I found the hazmat suit exactly where Greg said I would, laid in eerie neatness on the floor down one of the ward’s side hallways.

He hadn’t mentioned its riotous electric lime color was nearly indistinguishable from the color of the fungus’ spores. The suit was a hollow ghost, clean and pristine. There wasn’t the slightest trace of a corpse. An airlock zipper-seal ran the length of the torso, completely opened, as if something had burst free, though the horrid truth was the exact opposite of that. The suit lay against the seam where the pallid teal vinyl floor met the hallway’s walls, sloughed off and abandoned—a plastic shell of a humanoid being.

What most attracted my attention was the large, backpack-shaped lump jutting out from the suit’s back. After a bit of fumbling befuddlement, kneeling down onto my numb, dead knees, I noticed a closed zipper-seal on the back of the suit’s interior. Opening it made the air-tight seal hiss as air puffed out. Through the gap, I saw a pair of slender metal tanks. Their satin finished gleamed dully in the dim light. It took a second for me to realize what it was.

The air supply.

The point was to completely separate the wearer from the environment around them.

“Uh-oh…” I muttered. This was going to be more complicated than I first thought. “Fudge, where am I going to get my oxygen supply?”

Not only was it a good question, it was also a bad one. We were already having to ration the hospital’s oxygen supplies, and, even if we hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been comfortable taking precious air that our patients could have used to breathe.

“Somethin’ wrong, Mr. Genneth?” Andalon asked, popping into existence behind my shoulder. She looked over me, staring into the suit along with me.

What the heck, I might as well ask.

I looked over my shoulder.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Do wyrms need to breathe?” I asked. “Do I still need to breathe?”

“What do you mean?”

I paused, and then decided it would just be best to show her. “This is breathing,” I said, and then I took a couple deep breaths.

Her response? She giggled. “No, Mr. Genneth. That’s silly. Wyrmehs don’t need to breathe.”

That would explain why I’d noticed I’d been breathing a lot less than usual.

So, on the one hand, I wasn’t breathing anymore. On the other hand, I could finally explore the bottom of the sea.

Fricassee me. This is never going to feel normal, is it?

“What is normal, Mr. Genneth?”

I chuckled, mostly because it was better than crying. “That, Andalon, is a question for the ages.”

Still, I guess it never hurt to be certain.

After a moment’s cringe over the incredibly stupid thing I’d just decided to do, I went ahead and completely covered my mouth and nose with my left hand, blocking any airflow. I spent a couple seconds waiting for the need for air to pull at my chest—but it never came. Instead, a gentle, warm tingle fizzed somewhere in my belly. From my experiments earlier in the evening, it stood to reason that there was probably some more radiation at work, as my body did whatever it did to bypass the whole oxidative cellular respiration thing.

If and when Brand found out about my transformation, he was going to have an absolute field day with it.

Then I took my hand off my mouth and inhaled, and the warmth and tingling instantly faded.

I guess I really didn’t need to breathe anymore. That was convenient. Freaky, but convenient.

Since I clearly wasn’t going to need the oxygen tanks, I pulled them out. Even with gloves on my hand, they were cold to the touch, though not nearly as cold as Andalon. Gently, I placed the tanks on the floor. I was about to start putting the suit on when, while staring at the decent amount of space the tanks had occupied in the suit’s built-in backpack, and noting the flexibility of the plastic, I had a thought that was likely a first in human history: I could put my tail in that. Though, as I thought it over, I realized there was another issue at hand:

What was I going to do with my clothes? Put them in a locker and wear only my undies? I’d never worn one of these things before, so I genuinely didn’t know. I could have looked it up, but there wasn’t any time for that.

I needed my coat. In this situation, my white medical coat was the only truly mandatory piece of clothing—well, that, and my lucky bow-tie. Greg had soldered my chip into the fold of the right sleeve’s cufflink, and so, unless I was willing to claw off the cufflink and wear it as a bracelet, I’d need to wear the coat in order to use my chip.

