincing her to back out. It was me that needed to change.

With a deep breath, I imagined that our places were reversed. There wasn’t exactly a human equivalent to what I was about to do to Jun, so I had to completely make that up, but I had a pretty vivid imagination. My nightmares proved that. I envisioned that I was the one with my back turned, trusting Jun to a procedure that could leave me completely crippled–mentally and emotionally–if she failed. I took painkillers to dull the sensations I knew would be coming, and I still worried about the pain, and what would happen if Jun didn’t know how to work with Human anatomy.

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But not once did I worry about her fucking with my mind. I trusted her to do her best, to do what I’d asked, and my sporadic breathing leveled out. She would do everything she could, and I trusted that everything she could do would be more than enough. That was how I felt. From how Jun was strangely calm under my palm, I knew that that was also how she felt. I needed to let myself believe that she trusted me as much as I trusted her. That the almost baseless belief I held in her was mirrored looking back at me.

The worry didn’t go away. But I was more than it. “Did you take any painkillers?”

Jun answered with a slight nod. “They won’t completely take away the pain, since I have to be awake and aware for this, but I can take the pain. Do what I need you to do.”

“Okay.” I said quietly, gently pressing the blade of my knife to where Jun had initially pressed her thumb. She hissed at the cold metal as a little shiver went through her body, but she didn’t tell me to stop. “I’m going to start now. I… thank you for trusting me so much, Jun.”

“Thank you for helping me so much.” Jun answered meekly. She let out a long breath and shook her arms, slightly shifting so she rested her elbows against her thighs. “Okay. I’m ready.”

I nodded and took a deep breath, pressing my knife into Jun’s white and pink mottled skin as gently and swiftly as I could. She grunted in pain and clenched her fists, but I knew that if I stopped now to ask if I should stop, she’d just be in pain for longer. So I clenched my jaw and slid my dagger through her flesh without much of any resistance, cutting as clean as metal could cut until I reached where she’d told me to stop. Mostly clear ‘blood’ spilled out of Jun’s wound as I dismissed my dagger and leaned in, the slightly-sweet smell of sap and nectar fucking with my brain as I tried to look for the worst flows.

With the intent of sparing the goriest details, Jun’s flesh looked something like a mixture of the cross section of a large succulent plant and a fleshy anthill. And no, there will be no further elaboration on what I saw. My eyes darted around to gauge where the ‘blood’ was coming from, and after a few panic-filled seconds where everything looked the same, I found a flow that wasn’t exactly larger than the others, but it was spurting out just a little further. As if those… Staura equivalent of veins were under more pressure. I grimaced and pressed both of my index fingers to the higher-pressure flows of blood, which produced Jun’s first loud gasp of the procedure.

“I think you found it.” She ground out through what sounded like clenched teeth.

I nodded in response even though she couldn’t see me. Something shifted in the mass of plant-like flesh that was Jun’s back before my eyes, pushing through to say hello to me like a very curious parasite. It was the size of my palm and the shape of an artichoke, and as I watched it rise, I realized I didn’t have a free hand to continue the procedure. I chided myself for my choice of stopper and summoned a copperbound gauntlet to my right hand, covering it in scales before slipping out of it.

The gauntlet stayed in place thanks to my mental efforts with the scales. Flow stopped, hand freed. I quickly resummoned my weapon and cut a notch into Jun’s person-seed, or whatever it was, and paused. Inside of the seed was… something I struggled to describe. It was constantly in flux, shifting from one thing to another, yet there was a set of parameters it couldn’t leave. Like a caged animal smashing into the bars, unaware that nothing it did could set it free. Yet the animal was Jun’s very existence. The makeup of what made her into the person I knew.

As if her D.N.A. was all contained within one small pod, and didn’t like that fact. Her genetic makeup was somehow connected to the organ that I’d just cut a chunk out of. I was about to alter her genetics so that her own people wouldn’t see her as a Keratily. With a drop of my own blood and the force of my will. It seemed so preposterous, but I’d seen devices that scraped away bits of your memories to power them. I’d fought a monster that killed people by removing chromosomes from their genetic makeup. I could do this for Jun.

I looked down at my knife, still dripping in Jun’s genetic makeup, and brought it to my own right index finger. I pressed it into my skin, wincing at the sharp bite of metal, and unsummoned my blade before the first drop of blood could fall. A first drop that didn’t fall even as I leaned back in. That cut should have bled at least a little by that point. And this wouldn’t work if my blood didn’t touch Jun’s genetic seed.

I flipped over my hand to see that the drop of blood hadn’t finished welling up just quite yet. It was too thick for that. A thick, glistening red so dark it was almost black.

Like oil.