Are You Even Human

How many people have to die before I finally get my shit together?

That thought echoes in my mind, over and over, as we leave Andre's corpse behind. Funny how it takes a second foster brother turning into a mangled pile of meat for the shock of the first to actually start wearing off. Odds are that Peter is dead too, now that I think about it. I've never liked my so-called brothers, I'll admit, but I didn't hate them either. It was just always my job to herd them like the cats they are, being the only level-headed and mature member of our fake little family who could actually speak up for herself.

And I failed to do that. I failed to do much of anything, staying quiet and forcing Emily, of all people, to take charge. And I like Emily, but even with her sudden, strange confidence she doesn't know how to manage people like I do. As usual, she has the plan. She knows what needs to be done. But I'm the one who has to get people to actually be sensible, and I failed at that when I was needed most.

No more. I refuse. I take a deep breath, and another, and then turn to Lia. She's holding my right hand, with Emily keeping a deathgrip on my left. The pressure that killed Andre still dances across my skin, looking for a way inside, but it hasn't found anything yet and there's nothing I can do but hope that will continue. What I can do is manage people.

Lia is our next flight risk. Obviously. Emily is the one who proposed this 'use my powers to prevent dying' strategy in the first place, so she's not going anywhere. And while Lia saw what happens if she lets go of me, she's still panicking. It's obvious from the bob of her Adam's apple, the twitching of her eyes, and the sheen of sweat on her skin. Her thoughts are going a mile a minute, and in situations like this, that could be really, really bad.

I'm panicking too, of course. At least, I think I am. My body is shaking, screaming at me to move faster, but more than anything I just feel numb. …Which is ironic, since my right hand is experiencing physical sensation for the first time I can actually remember, and I do not like it.

I'm not sure if Lia realizes she's currently holding an exact replica of her own hand, but if she doesn't I'm definitely not going to point it out to her.

"Lia, slower breaths," I say instead.

"Oh, now you're talkative, huh?" she snaps at me. Because she's scared, and she reacts to fear by appearing to be angry, like a cat puffing up its body and hissing at a dog. (I really like cats, because they're absolute dumbasses and therefore perfect metaphors for people.) I want to tell her to shut her ass up and do what I say, because literally everyone knows that hyperventilation is bad and slow breaths help a person calm down and I shouldn't need to fucking justify reminding her to take care of herself in a crisis. But Lia is self-centered to the point of fragility, and what I want to tell her won't actually make her do what I need her to do.

"Emily is keeping calm," I tell her instead, even though that's probably a lie. Emily appears calm, though, and as long as I make it a competition Lia will compete.

"Fuck off," Lia snaps at me. "How could anyone be calm right now?"

But she starts breathing slower and stops twitching her eyeballs around like a frightened rabbit, and that's all I need. I squeeze her hand a little tighter, trying to ignore the sensation of feeling crawling further up my arm, the flesh visibly twisting and smoothing and turning itself into a copy of her arm, down to the last hair follicle.

I know this because I can feel them, somehow. Something in the back of my head crawls through Lia's stupidly perfect body the same way that pressure keeps trying to burrow into me and rip me apart. It teases away at what she is and what she's made of, showing me every little detail of every little cell in a way that I get, I understand, except I don't because whenever I try to focus on the details they slip away from my aching head like blood from a wound.

I feel like I'm looking at a tapestry the size of a castle, hanging from high in the sky. I can gaze at it from a distance and see the artwork of her body, but if I step closer to examine the threads the context is lost. I can feel the way her tendons link bicep to bone, but the deeper I focus the more that bone slips away from my mind, the infinite complexity of the tendon consuming my focus until it's not even a tendon anymore, just a single thread of the tapestry that I mindlessly follow along the weave, any idea of the greater picture rendered incomprehensible.

I hate it. I want this feeling to stop. It picks at my mind, making it harder for my already-struggling brain to focus. More and more of my arm turns soft and dark and damnably smooth, confusing sensation after confusing sensation eternally clawing at me, needing to be understood. One of them, I'm sure, has to be warmth. I can't remember feeling temperature, which has always been a problem for me because I can't sweat. Cold isn't too bad; I know I need to put on more clothes when I start to shiver. But heat has always been dangerous for me, as I never know when it's too hot out until I start to feel nauseous and dizzy.

