She turned dejected. “It’s not very fun bein’ Andalon, Mr. Genneth.”

I frowned. “It’s not much fun being me, either,” I said, flatly. I sighed. “You never mentioned you had a family before, Andalon.”

Andalon shook her head. She sprawled her legs out behind her. Her bare feet stuck out from under her pale nightgown’s hem.

“I was so confused at first, Mr. Genneth… so sad and… and… I didn’t know why, and that was so scary.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I thought remembering would make it better, but… now I have been remembering, and it only makes me feel worse!”

My eyebrows raised. “What did you remember?”

“I’ve been looking for my family, Mr. Genneth. I’ve been looking for where I come from, and why I come from, and for a place to belong. And I’ve been doing it for a long time. A very, very, very long time.” She sniffled, her pale cheeks flushed. Her eyes quivered, ready to break again at the slightest stress.

My God, I wanted to cry with her.

“But… it’s not just that,” she added. “I wanna help, and I wanna help because I want to, and… and,” she managed to smile through her tears, “because if I can help—”

“—It makes the hurt go away,” I said.

We spoke in unison.

Though nodding unsteadily, Andalon managed to smile. “It’s like what you do, Mr. Genneth.”

All I could do was stare.

“I’ve never known who I am,” she said, “or why I am, or why I feel the way that I do.”

“—Andalon,” I sighed, “you say you want to help. I know more about that feeling than anyone, believe me. But,” my voice cracked, “how is what you’ve done to Merritt helping? How is what happened to Kevin and Isabel helping? What’s the point of being saved from Hell if it means having to live through it anyway?” The resentments I’d swallowed were coming back with a vengeance. “What good does that accomplish?” I asked. “How does that save lives? How does it do no harm?”

Andalon averted her eyes and gave me a sidelong glance. “If I tell you, you’re just going to yell at me. You’re going to tell me to go away and be all alone, just like before. And that hurts. It hurts like Miss Leen hitting me.”

“Stop it, Andalon!” I snapped, “I’m angry at you for a reason, and a darned good one! I’m angry because of whatever it is you’re transforming us into. I’m angry because of all the information you seem to have but never tell me; you appear and disappear at random, as if everyone else’s lives revolve around yours.”

Andalon fell to her knees, blue locks draping over her head.

“I have a tail now!” I slapped it where it pressed against my left thigh. “I’m not supposed to have a tail!”

Well, she’d been right about one thing: I did yell at her.

Tears trickled down Andalon’s pale cheeks.

“I’m just doing the best I can!” she said. “If I did nothing, you—everyone—everyone would all be gone! I’m here to save you, Mr. Genneth. I’m here to save everybody! I found a way to beat the darkness. I won’t let it take anyone. I won’t let it kill. I hate that. I don’t want anyone to be lost forever and ever. That’s why I’m here. I save souls before they die; I put them in all the wyrms nearby, and they live inside them, and that way, I can ask them things, just like you can ask them things. It’s the only way I can save anyone. Otherwise, I’m all alone, and you’re all gone, and,” she hiccuped, “and I’ll never understand—”

I yelled. “—Understand what!?”

Andalon recoiled, only to speak again, faint and forlorn.

“Why I do feel so sad?” she said. “Why do I feel like… like…” she laid her hand on her heart, “like a part of me is missing.” Andalon wept again. “You and Miss Leen and eberybody else has families and aren’t alone, but Andalon has nothing, just the darkness that wants to eat me!”

Paresthesias danced up and down the upper two-thirds of my legs, like a prelude to paralysis.

Andalon burbled through her tears. “I’m just doin’ the best I can, Mr. Genneth. I’ve never known who I really am, or why, or where I came from. I try and figure it out, but everything goes wrong and then the darkness came and I have to run and run and it’s so scary. Hell will destroy me. I can’t go there. But, someone, somewhere has to know who I am and why I am, right, Mr. Genneth? But… but if they get eated up by the darkness, Andalon will never find the answer. Never ever ever!” She wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s so hard and I’m scared and I don’t know what to do!”

It would have been so much easier if the past few days—the plague, everything—was all just one, long psychotic break, and that I’d wake up and find I’d been in a coma for seven years. That would have been so much easier to deal with than what I felt right now. As impossible as it should have been, I was sympathizing with her. Was it really just because she looked like a child? Was I that easily manipulated? Or was my ache for her genuine?

Neither answer brought me much comfort.

