Lopé’s case had made it clear that, for transformees and wyrms, you didn’t need to have a mouth to be able to eat. When hunger struck him, Lopé had pressed his face-holes against his evening meal—his pillows and blankets—and, in moments, viscous black sludge came oozing out of his holes: the holes he had in place of lips; the holes on his cheeks; the holes above his jawbone; the holes through his jawbone. It was like how chefs used those tubes to squeeze frosting onto cakes—and it smelled just as sweet.

The sludge had made quick work of Lopé's meal, dissolving the blanket and pillows into mushy chunks that he snorted in through his face-holes. I had to turn away and step back as some of the glop fell on the floor. It smelled divine, and it took far too much of my willpower to keep myself from eating it. Fortunately for me—lying coward that I was—Kurt and Maryon lapped it up off the floor. And if that wasn’t horrifying enough, after they’d licked the floor clean, there was a slightly indented patch of discoloration on the floor that the goop had left where its corrosive properties had begun to dissolve the varnished on the wood. I figured it was only a matter of time, goop, and fungus before even buildings would be on the menu.

By now, the evidence was conclusive: I could eat anything. Anything I stuck in my mouth dissolved on my tongue like cotton candy. Real food disintegrated before ever dropping into my stomach. Plastics took longer; metals, the longest. An experiment with a radiation sensor confirmed that I now gave off concentrated streams of ionizing radiation whenever I ate metal. The only explanation I could come up with was that my body was now doing nuclear chemistry, transmuting the metal I consumed at the atomic level, changing it into substances my body could use. That would explain why eating metals filled me with tingling, bubbling sensations that came out in burps. The tingle was the radiation, which—apparently—my insides could now feel.

I’d probably eat my clarinet before my changes were through. So, not only was I metaphorically destroying everything I touched, I was also well on my way to literally destroying everything I touched.

The hunger was maddening. After I’d finished up with my Room 268 patients, my cravings got so intense that I’d started to contemplate eating inanimate objects—even my own medical supplies! Used syringes, empty IV bags, discarded bandages; they all smelled delectable. When I ate, I snacked on the smallest bits of real food I could get my hands on: half a cookie, a handful of rice chips.

My mouth, throat, and stomach were like amoebas, now. They absorbed whatever they could, directly integrating the substances into their structure. Tiny rivulets of freshly absorbed matter crawled along my throat whenever I ate. From there, they’d squirm their way into the depths of my body. Sometimes, even when I wasn’t eating, I could feel them slithering beneath my skin.

I suppose I could have avoided my eating troubles by having dinner like a normal person, but I wasn’t a normal person anymore—neither in the sense of “normal”, nor in the sense of “person”. Normal people didn’t worry about turning into a monster whenever they came across a plate of food, or even just an empty plate.

I’d spent what should have been my dinnertime trying to understand the transformees’ fleeting encounters with Andalon. I went so far as to ask Ward F’s CMT to give me access to their transformee sequestration room, just so that I could increase my sample size. I couldn’t believe that I was the only one who got to interact with Andalon in any meaningful way. I’d hoped that, just maybe, F Ward might have a transformee that interacted with Andalon the way I did.

But, no, they didn’t. It was inexplicable. It was terrifying. But it was true! Somehow, I was different. I was special. All my life, I’d wanted to believe that I was special, that I served a unique purpose that made my existence meaningful and worthwhile, only to come up empty handed every time. But now, when I finally was special, it was in the worst possible situation, and I had no idea why. I was the only one who could meaningfully interact with Andalon. To all the other transformees, she was little more than a phantom. She lived in the corners of their eyes and the moments in between strange silences. I would have loved to ask Andalon herself about why this was the case, but she was still AWOL.

Probably because I was a bad person. A bad wyrm. An utter, utter failure.

I mean, it made sense. She was trying to save people from Hell, and regardless of whether or not she was doing it with the Angel’s approval, it made sense that she wouldn’t want to associate with a Hell-bound Sinner like me.

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I was worthless. I couldn’t help anyone. I was a failure of a doctor, of a husband, of a father. Of a man. Of a… wyrm…

Ugh.

That’s why I’d turned to my clarinet. It was my go-to method for drowning out my sorrows. Alcohol and drugs didn’t make the pain go away, they just numbed it or distracted from it. Music helped me emote. It helped me get the awful feelings out of myself.

And I couldn’t even do that right!

