The flesh body awoke.

No. What was a flesh body?

Willow came back to herself and opened her eyes. She was in a small room lit by a dim inscription set high in the ceiling. The walls were pale stone and at the edge of her vision she saw the top shelf of a bookcase.

Willow turned her head and suddenly there was pain. Oh the pain! It swept from her neck to her feet like an avalanche, then back up again until it filled her with nausea. She’d felt pain before, terrible pain, but not like this.

She moaned and moved her arms weakly at her sides. She was on some kind of padded surface, something that accordioned out of a large case.

The portable bed. Someone moved in the room and she saw Professor Brandeweiss come into view.

Carl.

“Willow,” he whispered, and laid a hand on her forehead as if he were checking her temperature. Strangely she did feel like she’d come down with a fever. She tried turning further but he stopped her.

“Don’t move, not yet. You’re still healing.”

“Healing,” Willow croaked, and Carl looked across her body. Willow turned her head—suffering another wave of nausea—and saw Annabelle sitting at her other side. She was directing glowing green sphere of light hovered over Willow’s abdomen. Annabelle didn’t acknowledge that Willow had awoken at all.

“What happened,” Willow whispered, and turned back to Carl. She clenched her teeth to keep from vomiting and vowed to herself not to turn her head again.

“What do you remember,” Carl asked.

“I was with… Steph and Daniel,” she said. “Metrology wanted me to come in for another test. Something about their capstone project.”

“They were nosing around,” Carl said. “Tried asking me all sorts of things. They came to the wrong conclusion.”

“They thought I was a magical creature.”

“And they treated you like one,” Carl growled. Willow saw his face change color, his forehead ripple, and realized he was furious.

“There was a chair. And a terrible force.”

“They extracted nearly all of your essence, at least that’s what they told me. They nearly killed you.”

“There was…,” Willow said, but she had difficulty finding the words for the memory. Something about a sphere.

“I wasn’t myself,” Willow continued. “I was… everything.”

Carl was silent, eyes boring into her. But nothing else would come.

“Did I get hurt?”

Carl shook his head, raised his hand to his brow, and let out a chuckle that sounded a lot like a sob. He wiped his eyes and looked across at Annabelle.

“This was my fault,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “I should not have held you back. If I’d just given you your other hand, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

“What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. I’m just tired I suppose.”

“How… bad was it,” Willow asked. “Was it bad?”

“As bad as it could get,” Carl said. “Rest, and let Annabelle finish her work. Afterward we’ll have a discussion about your future.”

Willow swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded slightly, then closed her eyes. She was out before she had the chance to consider his words.

🜛

It was everything. Earth and stone and metal and flesh. It reached and touched and became. Its body was all-encompassing, and ever-shifting. It moved at the speed of thought, adopting whatever form it wished. It sprang up through the walls of stone, passed through mortar and door. Spread through the teeming river of flesh in the hall outside, and touched a hundred at a time. They shivered, but knew not what it was. It was them, if it wanted to be. It was everything.

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The flesh body awoke.

No, Willow awoke. She was in a high-ceilinged room made of pale stone, laying on a padded mat beside a desk and a chair. Carl was standing over her, a pulsating ball of pale-blue energy between his hands. He let out a sigh and canceled the spell, which boiled off into the air.

“What were you doing,” Willow asked, and gingerly got up onto her elbows. Her stomach felt tender, so did her chest, but the pain she remembered from before was mostly gone. Just her normal gamut of aches.

Carl shook his head in exasperation and walked around to sit behind his desk. Willow presently heard the rapid tap of engraving hammer on chisel, and the high squeak of cutting metal.

She worked herself up into a sitting position and found that her clothes had been refastened strangely. She supposed it made sense that Annabelle would have had to undress her, but she still felt a pang of embarrassment.

There was a charred hole in her overcoat, right over her stomach.

Willow squeezed the edge of the cloth between her fingers and it crumbled into charcoal. Her underclothes were blackened, but were at least still present under the hole.

What happened to her?

“Steph and Daniel,” Willow said. “Are they okay? Did they get hurt?”