But now, as we power walk (or in my case, power limp) through the dead streets of the Chicago suburbs, I can feel my arm telling me something is wrong. The sun beats down from the ever-more-cloudless sky, and it has a presence on my skin. An uncomfortable film of liquid starts secreting itself in response, and that thing in my head—my power, I suppose—gleefully tells me far more than I ever wanted to know of sweat-vomiting pores and the way my body now produces the salty liquid on command.

It's distracting. Too distracting. I need to focus, to be better than this. Lia is starting to look worse again, her thoughts no doubt spiraling in the silence. I need to distract her, too.

"Where were you two going to go on your date?" I ask.

"Is now really the fucking time to be indulging your siscon shit, Jules?" Lia hisses.

"Humor me," I scowl, refusing to rise to the bait.

"Shouldn't we be staying quiet?" Lia counters. "Because, y'know, there are giant monsters hunting us?"

"It should be fine," Emily says quietly. "I don't think it'll make a big difference on whether or not they find us. We're kind of walking out in the open."

We don't have much choice but to walk out in the open. Everything other than the street is mostly rubble from the earthquake, so there isn't a lot of cover. Lia looks around and sighs, silently conceding the point.

"...We were going to some cheese-tasting place out of town," she says. "Emily gets super weird about cheese. But like, in a really cute way. I was looking forward to it."

"I don't get weird," Emily protests. "Cheese is just neat. It's all so fundamentally similar, yet there are a million different ways to make it and it creates a million different complex flavors. The amount of subtlety in the art is cool. Like, even a master usually only knows how to make a select few styles of cheese, though obviously they make them really well and they are just so good."

"What's your favorite cheese?" I ask, leaning on her a bit as I struggle over an uneven part of the road. In the back of my mind, something starts crawling over Lia's legs.

"Oh my god, Raclette du Valais," Emily sighs. "It has a whole dish named after it where you heat up a big wheel of it until it starts to melt, scrape off just the liquid bits, and drizzle them all over potatoes and other stuff and it's so good."

I nod along. People don't often talk to me about food since, y'know, I can't actually taste stuff, but it's exactly the distraction we need right now. We just need to keep moving, keep walking so we have as long as possible before the monsters overtake us. If we're lucky, we'll reach the defensive lines of the military before they catch us. Unfortunately, I'm here, so 'lucky' is quite a ways beyond us.

We can see our supposed saviors out there in the distance. Helicopters, mostly, flying around the edge of some invisible line in the sand that the commanders have drawn. We can't see any of the ground troops, but the presence of those flying protectors should mean that the rest of our forces are gathering underneath them, ready to defend the dwindling territory we have left. We make it to them, and we make it to safety.

Naturally, they are a lot farther away than I'd like. Hours away, at least. But the less we think about that, the more likely we are to keep a level head long enough to make it there.

I feel myself getting winded, my ravaged body struggling with more walking than it's used to doing in a day, let alone an hour. Focusing on Emily helps, and I can feel the muscles in Lia's face pull her lips into a smile as her girlfriend jabbers on. It's kind of sweet how it seems to genuinely relax her, making me question my assumptions about their relationship in ways that cause my gut to churn and boil.

But now is not the time for whatever that emotion is, so I firmly shut it down. I keep my eyes glued to the ground, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and doing my best to not think about how it's a little easier not to trip with every step I take.

I can't help but chuckle. I'm turning into Lia. God, I hate her. My mirth can't last, though.

We hear the Behemoth before we can see it, but it's not long after that we can see one stepping over the piles of rubble behind us. The Behemoth is like a massively upscaled version of the Wasps: four limbs, each tipped with a long blade rather than a foot, and no head. A long, flat tail like an eel's—or a Leviathan's—flicks back and forth behind them, skimming just above the surface of the ground without ever touching it. Whatever sensory organs these beasts have are integrated somewhere into the thick skin of their torso and thighs, and though I see collections of holes that could be ears or breathing vents or acid-launchers or something even worse, I have no true idea how it might be tracking us.