Before I made my decision, I briefly stared at the suit’s headpiece, looking over the speaker mounted at the base of the inside of the helmet, trying to see if an onlooker could see that the suit’s wearer didn’t have any clothes on. It was difficult to tell, but it looked like I was in the clear.

It was stressful, uncertainty-riddled moments like these that made a man’s skin go clammy and his hairs stand on end. My rotting corpse-body did neither. It also didn’t smell like a rotting corpse should have, but that didn’t stop my proprioception from telling me that it was a rotting, time-lagging shell of a meat-suit; almost as much of a shell as the suit would be once I put it on.

Sighing, I closed my eyes and took a breath, not that I needed it.

I turned to Andalon. “Could you go for the not-here-place for a bit, Andalon?”

“Why?”

I lowered my gaze in embarrassment. “I need to disrobe.”

She smiled enthusiastically. “I don’t know what that means, but okay!”

Would that everyone be so easy-going.

Okay, here we go…

I was not looking forward to seeing the condition my legs were in. Unfortunately, my problems began before I’d even gotten my pants off.

I was having trouble getting up. My… my legs were just too weak. I needed something to pull on; I needed to use my arms. I looked around, but there was no sign of a handrail or the like anywhere nearby.

Greg’s words ran through my thoughts.

Well, you should learn to do that sort of thing on your own.

Fudge, he was right.

I felt like there were two paths I could take: I could try to use my psychokinesis to create a solid surface to push off—like I did with my air-manacles—or I could try pushing off the ground directly with a burst of force. I chose the former. I did not want to end up splattering my head against the ceiling.

I raised my arms up as my thoughts wove glistening fibers around my wrists. I had to keep pushing power into them to keep the effect going. It was a weird sensation, but it was sort of like circular breathing while playing the clarinet, and that, I could manage well enough.

I groaned as I pulled myself up with my arms, tugging against the pataphysics that held my arms in place. My legs trembled beneath me like I’d aged fifty years overnight. But it worked. I dismissed the force with a sigh, and then I pulled down my pants.

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I shouldn’t have done it with my eyes open.

The first thing that came to mind was one of the old sofa-chair cushions from my Dad’s place. Even before my transformation had enhanced my memories, I could vividly remember unzipping the pillow covering to get at the pillow underneath, only for feathers and mold to breathe all over me, making me sneeze as they spilled out onto the carpet. The pillow had been torn open within the covering, the down spilling out.

The covering was to the pillow what my pants had been to my legs. Thick flakes of fat and hairy skin crumbled off my trembling legs as I slid them out from my pants. My limbs looked like something you’d find on a medical school cadaver, left out to rot in the sun. They were covered in whole swaths of necrosis where the flesh had turned dry, flaky, gnarled, and dark. And where the necrosis had yet to spread, the skin was filmy and translucent, like gelatin, and through it, I could see the rot that had seeped into my bones. The break in my leg bone was clearly visible. My skin held the limb together like wet pantyhose. And, once outside of my loafers, my feet jostled like bobbleheads at the ends of my legs, tenuously attached at best.

I didn’t dare look under my boxers. Just noting the feel of something… loose… brushing against me underneath them as already more than I could handle.

Beast’s teeth…

In jutting out over the top of the back of my boxer short’s waistband, my undergarments were riding low.

Before I could second guess myself, I closed my eyes and ran my right-hand’s claw along my undergarments, ripping through the fabric on the front and back. I flinched at my claw’s sharp touch against my rear. Keeping my eyes closed, I grabbed my boxers from the front, squeezed and pulled them off, shuddering in horror as… something… came loose. Things like roots pulled out from beneath my legs, and I shuddered more when they finally came free.

