“T-Tira?” I said, with a stammer.

“You know her?” Dr. Horosha asked.

Of course I did. The voice of Ward C’s friendly receptionist was instantly recognizable, though it took a second for me to find where it was coming from, mostly because Tira’s head—once I found it—seemed to be hovering in the air. Like her voice, Tira’s face was perfectly recognizable. Her green hairdo was a dead ringer, styled as it was in a stick-fastened bun.

And then, I found the rest of her body.

Oh God…

Feeling nauseous, I brought my hand to my mouth, over my transparent F-99 face mask.

Tira “stood” in the waiting area to the right of the reception desk, on top of a wide, brown carpet set in a disk-shaped indentation in the floor. I say, “stood,” because both of Tira’s legs were gone. It was like they’d been amputated slightly above the knee. Instead of feet, she “stood” on the cross-sections where her thick, stubby thighs came to a dead-end. Tira had the physical profile of a toy Slunky™ hanging over the edge of a step, frozen mid-motion. If I’d been standing in a T-pose, her neck would have been longer than my spread arms, fingertip to fingertip. Her torso, alone, was half and again as tall as me. She dangled herself over the carpet and the disarray of cushiony chairs surrounding it. Like many of the people around me, Tira had a tail; hers was about as big as a child, and trailed over the carpet. It provided her with the counterbalance she needed to avoid toppling over as she moved from side to side like a living construction crane.

The cherry on top? At the end of that monstrous neck was a perfectly human face.

“Yuth was just talking about you, you know,” Tira said. Craning her body to the side, Tira curled her neck to face her head down the hallway. “Yuth!” she called. “Look who’s here!”

“What is it now, Tira? This is the third time you’ve—”

—Yuth paused the instant our eyes met. For we stared at each other for a wordless moment.

The Quiet Ward’s supervising nurse was almost entirely human. Almost. Still the same high-cheekbones. Still the same slightly earthy skin. She’d dispensed with her make-up for all the obvious reasons, though I hardly noticed it. Without my wyrm-enhanced memory, I wouldn’t have noticed it. Yuth had let her hair out, though, unbinding it from its ponytail.

Unfortunately, the inhuman part of her body was utterly absurd. As if in exchange for temporarily sparing her humanity, Yuth’s transformation had gone all-out with her tail. It was outlandish. It was like a giant, misshapen phallus, only as wide as her torso. She’d threaded the thing between her legs and then up along her chest. From there, it went over her shoulder, its girth cresting above her head as it trailed down her back. Its tip came to rest a bit below her cheekless buttocks, where it occasionally brushed the back sides of her nightmarish, fungus-struck legs.

Understandably, Nurse Costran was naked south of the border: no shoes, no socks, no skirt, no stockings, no undergarments of any kind, though that hardly mattered. As far as I could tell, any traces of her human plumbing had been plastered over by olive-colored wyrm-scales, though of a lighter hue than those on her dorsal side. The scales on her belly and ventral side were longer and thicker.

Scutes, I thought, recalling the term from middle-school biology class.

“I’m sorry you have to be here, Genneth.”

Oh God…

I felt myself getting emotional all over again. “Does it hurt?” I asked, weakly.

“No.” She sighed in resignation. “But… all things considered,” she put on a smile, “it’s nice to see you.”

That was so characteristic of her: to try to plaster over the pain.

“It’s nice to see you, too,” I said.

“How’s Letty doing?”

“Actually, now that you’re here, Nurse Costran,” Dr. Horosha said. “I could use your assistance.”

“What can I do you for, Suisei?” she asked.

“Ensuring the restraints on our newest guests are properly secure,” he explained.

Yuth nodded. “Right away.”

“This way,” he said. He turned to me. “If you will excuse me, Dr. Howle. I will return momentarily.”

The two of them walked down the hall.

“So…” Tira said, “how are things?”

Andalon pointed at the secretary’s neck. “Necky!”

You can say that again.

She did: “Big, big necky!”

I sighed. “Actually, uh… Tira… I’m feeling a bit—well, more than a bit overwhelmed right now. I’d like some time to myself.”

Tira nodded. “No problem. No problem.”

She craned her neck to a conversation almost 180 degrees away.

You too, Andalon.

The spirit-girl vanished with a nod.

Walking off to the side, I took my seat on a nearby stool, where I sat for several minutes, trying to process everything that had happened. Everything was still happening.

Is there any upside here? Anything? Anything at all?

I thought long and hard about it.

Well, with my tail now dangling out behind me, sitting down was nowhere near as much of a fuss as it had been for the past twenty-four hours. Unfortunately, that wasn’t much of a silver lining, thanks to the boatload of grotesquerie on display all around me.

Angel’s Face, it was disturbing!

