The dream tower was the key, I thought. The coma boy had seen it. The avatar girl had run to it for safety. Even the reaper had been there at some point. The tower tied all of us together somehow, and maybe I could use it to find others of my kind. But how did you search for something that, by its very nature, did not exist in the real world? If I searched for it in my dreams I could wind up with all seven reapers coming after me.
It was too much to think about. I closed my eyes for a moment, sighing deeply.
“You okay, Jess?”
“Just tired,” I muttered. “It’s been one hell of a week.”
Was it only a month ago that I’d been struggling to deal with normal teenage angst? Final exam stress, family issues, concern over finding a part-time job for the summer so that I could afford a car next year? It had seemed like so much to deal with, back then. Overwhelming. That was the one upside about being hunted by monsters, I thought dryly. It really put things in perspective.
“Hand me the phone,” I told Tommy. “I’ll tell the Fleshcrafter we’re good to go.”
The Potter arrived at eight o’clock sharp. Whatever I’d expected our assigned Fleshcrafter to look like, the stocky, ruddy-cheeked senior citizen who showed up at our front door was not it. But apparently Selena Hearst was the perfect person to win my family’s trust, and soon Rose was setting out tea for us all and asking about Eastern massage techniques. The Fleshcrafter was surprisingly patient and showed us a collection of river rocks that she used in her work. She said she’d collected them from spiritually significant waterways. Would Rose mind warming them in the oven a bit? They worked better that way. Oh, and Selena would like to brew a special herbal tea for my mother, would it be possible to get some hot water for that? I wasn’t sure how much of her performance was real and how much was just cover for her real business, but I suspected it was strongly weighted toward the latter.
Finally we all retired to a back room with Mom, where a table had been laid out with a camping mattress on top of it. I’d asked Rose to get us a couple of boxes of donuts, as per the Potter’s request, and they were waiting on the sideboard, their lids folded neatly back. The room smelled of confectioner’s sugar.
The Fleshcrafter had Mom drink the tea and then lie down, and she made a show of arranging the newly warmed river stones around her in a pattern designed to channel her vital energies. Or so she explained to Rose and Julian as they watched. Soon Mom’s eyes shut, and it looked like she’d fallen asleep. Selena requested politely that everyone but the children leave, as too many people in the room would make it hard for her to channel Mom’s qi properly. My aunt and uncle didn’t want to go, but clearly they respected Selena’s expertise. Soon the four of us were alone.
As Selena reached for a donut I noticed a change in her body language. Gone was the aura of homey warmth that had so charmed my family, and in its place was a sharp and sparing manner, totally at odds with her physical appearance. I must have been staring at her, because when she finished her first donut she looked over at me and said, “No, I’m not really old. Not female, either. That simply seemed like the most effective way to deal with your family.”
“It was,” I agreed. I looked at Mom. “What did you give her?”
“Something to shut down non-essential mental activity. I can no more fleshcraft an active brain than a surgeon can operate on a moving body. Not safely, anyway.”
She (he?) took another donut. “You understand, my goal here is to restore the neural network as it existed before the fire. Any cells which died left their mark on the surrounding tissue, so there are ingrained patterns for reference. I can prompt the body to create new cells exactly where the old ones were.” She started inspecting Mom with her free hand as she talked, touching her gently at various points on her face and skull. “Neurotransmitters, on the other hand, are temporary in nature, reabsorbed after every use. I can’t judge how effectively they functioned before the fire, so I can’t adjust their strength now. The brain will do that naturally once the neural network is restored, seeking its original balance, but that will take time. You should expect a period of confusion, with intense and possibly disturbing dreams. None of which will have any medical significance, save as a sign that she is healing.”
Yeah, but it’ll be hell to explain to my family, after I gave them a song and dance about how you would make Mom feel better. “For how long?” I asked.
“She seems highly functional, which suggests that repairs will be minimal; I’d be optimistic about the time. A week, perhaps.” She looked up at me. “We’re in the primary Terran Cluster, correct? Only one moon?”
“Uh . . . yeah. One moon.”
She nodded. “One month at most, then. If disorientation lasts longer than that, contact me.”
“Will there be any pain?” Tommy asked.
“Usually there is. The human body doesn’t surrender its birth-form without protest. But since brain tissue has no pain receptors, your mother should be fine.”
She finished off the donut and waved us to silence. “No more questions now. I need to concentrate.”
Tommy and I watched her fleshcraft. Or more accurately, we stared at a man in an old woman’s body while she leaned over our sleeping mother and nothing visible happened. The Potter spread her fingers over Mom’s face and skull, lowered her (his?) head until their foreheads nearly touched, then closed her eyes and seemed to go into a trance. Periodically she would awaken from it long enough to get another donut, study Mom as she ate it, then return to her trance. Eight donuts in all. It was a long time to wait for something to happen. At one point I saw Tommy take out his phone and text somebody. Later I took paper from the nearby desk and started sketching the shapechanging castle that I’d seen through the reaper, angling my work so that even if the Potter looked in my direction she wouldn’t see it. But the building defied my best attempts to capture it on paper; it was as if it existed only in the world of imagination and couldn’t be translated into materials as mundane as pencil and paper. After several tries I gave up, closed the drawing pad, and waited in silence.