There was a mass in my hands. Something solid. Something—

—Multiple things happened at once. The most important was me throwing the horrid thing in my hands as far as I could the instant I realized it was moving on its own within my shredded boxer shorts, rasping like scales against stone. Opening my eyes, I slammed a psychic anvil down on the thing the instant it landed. I saw a brief glimpse of something like tendrils wriggling on the floor before my psychokinesis crushed it to a pulp. There was a splatter, and a crack in the ground, and when the deed was done, all that remained was the shreds of my undergarments and dulled, grayed-violet dust spread over the floor.

It wasn’t cold but I couldn’t stop shivering, especially when a familiar wriggling sensation graced my crotch as whatever wounds I’d made sealed themselves shut from within.

I glanced down, just once. All of a sudden, I realized that I hadn’t used the restroom in far too long, and I hadn’t even noticed it.

Now I knew why.

All the plumbing was gone. Urogenital tract, anus—everything. Not even my navel had been spared. Everything had been smoothed over. I shivered again, this time from the feeling of my freed tail swishing on the floor.

Now, I just needed to thread the needle—well, backpack. Given that my tail was already thicker than my leg—at the very base, my hands could just barely wrap around its girth, the task was easier said than done.

I grabbed the suit without touching it, lifting it up with a psychokinetic tug, and then clutching onto it once it was within reach. No more needing to bend over to pick things up. I supposed. Sticking my legs through the suit’s legs was surprisingly easy, even with how much they trembled. The hard part was stuffing my tail into the air-tank compartment in back.

“This must be what a hermit crab feels like when it’s changing shells,” I muttered.

I fought to keep my tail as still as possible. The extra practice I’d gotten while sitting down with the self-help group really made a difference here. For better and for worse, I was starting to think of my tail as an honest-to-goodness limb, even as my legs continued to decay. And, to be honest, the backpack's spaciousness was downright luxurious compared to my pants-leg.

Finally came the moment of truth: I slipped my head into the suit.

The suit’s built-in helmet was massive. I was fortunate for that; it gave me enough room to bend my neck to bring my face to a normal height-level while simultaneously keeping its freakishly elongated curve tucked away out of sight.

Shuddering, I clenched my fingers. My missing fingers made my gloves a bit floppy, but, hopefully, no one would notice. Then I zipped the suit closed, and only after that did I breathe a sigh. A light by the suit’s speakerphone flashed green in response; sound puffed out of the suit’s speakers on the outside.

I wanted to scream and cry. But I just didn’t have the time.

“Mr. Genneth… can I come out now?”

“Yes, Andalon,” I said, wearily, “you can.”

Andalon popped into existence leaning back against the opposite wall.

“Can I say my thing now?”

“Sure!” I smiled bitterly. “Why not?”

I was about to apologize, but then I saw her nod excitedly. She hadn’t understood my sarcasm.

Let sleeping beasts lie, then.

“When we were in Gregworld,” Andalon said, “I had a big remembering!”

She spread her arms wide, gesturing at the space around us.

“What Greggy was doing? That was makin’ stuff! That was what wyrmehs are for! This is what you do! You make places for people to be. They’ll be safe here. They can live, and the Darkness won’t hurt them. That’s why the ghosties with Greggy and friends were safe from the Darkness! They were safe in happy mind places!”

“But… why?” I asked. “How does that save them?”

“They need to be busy, and happy, and maybe even sad sometimes,” Andalon answered. “They need a world, even if they don’t have one anymore. Without that…” she shook her head again, forlornly, “they don’t want to be anymore. They’d want to die and go away forever.”

Holy Angel.

“And that’s what makes them into demons…” I whispered, feeling the light-bulbs flashing in my mind. I nodded. “That’s how Hell corrupts them.” I followed my train of thought, exhilarated and terrified at the same time. “When the ghosts of the dead yearn to die, their pain and loathing turns them into monsters. That’s what happened to Ileene and Frank and the others. They can’t be in Paradise if they don’t want to be there, and if they’re not going to be in Paradise…” I gulped. “They go to Hell, instead. Their pain turns them toward Hell.”