Carl tapped for a few more seconds before he flicked away a curl of metal and let out a held breath. He considered whatever he was working on under a stand-mounted magelight. He peeled the metal off the lacquer backing.

“Steph and Daniel are fine, unfortunately,” he said. “They were sitting far enough away from you when… Well, they’re fine. Expelled, but alive.”

“Expelled,” Willow blurted out. Carl’s face hadn’t changed at her reaction. He was inspecting what looked to be a small silver medallion.

“They were just trying to help.”

“You nearly died,” he shouted and slammed the medallion down on the tabletop. Willow flinched and when she met his eyes they were angry beyond anything she’d ever seen.

“They treated you like an animal. They didn’t care if you were killed, don’t you understand that? They thought you were less than human, less important than their precious capstone project.” He took a breath, forcing himself calm.

“And, they destroyed three two-hundred em tanks. That’s not an expense the Arcanum can overlook.”

“I think I destroyed them,” Willow admitted, and she saw a smirk touch Carl’s face.

“I know, but they shut up long enough to take the fall. I suppose I should give them a little credit.”

“But they’re getting expelled, why would they do—”

“They were made another offer. Interesting work, hard to come by for expelled students. They were out no matter what, but at least I could mitigate the damage to you.”

Willow considered his words. “Does everyone know now? About me?”

Carl shook his head. “Nobody does, not even those two idiots. The Dean knows you were grievously injured, but besides that nobody knows about your condition.” He looked toward the door, as if expecting something on the other side.

“There’s a young man who’s been threatening me for the last few hours,” he said, and smirked again. “He seems quite taken with you.”

“Leopold,” Willow sighed. “He won’t have known what happened to me.”

“I filled him in with most of the details,” he said. “As for the rest, you’ll have to figure out how to lie well, and fast.”

Carl slid the small amulet onto a thin chain and walked around his desk to Willow’s side. He motioned with the two clasps of the chain, and Willow raised her hair.

“What’s this,” she asked, and Carl fastened the chain around her neck and laid the inscribed silver disc just under her throat.

She didn’t feel any affect.

“Something happened in that metrology lab,” Carl said. “Something I can’t explain. This acts as a planar nullification field. It’ll keep you from… well, I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know,” Willow asked. “What really happened in there?”

He shook his head. “Something I didn’t expect, as usual. Just don’t take it off, whatever you do. Especially when you sleep.”

🜛

Willow found Leopold hunched over, sitting against the wall in the hall outside Carl’s door. They made their way back to the house on Grave street mostly in silence. He tried asking her what happened, but she found it difficult to talk about. Difficult to remember.

Margaret took one look at her and began fussing immediately. Bryan wasn’t much better when he came home, and mention was made several times to her bruised eyes, but she shrugged them off after stuffing her face with potato stew. She and Leopold retreated to her room soon after, where she gently shut the door and laid down on the bed fully clothed.

Leopold laid down beside her.

“Willow,” he whispered. She turned her head toward him and felt the familiar creak of her spine. Was it her spells that turned her head, or her muscles? Where did the paralysis start? How much of her was a real, working, human body?

Willow closed her eyes and tried to banish the thought. Of course she had a human body, why would she think otherwise? Was it what Steph and Daniel had thought—that she was a magical creature or some kind of half-breed? No, it wasn’t that, the idea seemed even more ridiculous to her now that she was out of the metrology lab.

It was something about a chair. And a wall. The tanks against the wall. She felt, strangely, like they were a part of her too. That she was, somehow, more than just her body.

Her thoughts weren’t going anywhere, and she turned back to look at Leopold. He was watching her carefully, and his eyes slipped down to the small pendant at her throat. He reached over and stroked the metal.

“Inscriptions,” he said. “In silver. Did Professor Brandeweiss give you this?”

“He made it for me,” Willow said, and touched the pendant too. The graving was rough and the metal raised enough to bite into her thumb. She still couldn’t feel any affect from it.

“What does it do,” Leopold asked.

“I have no idea,” Willow said, and turned over.