Last night and this morning, I’d been riding on a cloud of false confidence, believing I was cut out to help Andalon with her salvation quest. But I was wrong. I’d been foolish and overeager, and now, Andalon was gone and I was helpless and clueless and lost and unloved. My life had fallen apart. My humanity had fallen apart.

Why hadn’t Andalon just let me die from the infection? My miseries would have ended, and my family would be able to face their end and the world’s end thinking their father was a hero. Better that than dying knowing their father was turning into a monster.

I leaned back, bending my neck, resting the back of my head on the sofa’s seat cushions.

“Fudge…” I moaned.

I sat there for a bit, a sniffling, red-faced nothing, marinating in all the awful feelings.

I was about to pull out my console—maybe check the web for something, I dunno—when my torso was gripped by an all too familiar tightness.

The hunger.

Sweetness bloomed on my tongue.

Sitting up, I reached into the bag of frosted, bite-sized, custard-filled pastries I’d left on the table and popped the last three into my mouth. I spent all of a second staring at the bag before I crunched into a ball and stuffed it between my lips. The plastic crinkled harshly in my ears as it dissolved in my mouth. I winced at the sound. Thankfully, the packaging dissolved quickly enough.

And then my transformation got back to work.

The changes flowed off my stomach and crept onto my left arm, descending toward my hand. I rolled up my sleeve just in time to see dark fungal flesh spreading down my arm and onto my hand, covering me in a flexible armor that rippled forth with minute, dark violet scales. The color was like the dying edge of dusk.

And the strangest part? The changes brought clarity—clarity of feeling. After days of dealing with my body constantly lagging milliseconds behind my will, it threw me off to have my hand respond in perfect time like it always had. Heck, my mutant hand felt more normal than my unchanged right hand. That one fact encapsulated just how far my changes had come, just how much I’d lost, and just how much I still had left to lose.

The changes seemed to stop after about five minutes or so. They ended rather unceremoniously, with the little finger on my left hand falling off like a snapped twig. I fully admit to eating it right then and there, swallowing it in a single bite, just like the mini-pastries.

Of course, that extra bit of fuel made the changes creep forward just a little bit more. I knew it was going to hit the fourth finger on my left hand when I suddenly lost all sensation in that digit. My finger shriveled as the scaly wyrm hide crept up to its base, but no farther. The tissue lost its color, like a tree poisoned at the roots. After a moment of staring, I stuck my hand into my mouth, bit down, tore off my finger, and swallowed it whole. The flesh merged into the walls of my throat before ever reaching my stomach.

Closing my eyes didn’t make me any less conscious of the path the biomass took. It crawled down my neck, over my chest, under my armpit, and then onto my left arm, slowly dissolving all the while, leaving a thin trail of new growth all the way down the path. The change pooled in my hand, slathering my thumb and my two remaining fingers. The three digits swelled. There were still patches of wyrm-stained human skin on my left hand, and the way my two fingers and thumb grew made it seem like that remnant of my humanity was a shell they had yet to fully shed.

So, it looked like I was going to have three-fingered hands now. Already, the outer two fingers on my right hand were beginning to lose a teensy bit of feeling. I imagined it would only be a matter of time before—

—Angel!

I snapped to attention and looked up at the ceiling. I rubbed my eyes, making sure I wasn’t imagining things.

I wasn’t.

A solitary blue flame had flared into being overhead. It descended toward me, passing into my chest. Sensations fluttered across my hide, rippling out from the point of contact.

I knew what the flames meant. Something was about to change—something more than just my body. I braced myself for whatever was about to happen.

I sniffled and grit my teeth. “I’m ready,” I muttered.

As it turned out, no: no, I wasn’t.

The flames positively swarmed me. They appeared one after the other, in a trickle that grew into a stream that swelled into a torrent that whipped itself into a whirlwind right in front of me. Heat and wind buffeted me—and only me—as the current wound tighter and tighter, condensing into a cocoon of pale blue light that built and spun and fell and coalesced, brightening like a second Sun, ethereal and blue.

And then it burst.

Flames spread out in every direction. They melted through my coat, through the walls, through my clarinet case, and the sofa, and the table and the stool and the ceiling and the floor and the shelves and the doors, fading into nothingness as a brightness overwhelmed my vision.

Everything darkened and blurred.

Then my shine-stung eyes finally readjusted; the blurry darkness cleared back into dim light. And there she was, at the heart of the vanished cocoon, standing there, uninjured and perfect—as good as new.

Andalon.