Andalon nodded.

“And when they go, they leave me all alone, and I’m sad, too, because they’re gone and because now I gots nobody to help me figure out why I am, and where I’m from, and where my happy family is!” Andalon held her head down in dejection for a moment, and then, she lifted it up and nodded confidently, though her expression was still flushed with concern. “You need to learn how to do what Greggy did and make the ghosties like Miss Leen good and happy, Mr. Genneth,” she said, “or they will be very sad and lonely—”

“—And the Darkness will take them and make them into monsters,” I said.

By the Angel, it made sense!

— — —

It took about forty-five seconds to walk back to Suisei, and it took about fifteen seconds before I wanted to tear my electric-green hazmat suit open and cast it onto the floor. Whatever relief I felt at no longer having my tail stuffed down my pant-leg melted in the hazmat suit’s humid confines. The atmosphere inside the suit wasn’t just hot. It was sticky heat. It was a languorous heat; a hot stillness that weighed my limbs down with every step. I almost wished I did have to breathe. At least then I would suffocate and get put out of my misery.

Though, I supposed that was appropriate. Perhaps this was part of my (well-deserved) punishment for having outright lied to colleagues.

I had to wobble on my decaying legs, both because of their weakness, and because of how having my tail woven in the tank-space constantly set me off balance, in addition to making it feel like I was walking with my butt pressed against the small of my back. I had to be careful not to fling my broken leg about too much, or it wobbled like a rag-doll limb from inside my suit.

As I walked, Andalon followed alongside me, and to my surprise, she was suffering from the heat almost as much as I was. She was sweaty and wilted, and constantly grumbling in discomfort.

On a whim, I tried to think of cooler weather; the sometimes-refreshing, usually-oppressing damp chill of a cool summer’s day in Elpeck. And, curiously enough, it seemed to work. Andalon’s breathing eased and she stopped moping at me with those blue, blue eyes of hers.

I found Dr. Horosha leaning against the side of the hall, rapidly tapping his thumb and forefinger in impatience. He stared at me for a moment, and I could have sworn I heard him snort.

“You really are dedicated to this,” he said.

I stood still for a moment, marinating in the heat. “You have no idea.” I looked him in the eyes. “Are we ready to go?” I asked.

And, to my relief, he nodded.

We made for odd partners as we walked down the hallway. Suisei’s walking speed was most men’s jogging speed. I had to speed myself forward with little psychokinetic bursts—like I was an engine, sputtering—just to keep up. No one gave me more than a passing glance as we crossed back into the Administration Building. We made it to an elevator lobby at the edge of Ward E in relatively good time, and fortunately for us, the darkpox patients were nearby. I made a beeline toward the elevator call buttons—which I pressed—while Dr. Horosha kept on going, apparently intent on taking the stairs.

“Uh… could we take the elevator?” I asked.

Dr. Horosha stopped in his tracks. “The stairs would be quicker,” he said.

“Well,” I replied, “my feet aren’t feeling very quick at the moment.”

He turned to face me right as one pair of elevator doors slid open in front of me.

“You were the one who insisted on accompanying me, you know,” he said, walking over to the elevator.

He went in first, and did me the courtesy of holding the door open as I stepped in and pressed the button for the first floor. Above the door, the floor indicator made several cheerful dings as we made our descent.

In between the dings, I asked him a question.

“What’s your endgame?” I said.

“To survive, and help others do the same, while doing what good I can, when I can.” He glanced up at the floor indicator above the door. “And, perhaps, to understand why your night sky has no stars.”

“What’s a star?” I asked. I’d never heard the word before.

“Suisei?”

“Something beautiful, Genneth,” he said. “Something beautiful.””

The elevator came to a stop as the doors slid open.

He walked off, and I followed him. The hallways of the ground floor were rich with desperation—and not just my own.

And then, we heard the screams.

No, I thought: battle-cries.