Brand Nowston was whatever the opposite of a social butterfly was. (A social moth?) Whatever you chose to call it, it never took more than five minutes to see it was true, and understand why it was true, unless you were somehow even more socially oblivious than he was.

Whatever fires of human neurobehavioral development were behind people recognizing and internalizing the fact that conversations were back-and-forth, not one person lecturing for minutes on end, Brand hadn’t gotten it. He was blissfully unaware that some topics were not appropriate for discussing over a meal. He was incapable of telling when a person wanted him to stop talking.

He didn’t see why it wasn’t okay to pick a dead snail up off the ground and start dissecting it on the table, a couple inches away from your sandwich. You could point it out to him, and he would bow and politely apologize, and then a week later, it would happen all over again.

The list goes on.

But this were a feature, not a bug. His curiosity and open-mindedness were inseparable from who he was and what he did, and it made him one of the most brilliant, authentic, honest, truthful, loyal, and earnestly, painfully kind individuals I’d ever known.

People are who they are, and unless you take all of them, there will never be certainty or truth.

Still, from time to time—such as at this very moment—I would come face to face with his quirks in a way that I couldn’t just smile and wave them away, not when Brand was ogling me from inside his yellow-green hazmat suit like I was a freshly dissected lab rat.

“I wish I had time to write a paper about you,” he said. “Or ten.”

“Brand…” I said.

Leave it to Dr. Nowston to not notice my current heartache.

This must have been what those sexy swimsuit models felt like. Next to your face, your feelings were the last part anyone cared to glance at.

Though, to be fair, I hadn’t been exactly vocal about my emotional and spiritual woes—mostly because I was too overwhelmed with all the changes.

My hands had gone full wyrm. Fine scales atop fungal flesh started just below my elbows. From there, they went all the way to my fingertips. I had only six digits: two fingers and a thumb on each hand. They’d grown in length and width, and now sported fully formed claws as black as Night. Light gathered like droplets at the brightness of their savage tips.

And then there was my back.

My neck was long enough that I could turn my head around and look down my back, and what I saw did not inspire confidence.

I had… lumps.

They must have come from the twinges I’d felt down my spine.

It was like someone had taken chicken eggs and put them underneath my skin, in a line that went down my back and disappeared somewhere in the middle of my tail. The skin along my back was human on the edges, but with a wyrmflesh spine that branched off onto my human skin the way the Green Death’s hyphae spread through its Type One victims.

I couldn’t help but think of the mane of spikes I’d seen emerge from Karl’s back.

I guess I was growing a mane now.

Suddenly, Brand did something I’d rather he hadn’t: he grabbed my tail and squeezed—hard.

“Do you feel this when I touch it?” he asked.

My flinching answered his question for him, as did my I gripe.

“Brand!”

Not even I had a strong enough of an imagination—wyrm hyperphantasizing yeswithstanding—to picture the flights of thought Dr. Nowston had lost himself in.

“This is crazy, man,” he said. “I—”

“—Dr. Nowston!” With a yell, I ripped off the face mask I’d picked up earlier; the thing was drizzled with my tears. Pale patches of green discoloration had appeared where my tears had dried, along with a thin, dusty layer of those impossibly small, impossibly deadly spores. Near the spores, the F-99’s translucent fabric had lost its translucence, instead beginning to brown and blacken, as if being slowly burnt by an unseen flame.

Acid would do that sort of thing.

More spore-tainted tears trickled down my face.

Brand fell silent.

“You’re right,” he said. Finally, he saw me, not as a patient, or as his latest science experiment, but as a person—as his friend. Unfortunately, that meant his momentary excitement was now dead in the water, and the regret on his face said as much.

He lowered his head in shame. “I’m… I’m sorry. That was rude of me.”

I sighed, breathing out visible wisps of green.

Fudge, I thought.

“Thank you,” I said, softly.

My back lumps twitched.

As I lay on the floor of Dr. Nowston’s pathology lab, I felt the lapsedness of my lapsed Lassedicy more acutely than ever before. An urge welled up in my chest.

I needed to Divulge.

Yes, the urge was somewhat blunted by the knowledge that there was more than one Angel, and so all of Lassedicy was incontrovertibly wrong, but, as they say… old habits die hard.

I didn’t expect forgiveness for killing Adam. I’m not even sure I wanted it, let alone deserved it. But I had to tell someone.

I’d reached out twice now. First to the transformees in the self-help group, when I’d shared with them what I knew about Andalon, and then to Heggy and the others.

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I didn’t want to get found out, or discovered by happenstance. I wanted to be the one to reach out. It felt good to come clean, and I still had so many others to tell.

Ani.

My transformee patients.

Jonan.

I had to own up to what I’d done. How else could I ever begin down the path to forgiveness?

I’d been taught that only Divinity could truly forgive us for our sins. Because of our Primordial Sin against the Angel, Man and Nature had fallen into corruption. Our sins were our own, yes, and in that respect, we could be forgiven by those whom we wronged. However, our predilection to sin was beyond our control. Not even the most noble soul could overcome that. The Moonlight Queen’s Living Law showed us the path that human beings were meant to follow, but that alone was but a carving in stone—the Tablets of Destiny. It was only by the mercy of the Angel’s Love and the grace of His Light that we could walk down the path of forgiveness and become who and what we were always meant to be.

Your fellow man could forgive your sins against him; he could not forgive you for your sins against God—and, as the fount of all goodness, all sins were sins against God—defiance against creation’s preordained order.