There were many different states of transformation on display. Some people looked perfectly normal, others, were more noticeably changed, though they were still mostly human. Tira was on the far end of that spectrum, but it didn’t seem to bother her in the least. The receptionist was as personable as ever, conversing with the transformees who were relaxing by the chairs in the waiting area as if everything was perfectly normal.

But Tira was far from the most significantly transformed transformee.

From what I could tell, it looked like I was somewhere in the second quartile of transformation progression: not entirely human, but still significantly less changed than some of the others.

This brings me to the eight-hundred pound gorilla (wyrm?) in the room.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

One transformee was, far and away, more transformed than any of the others, no contest. The formerly human male was coiled on the floor—yes, coiled. He was coiled out in the open, in the middle of the large open space next to the reception desk, opposite Tira, the carpet, and the chairs.

I shuddered.

It was another fairy-tale moment—this time of Dalusian extraction: the tale of Mehda and the Serpent Sultan, though with a grungy, unsavory twist. Instead of the cursed king’s seraglio in his palace in the dunes—the lush carpets, the ornamented pillows—the snake-man coiled beside the reception desk nestled among step-ladders and power tools. He wore a dark, half-torn, stained T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “Whatever happened, it’s probably your fault.” At one point in time, he must have had black hair; all that remained of it now were a couple ridges of the stuff sitting atop his distended, rostral skull. A torn eyelid dangled from his face, beneath the glistening, golden orb that had taken the place of his human eye. His scales were Night-black, with a satiny-finish that swept out over a tail which had long since usurped his legs. His tail was a solid, massive length of wyrm-flesh that flowed out seamlessly from his broadened waist, tightly coiled beneath him in two, thick layers, occupying an area at least as large as my dining room table. He kept extraordinarily still, his arms crossed in contemplation. I had to blink several times to convince myself that his body was as motionless as it seemed to be. I would have thought him a wax statue rather than a living thing, were it not for his eyelids occasionally twitching, reminding me he was actually alive.

There was no breath in his chest.

Tingling sensations ran down my tail as I looked at him, and I couldn’t help but point a finger as I stared.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Ah, that’s Greg,” Tira said. “He works in IT.” She tilted her head to the side. “Well… worked.”

“Greg Pfefferman?” I asked.

Over on the other side of the room, Greg stirred.

“Information Technology,” he said, calmly but sternly.

With its many layers of sound, his voice reminded me of the filters that hackers used in TV dramas whenever they stated their demands.

The wyrm eyelid that had replaced his sloughing human one pulled back, revealing more of his golden eye. It slipped back down as he returned to his trance-like state, but not before taking note of the newest arrival.

Me.

I looked away. I felt terrified and seriously awkward. I immediately decided to change the topic, while making a concerted effort to not look at Greg any more than was absolutely necessary.

Andalon?

“Yeah?” she asked, popping into existence right in front of me.

You didn’t answer my question. What…

Biting my lip, I shook my head. What am I doing wrong that’s allowing the darkness to corrupt my ghosts, but not these people’s ghosts?

Admittedly, I’d only seen these transformees’ ghosts for a brief period of time, but I hadn’t seen anything which countered Andalon’s confident assertion that, unlike mine, these ghosts were safe.

The spirits I’d seen had looked… normal. Dressed in their day-clothes. They’d been downright prosaic!

“It’s because they’re keeping their ghosts happy,” Andalon said. Suddenly, her eyes widened. She perked up. “Oh, and they’re doin’ the thing! That’s really imporptant!”

What thing?

Andalon looked around evasively before glancing down in shame. “Andalon doesn’t remember.”

I sighed.

Fair enough.

Hopefully, she’d remember more in due time.

“Okay!” Andalon smiled brightly, and then vanished an instant later.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dr. Horosha walk out from around one of the plastic curtains in the hallway.

Immediately seizing the opportunity, I stomped a foot on the floor to get his attention, and called his name for good measure. “Dr. Horosha,” I said. I crossed my arms. “If you don’t mind, I’d like my explanation now.”

“And you shall have it, Dr. Howle,” he said, as he closed the door to the patient room behind him. Then, approaching, Dr. Horosha did something that surprised me: he bowed at me. Deeply.

His arms went stiff as he pressed them flush against his sides.

“What’s going on here?” I asked. “And whose idea was it?”

Tira craned her head back toward me. “Well, first, I was—”

“—It was my idea,” Dr. Horosha said. He leaned back against the reception desk’s countertop.

I blinked. “What?”

From what I’d seen of him, I’d assumed Suisei Horosha was a man who liked to follow protocol to the letter. Apparently, I’d been mistaken.

“Horosha, this is a massive breach of protocol,” I said. “And, I should know, I’m lying to our colleagues.”

Then again, so are you, I thought—though I didn’t say it.

“Please,” Horosha bowed once more, “call me Suisei.” He wove his fingers together. “As much as I wish it were otherwise, I have never felt at home with my title as a Doctor.”