I was no stranger to the struggle against powerlessness. The plague and my transformations had put that struggle front and center. I dreaded the thought that, against them, our powerlessness would only grow.

I was infected. There was no denying it. Like Brand said: the tissue was the same. The fungus was inside me, just like it was inside Kurt, and Merritt, and Ileene, and her parents, and Lopé, and Letty, and… everyone else infected by this unholy contagion. By all accounts, I should have already been reduced to a gibbering invalid—a husk of madness lost in a hall of dying memories’ twilight—trapped in a hospital bed while the fungus ate me from within, down to my very last breath.

But I wasn’t, and that was only because of Andalon.

Yet, still…

“Why did it have to be wyrms, Andalon?” I asked. “Why couldn’t I become something more… normal?”

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“Andalon likes wyrmeh,” she said, with a smile. “They’re super cool.”

“Is there a greater purpose to it? Is it because of a connection to the Demon Norms? Or Catamander Brave’s Time Wyrms?”

She pursed her lips for a moment, and then answered, with blissful innocence, “Andalon likes wyrmehs, so Andalon make wyrmehs. Wyrmehs fix things. They make everythin’ better.”

Obviously, this line of inquiry wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so, I tried a different approach: “If you can change some of us,” I asked, “why not change all of us?”

“I can’t.” She shook her head. “It’s not… safe. Not everyone can be wyrmeh. Too many break. And if they break, then they’re gone, and everybody inside is gone, too. Gone forever.”

Triun!

If what I was going through wasn’t “breaking”, I didn’t want to know what was!

My breath was hot and dry on my tongue.

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

“I’ve been rememberin’ things,” Andalon said, “but slowly. Even just being here is like… it’s like trying not to drown. It’s not easy.” She looked up at my eyes. “Mr. Genneth…?”

“Yes?” I said, softly.

“Are you still mad at me?” She looked down on the ground, and then glanced off to the side, staring beneath the table legs.

“I don’t know, Andalon,” I said, “I really don’t. I really, really don’t.” Then I sighed. “But…”

“Yeah?”

She hung on the word.

“I guess there is one way you could help me.”

“What is it,” she asked, bunching her hands into diligent little fists. “I’ll do anything. Just, please… don’t” she looked down again, “don’t be mad at me.”

With Andalon, I had to remodulate my expectations. I had to ask her something she could realistically do, otherwise I’d be dooming both of us to disappointment.

“Andalon: the next time you remember something,” I said, “I want you to tell me as soon as you can, no matter what.”

Gazing at me with her limpid blue eyes, Andalon nodded. “I promise,” she said.

She put her whole being into that nod, as if her life or death depended on her ability to make good on her promise.

For a moment, I lost myself in my thoughts. Though much was still uncertain, at the very least, I could say Andalon was trying. By the Angel!—given all that she was responsible for and capable of, she deserved the high marks for her work habits, even if her work sometimes scared the living daylights out of me. But, as for everything else? To judge her work for its merits?

Blessèd Angel…

You’d need to be a Lassedite to sort it all out.

“Mr. Genneth?” Andalon sniffled. She rubbed her face against her sleeve, drawing away her tears.

“What is it?”

Shakily, Andalon rose to her feet. She stood like a little soldier: stiff, chest out, arms flush against her sides.

“You wanted me to tell you when I remembered stuff. Well… I’ve remembered more stuff. So…” she glanced down at her bare feet. “I’m tellin’ you right now. Right right now. It’s… uh,” Andalon paused for the word, and then found it, with gusto: “responsibibble!”

I nodded. I pushed myself off the floor and settled onto the couch at my back.

A promise to be responsible was a start.

Andalon climbed onto the table. “Mr. Genneth?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got somethin’ to tell you now,” Andalon said.

I nodded in approval.

She rubbed her face on her sleeve again.

“When I woke up, just now,” she said, “I ‘membered more. I remembered why I’m remembering!” She perked up. “It’s because of the silvery bag in the baby wyrm’s head.” Lowering her eyes, she muttered, “Poor little guy…”

“The what?”

“I think Mr. Misty called it a tat-o-sis.”

“Tat-o-sis?”

Obviously, “Mr. Misty” was Dr. Skorbinka, but, as for the rest, it was hidden behind her Andalonish. So, I concentrated on the memory of Ileene’s autopsy. Suddenly, the world blurred, and I found myself standing back in the morgue with Mistelann, Brand, and Dr. Horosha at my side, reliving the moment as it played out in perfect detail. It was like with my doubled consciousness, only even more strongly felt. I was cognizant of being in two places at once: my physical body, here with Andalon in Ward E’s Staff Lounge; my mental body, inhabiting the past. And it all transpired within the blink of an eye.