Finally the Potter drew back from the table. My mother was beginning to stir now, moving her head from side to side, whispering things that didn’t sound like English. I felt a knot form in my stomach. What if this process skewed her brain so badly that she appeared even sicker than before? My aunt and uncle would take her to a hospital for testing, and God alone knew what would come of that. Would tests of her newly restored brain match the ones from before this operation? What would the doctors make of it if they didn’t?
Suddenly her eyes opened. I held my breath as she stared at the ceiling for several seconds, then slowly looked around the room. Her eyes were wide. “The colors . . .” she whispered. “So different.”
The Potter helped her to a sitting position on the table. Mom seemed very weak, but that might just have been from the drugged tea. “Tell me what you see.”
“The colors . . . look brighter. Everything. Brighter. Like I’d been seeing the world through a grey veil before, but didn’t know it. Now suddenly it’s gone.” She laughed softly, a sound of wonder and delight. “My God, I don’t know the right words to describe it.”
“I understand what you mean,” the Potter said softy.
Mom turned to me then, and I went to her and held her, and this time I let the tears come. So did Tommy, I think. He hid his face so we wouldn’t see them, but I saw his shoulders tremble.
Finally we disentangled from the three-way hug. Mom looked at the Potter. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Whatever you did, it feels like something is better. Thank you so much.”
The elderly female face smiled sweetly. “I’m glad to be able to help.”
Mom slid her feet down to the floor, tested her weight on them, then pushed herself away from the table. “Even the pressure on my feet feels different,” she whispered. “More . . . more detailed.”
br />
“The spiritual channels within you are fully open,” the Potter said, in her best New Age voice. “Your qi is flowing freely again, and all your senses are coming back to life. It’s part of the natural healing process.”
Mom looked around the room. “Where are Rose and Julian?”
“In the kitchen, I believe. I asked them to give us privacy. They’ve been most patient.”
Tears glimmering in her eyes, Mom hugged us both again, then headed off to find the rest of the family. We watched as she walked down the hall, staring at every piece of furniture she passed as though seeing its color for the first time. Soon she was out of sight.
“Was that a normal response?” Tommy whispered.
“Not uncommon. It’s a good sign.” The Potter looked at her watch, then at me. “We’ll give your family some time to absorb the news and express their gratitude, then you and I should retire to somewhere more private for your own alteration. You won’t want to be seen right afterward.”
I had been so focused on Mom, it took me a moment to realize what she was referring to: my own scent change. “We can use my room,” I said. I felt a bit queasy that someone was about to reshape my body, no matter how minimal that change might be.
A few minutes later Rose and Julian and Mom joined us, and the atmosphere was downright festive. Everyone told the Potter how grateful they were for her help, and Julian tried to offer her payment for her services, but she refused, saying that she’d done it as a favor to Miriam Seyer, not to worry about it. So Rose said that if there was ever anything they could do for her, ever, she had but to ask, and Mom said that went double for her. The Potter accepted their gratitude in a friendly old-woman way, and once more I was struck by the ease with which she switched roles depending on circumstances. Finally she said that Tommy and I had asked about her crystal work, and if it was okay with everyone she’d like to go off with us and teach us some things about the energies of semi-precious stones. And of course it was okay, though Rose did make me promise to share the information with her later.
There was a tremor of fear in my stomach as we headed up the stairs to my room, adult laughter fading behind us. But you gotta do what you gotta do.
My transformation hurt. A lot. When it was finally done I felt like I’d spent a day on the beach without sunblock, then rubbed sandpaper into my skin until it was raw, then taken a bath in lemon juice. And I looked like a boiled lobster.
But if this was what it took to get my body to exude a new cocktail of oils and gasses, so that my scent was no longer recognizable to the Hunters who’d smelled me in the past, it was worth every minute of the five-donut operation.
Tommy perched by my side during all of it, clearly wanting to be helpful but not knowing how. At one point when I was struggling not to cry out in pain he reminded me of the Mythbusters episode where they demonstrated that yelling profanities improved pain tolerance. The information didn’t do me much good—I couldn’t yell anything without my whole family bursting in to see what was wrong—but it got the Potter’s attention, and when she was done turning me into a lobster she asked Tommy to describe the experiment in detail. Apparently no one on Terra Prime had ever thought to ask whether screaming “oh, fuck!” at the top of your lungs would really make something hurt less. Maybe you needed an American mindset to come up with that.
The look on Tommy’s face during that conversation was something to see. For a few precious minutes he wasn’t a little kid, or a silent spectator, or even an ignorant Colonnan. He had knowledge that this powerful alien Fleshcrafter wanted, and she respected him for it. By the end of the conversation he was glowing so brightly from pride that you could have used him to light a room.