That made sense. Doctors tended not to be surrounded by snow-globe’s worth of flurrious motes.

“Before I have to ask for a third time,” I said, “can someone please tell me what the fudge is going on here?”

Greg’s golden eye opened once more. “He’s training us.” What remained of his eyebrows narrowed. “Well, he’s training them,” he added. “I’ve got my own projects to work on.”

“Training?” I said. “Training wh—”

Before I could react, blue-gold plexus threads flowed out from Greg and wove around me, making my body give gravity the proverbial cold shoulder.

“—Wah!” I yelped as I floated up several feet off the ground. Crazier still, I stayed that way for far too many seconds, long enough for me to calm down.

Greg lowered me back onto my stool.

“Stuff like that,” he said. Then he closed his eyes, and was like stone once more.

“He just made me float.” I said, pointed at Greg and giving Suisei a stink-eye. “I—I’m—” I stammered.

“Yes.” Suisei nodded. “Mr. Pfefferman is quite… adept.”

“So… you’re training them to use their powers.” I blinked. “Wait… How are you doing that? Also, why?”

Greg opened his eyes again. Angel’s breath, it was creepy!

“We’re all transformees here, dude.” He tilted his head toward Dr. Horosha. “Suisei here is our resident psychokinetic savant.”

He nodded at Greg. “You are too kind.”

“As for why…” Suisei said, answering the rest of my question. For a moment, he looked off into the distance, as if contemplating a memory, and then he looked back at me and answered me in the simplest possible way: “Why not?”

He continued, “As you have seen, Dr. Howle, I have developed a good deal of skill with these powers. Seeing as I am not alone in possessing them, it is in everyone’s best interest that I share my skills as much as I can. I think you can agree with that, no?” He looked me in the eyes. “Dr. Marteneiss has said so much about you, Genneth.” His smile turned forlorn. You are not the only one who wishes to be… useful.” He sighed.

Those last few sentences of his perfectly encapsulated Suisei’s personality and demeanor. I knew he was devout Lassedile, so he would have been averse to lying—though how much of an aversion depended on whether or not he believed in the Principle of Double Effect, and I wasn’t about to debate moral philosophy with him. Yet, given what I knew about him—particularly, that he wasn’t a transformee—his particular choice of words was absolutely fascinating. None of what he’d said contained the lie that he was a transformee, but it was also posed in such a way that if you didn’t have any reason to suspect otherwise, you’d think that’s exactly what he’d meant.

So, not only was he lying by omission, he was doing it intentionally.

“Though management has decided to sequester the transformees and hope for the best,” he continued, “there are many in West Elpeck Medical Center who feel they deserve our assistance and support, even if that means opening ourselves to… less traditional forms of medical care.”

“So you’re just doing this out of the goodness of your heart?” I asked, with a hint of sarcasm.

Suisei shook his head. “No. I am trying to be as rational as I can about this, but… I am trying to do what I can to avert catastrophe."

“What do you mean?”

He nodded. “We are all in significant danger. The threat grows with each passing hour.”

“What?” I did not like the sound of those words.

“There are many threats. Consider this. With the number of cases of NFP-20 we have observed so far, we can approximate the ratio of Type Two cases to Type Ones. The ratio seems to be constant. Small, but constant—though smallness is of little help here.”

“How so?”

Greg’s eye opened briefly. “You asked for it…”

Uh-oh.

“Suppose one out of every thousand people infected by the Green Death is a Type Two case,” Suisei explained. “There are 14 million people living in Elpeck alone.”

“14.3,” I said.

He nodded. “That means approximately 14 thousand transformees. Suppose further that, say, one percent of those 14 thousand have violent dispositions. That means the Elpeck Peninsula alone will have to contend with an army of nearly fifteen-hundred violent individuals with superhuman abilities. I hope I do not need to describe for you the kind of devastation we will see when those fifteen-hundred sociopaths discover they now have the ability to move objects at a distance with merely a thought.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but I couldn’t find the words.

“My point, exactly.” Suisei nodded.

It would be horrific beyond words. Fifteen-hundred Wognivitches, only with magic powers!

“The mayhem is coming,” Suisei said. “It is only a matter of time.” He nodded. “This hospital needs as many skilled kineticists as it can get. At this point, it is a matter of public safety. For maximum efficiency, I have chosen to restrict my attention to trustworthy transformees among the hospital staff. And so, our little self-help group was born.”

“And if anyone proves to be a rotten egg,” Greg added, “we can at least sic law enforcement—and, now, the military—on them. I don’t know if it would stop them, but it would slow them down.” He blinked. “Maybe.”

I stared at both of them for a second. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Always,” Suisei said. He looked over the other members of his coterie of transformees. “The skilled help others become skilled. And when the time comes, perhaps it will be enough to keep the cannibals and the madmen at bay.”

I gulped.