A viscous substance that I can only describe as liquid glitter oozed out from the gap between the necrotic dura mater and the gray matter deep beneath. The fluid glimmered brilliantly under the light overhead, like ocean waves beneath the sun.

I gasped. “What in the world…?”

“If pressed,” Brand said, “I’d call it a statocyst, though the term really doesn’t do it justice.”

“What is statocyst?” Mistelann asked, raising a perplexed eyebrow.

“A statocyst is a special type of cell found mostly in aquatic invertebrates,” Brand said, setting the forceps down on the metal tray. “In humans and other vertebrates, the analogous structures are the otoliths in the vestibular system. For mammals, those are the semicircular canals—part of the inner ear. But whether it’s a statocyst or an otolith, the operating principles and biological functionalities are the same. These structures contain small mineral concretions—usually calcium carbonate—called statoliths, and they’re free to move within the confines of the structure. When the organism turns on its side or face upside-down, gravity pulls on the statoliths, which then move sensory receptors which send signals to the critter’s brain, giving them their sense of balance,” Brand said. “Interestingly, squids and things also use them to hear.”

“Yeah,” Andalon said, “that.”

I willed myself out of the memory, pulling it off like a sweater.

“What about it?” I asked.

“It’s how I talk to you—to all the wyrmehs.” Andalon spread her arms overhead in a big arch. “And it’s how Andalon hears you back! And… because you’re still just starting your changes, I think that’s why I don’t remember stuffs.” Then, she pointed at herself, and then at the ceiling. “I can’t hear the rest of Andalon.”

Well, well, well. Brand’s comparison of the glitter-sac to a whale’s melon was more apt than he could have possibly known. Given how all the transformees so far had presented the same symptoms, it was pretty safe to assume we all had glitter-filled melons in our heads.

The melon does to sound what a lens does to light: it focuses it, enabling the animal to shoot concentrated bursts of sound in the desired direction.

If transformees’ melons were underdeveloped, they’d have difficulty communicating with Andalon, and, perhaps, difficulty receiving her messages in return. That made sense. If this thing really was responsible for my perception of Andalon—and if it was growing larger—it might even explain some of Andalon’s behaviors: not just her memory issues, but also her difficulties in manifesting for long periods of time.

Andalon looked up at the ceiling. “I can feel it, out there… all the rest of me.” She glanced back at me. “Remember the big fire swirly in the bathyroom?”

I nodded.

“I think that was me—or pieces of me—pieces of the rest of me that’s out there,” she pointed at the ceiling again, “out in the world, out in the wyrmehs. I think it’s the me out there tryin’ to talk to the me in here.” She pointed to her heart, but then corrected herself and pointed at me. “The me in you.”

The more developed the melon, the stronger the signal I’d pick up, and the stronger the signal, the more Andalon I received, memories and all.

I guess that means she really does mean it: she can’t remember, and that it’s been hard for her to ‘stay’.

Admittedly, much of the evidence was still circumstantial—assuming Andalon’s take was trustworthy—but, I now had concrete evidence to believe her and her claims.

“So… the more I change, the more in… tune you’ll be with yourself?”

She nodded.

I gulped.

Andalon’s memory loss was a result of being disconnected from her greater self, and she would remember more as she became more aware of her greater self. So, the more I ate, the more I changed, and the more that Andalon remembered.

Talk about a Norm’s bargain!

I’m not gonna lie: this revelation really didn’t do anything to get my hopes up. If anything, it just rearranged my doubts; answers gave way to more questions, as they always did.

But now, I had to wonder: what made me different? Why did I get to interact with her at length while everyone else seemed to only get the briefest glimpses? And what did it all mean?

And did I even want to know?

“Andalon… I’m scared.”

“I… I am too, Mr. Genneth. But…”

Andalon walked over and plopped down beside me on the couch. She looked up at me, gazing at me, eye to eye.

“I’ll be here,” she said, “and so will you.” She glanced down. “I’ve seen really scary stuff before. I know I have. But, bein’ with you—not being alone…” she looked up again, “it makes the scary stuff a little less scary.”

“Yeah, I guess it does.”

And for a brief, fraught moment, I almost smiled.