I understood just how he felt.
The Potter remained with us until the worst of my pain had faded then declared the operation a success. As she packed up her crystals and river stones, she told me my unnatural redness should fade within the hour, and recommended I avoid the rest of the family until I looked more normal. She also told me to wash all my clothing and my bedding, and throw out any garments that weren’t washable, as they still had my old scent on them. I hadn’t thought about that.
I could travel on Terra Prime now, I realized—or any world—and the Hunters who’d tracked me before wouldn’t recognize my scent trail. That was a heady concept. The Potter gave me a card with her contact information on it, and told me to get in touch with her if I had any concerns about her work. The name on the card was Reginald Harrington III, Master of the Guild of Potters, and the contact point was an office of the Guild of Greys. My hand trembled slightly as I noted that. Yeah, I understood that interworld mail deliveries normally went through the Greys, but servants of the Shadows were the last people I wanted to have knowledge of my business. At least I had the alias that Seyer had given me, so I wouldn’t have to give them my real name.
It seemed like all our business was done, but as she turned to leave Tommy suddenly asked her, “What’s with the donuts?”
We both turned to look at him—the Potter startled, me aghast.
“You’ve eaten fourteen of them since you got here,” he pressed. “Not like I’m counting or anything. Jesse obviously knew you were going to do that, since she’s the one who asked Aunt Rose to get them. So. . . . are you like, hypoglycemic? Or is it something more interesting than that?”
I was glad that my skin was already red so the Potter wouldn’t see me blush. “Tommy, please, don’t be rude—”
But she seemed more amused than insulted and waved off my concern. “It’s quite all right.” To Tommy she said, “Aside from the energy expenditure required by fleshcrafting—which is considerable—our Gift has certain limits. I can force my flesh to take any shape I please, but I can’t create flesh where none exists.”
“So you can change your body shape, but not your mass.”
“Correct.”
“So if you wanted to make your body bigger than it is right now, you’d have to put on weight like a normal person first. Right?” His face had taken on the same solemn expression as when he was reviewing a new game system. I guess, to his mind, he was doing just that.
She smiled. “Precisely.”
“So how much weight will you have to put on to go back to your regular shape? The male one, I mean.”
She looked down at her stocky form and chuckled. “The bodies are roughly commensurate in mass. Deliberately so.”
I suddenly remembered how small the Guildmaster’s body had been, independent of his extra arms. And many of the Potters in his grand hall had likewise been slender of build. The girl with the wings had been downright tiny. All of that made perfect sense, if a Potter who wanted to create extra appendages had to reassign existing flesh to do so.
Leave it to my little brother to connect that to their chocolate fetish.
Finally Tommy ran out of questions, and the Potter was allowed to leave. With a weary sigh I fell back on the bed, so tired in body and soul that I felt like I was bleeding into the mattress. Which was a good thing. Any sensation other than pain was a good thing.
For a moment I lay there with my eyes closed, enjoying the silence.
The total silence.
Without the sound of footsteps leaving my room.
I cracked open one eye. Tommy was standing by the bed looking down at me. His expression was solemn.
“What’s up?” I asked.
He shook his head and made a tsk-tsk noise.
I opened my other eye. “What? Is something wrong? What is it?”
A spark of amusement glittered in his eyes. “You didn’t tell me there was a junk food Gift.”
I picked up a pillow and threw it at him. It felt good. Normal, even. I was home.
For now.
28
SEER GUILDHOUSE IN LURAY
VIRGINIA PRIME
ALIA MORGANA
br /> MORGANA WAS IN HER STUDY when her organizer chimed, alerting her to an incoming call. Taking out the appropriate harmonie, she placed it in the holder on her desk and activated it. The image that took shape before her was of a woman wearing a mask that was half human and half bestial. Morgana nodded a greeting. “Well met on a hot summer day, Lady Fleshcrafter.”
“I prefer cool summer nights,” the woman responded.
Morgana nodded her acceptance of the coded greeting. One could never be too careful with Fleshcrafters, as any skilled member of that Guild could sculpt his or her flesh to look like any other. Not to mention the caller was wearing her consortium mask, which could transform anyone. An identity check was the first order of business in any such conversation. “You have news for me?”
“You told me to let you know if the Colonnan girl showed up.”
A delicate eyebrow lifted slightly. “She approached you?”
“She came to barter information with His Grace. She was spoken for by one whose word he valued, so she was granted an audience.”
Morgana’s eyebrow rose slightly. “The Green Man?”
“Indeed.”
That one is playing a dangerous game, Morgana mused. I may need to stage another attack on him soon, to remind him of his duty. “And the information she offered to His Grace?”
“That’s Guild business, and it doesn’t pertain to the favor you asked of me so, with respect, I would prefer not to discuss it.”
“As you wish.” Normally the Fleshcrafter wasn’t so evasive, which suggested that the information Jessica brought them had been unusually sensitive. Something Morgana would have to look into. “I trust you were diplomatic in turning her down?”