The Church’s sacraments were the instruments of her harmony. To the uninitiated and the ill-informed, they were merely rites of religious observance, no different from any other religious tradition’s storied rituals. But for faithful Lassediles—well, for those who acknowledged the sacraments as part of their faith—the sacraments went beyond mere tradition. They were an integral part of our Covenant with the Angel. To partake in the sacraments was to participate in the consummation of the Godhead’s will. The sacraments were the mystic chords that actualized the symphony of all creation.

They were eleven in number, and I was lapsed in all of them. Attending my children’s Bondings and Jules’ Sealing didn’t count, and it had been centuries since jury duty last counted for the sacrament of Remediation.

Enough!

Enough running. Enough lying about my own wretchedness—because—who was I kidding?—I was a mess.

A total fudging mess.

I told Brand everything, just like I’d told Heggy and her brother. I shared my current understanding of the transformation’s mechanics. I told him how I thought my powers worked. I told him about coming clean to Heggy and the others, and then about them telling me to keep keeping it under wraps.

I told him I’d killed and eaten Adam.

In the end, I was glad that Brand had been there to hear my divulgence. I’d always known I could trust him.

There weren’t words to describe the way Brand Nowston said, “Damn,” after I’d finished spilling the beans—or, if the words did exist, they were far above my pay grade.

Brand sighed. Then there was a long silence, after which he leaned forward and hugged me, around the torso.

My arms drooped limply at my sides. I hardly know what to do with them.

“Brand,” I said, “…stop.” I wriggled free, taking care to keep my claws away from his hazmat suit. I shook my head, despondent. “I killed a man.”

“What do you expect me to say?” he asked.

I lowered my head in dejection. “That I’m a bad person. That, all this time, I’ve been at least as wrong as I have been right. That I’ve been stupid and crazy, trying to save people when I’m just as screwed up as everyone else.”

Averting my eyes, I stared at my claws.

“I think you still have more to say,” Brand said.

And he was right.

Looking up at him, I saw that he’d narrowed his eyes.

My next words came out softly—oh so softly. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling wove golden cobwebs in my tears.

“You never went to Sessions School, Brand,” I said. “You wouldn’t quite know what it was like, having never been a believer, yourself,” I said.

He smiled faintly. “I appreciate my parents’ decisions more and more each passing day.”

I actually chuckled at that, but then I shuddered. A quiver ran down my spine, making my lumps twitch once again.

“A message ran through my childhood, Brand. You know what it said? It said I was tainted.” I waved an arm in a broad gesture. “That everyone was. And that message was tucked away in every Luminer’s loving smile, in every schoolyard flower, every comforting word; every bit of encouragement, every shred of praise. They said that, long ago, people thought there was a monster in the earth, and there was, only it wasn’t under our feet, it was in our hearts. We were the ones who had set it loose, with our pride. Life would have been perfect were it not for our pride. I was told that I was broken. I was reprobate, vermin, slime and that there was nothing anyone could do to fix it, least of all little old me. Only the Angel could. Outside of His Light, I had no value. Without God’s love, it would be better if the world didn’t exist.” I shivered. “And it was that love—that love, so magnanimous, because we didn’t deserve it… that love was all that kept us from an eternity of darkness in hellfrost and demons’ torment.” I turned away.

“Shit, man…” Brand muttered.

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove them wrong,” I said. “I’ve been trying to show them—to show myself—that I could be good just by choice alone. That I wasn’t broken.” I wept. “That Dana’s death wasn’t my fault. Or that… I never met…” My voice cracked. “Mom…”

I stared Brand in the eyes. I shook my head so rapidly and subtly, it must have looked like I was quivering. “But maybe they were right,” I whispered. I presented my arms to him. “Look at me now. Look what my pride has made me.”

There were tears in Brand’s eyes. “You really have lost your faith,” he said, “only it’s not the one you’re thinking of. What you’ve really lost is your faith in yourself.”

Darn right.

“How can I believe in myself, Brand? Look at what I’ve done! I wanted to come clean, and I ended up having to get back in the closet all over again!”

“Everyone makes mistakes, Genneth,” Brand replied. “We can argue about intentions ‘till we’re blue in the face, but that still won’t erase the reality that people fuck up. A lot.” He shrugged amiably. “But… I have no interest in whataboutism and recriminations. You know me, man, science saved my life.” He mustered a twitchy-lipped smile. “I was a lonely little kid, until the day I grabbed a magnifying glass and dug around in the garden to see what I’d find. It once was that I only saw all the stuff I didn’t have—all the friends, all the toys, all the fancy shit. And yeah, that stuff matters, and it hurts to come up empty-handed. But,” he raised his eyes, “I learned that life was just another experiment. The biggest one of all. And what matters, what really, truly matters is what you’re going to do next. You screwed up? Well then, how do you fix it? How do you account for the errors to keep from screwing up next time?”

“Everyone screws up, Genneth Howle,” he said, looking me in the eyes. “That’s the easy part. What’s tough is changing for the better because you screwed up. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the only form of penance that actually counts.”

I stared at my friend, wonderstruck.

“Brand,” I said, “I want to believe that. Desperately.” I glanced down at my inhumanity. “But… I’m scared.”

“So am I, Genneth.” Dr. Nowston nodded solemnly. “So am I. That’s the human condition for you.” He smiled. “But I’m confident you’ll be able to figure it out. Now,” he added, rising to his feet, “while you work on that, how’s about we go get you a fancy new suit, eh?”

He grinned.