Most Behemoths tend to be compared to elephants, with thick, blunt limbs and huge bodies that crush everything that opposes them. Yet this hive's Behemoths seem to be thinner and sharper than the ones I've seen pictures of online, more like a headless giraffe with their gangly legs and top-heavy frame. Of course, giraffes don't look quite so goofy up close. When an animal with legs taller than your body gets near enough to almost touch, the difference in scale isn't so much seen as it is felt. Every step of the massive monster cleaves into the ground, leaving a thin hole whenever it lifts a leg.

It is, thankfully, still very far away. Emily pulls us off in what seems like a random direction, but a plan I don't understand is better than no plan at all, so I follow her lead. She starts to speed up, and I immediately panic about falling, but to my utter surprise my legs catch me when I stumble. I can feel them now, rubbing up against my pants, twitching and tingling and sweating as we move. My lungs feel clearer, the pinches and kinks in my torso gone as more and more wretched, overwhelming feeling spreads through my body.

"...What the fuck?" Lia hisses, and I see she's staring at my face. Without even thinking about it, I feel myself mirror her expression exactly, testing the same electrical impulses and ensuring they get the same results. Her breath catches, and she looks away. I swallow nervously, and do the same. What the fuck was that?

Feeling is spreading through my whole body now, and Emily clearly wants to go faster so on a whim I try to run. I stumble almost immediately, not knowing the right steps, but I catch my balance again. A stumble no longer guarantees a fall. I feel giddy. I feel ill. Hair spills from my scalp and tickles my neck, and I nearly fall again as the sensation makes me spasm.

The feeling is spreading to more than just my skin. Everything is different and off, my blind eye snapping into functionality and instantly fixing the blurs in my vision. My left arm starts to change, dramatically faster than the glacial pace my right took, the flesh rippling into place in seconds rather than the better part of an hour. My bones are tingling, a sensation of change dancing up my spine towards my skull, towards my brain. Throughout it all, the Behemoth gets closer, but I honestly think my power is scarier.

Not my brain, I beg. You can't do that. That's ME. Even if nobody else cares about that, I do. Yet I know it's already changing. My balance, my vision, my hearing, the way every step I take is closer to a run than the last… that's all in the brain. Neural pathways are rewriting themselves, twisting into functionalities and habits that I didn't have before, so they have to be coming from the same place the rest of me is. Her.

I could die before the monster even gets here, my corpse running around thinking someone else's thoughts.

Is it crazy to be scared of this? Maybe. I don't know how powers work. But I've always thought the person I am is nothing but a collection of biology and chemicals stitched together, so if my power changes that biology, an alteration of personhood naturally follows, doesn't it? So I can't let it do that. I can't allow myself to be someone else that completely. Whatever my power is doing to make me like her, to give me all the damn effortless beauty I've always envied, it needs to stop inside the skull. You're my goddamn power, so you listen to me, okay?

Fuck, I really hope that's how it works. It's so weird even having a power. I have to accept that, considering that it's the only thing keeping any of us alive (how the fuck is it doing that, by the way!? Seems kind of important, yet also completely unrelated to the fact that I'm becoming a rich bitch clone.) but conceptualizing myself that way is… it just doesn't quite fit what feels like me. But I guess none of me fits as 'me' right now. I'll have to get used to that. …And running from a scary monster doesn't seem like the time to philosophize about the nature of the self anyway.

The crashing noises get louder and louder behind us, indicating that our pursuit approaches. I try to speed up some more and stumble again, Lia yanking me back to my feet so we can keep moving. I nod thanks at her, but she avoids looking at me. I guess I don't blame her.

I'm pretty sure my changes are done. I can feel both of us, and we're identical. …Other than the brain, thankfully. I'm genuinely not sure how much of that has changed, and I don't actually want to know if answering that question is an option. Fuck, what am I even doing? What is this? Every inch of my skin is screaming at me, every breath of air is filled with sensation, even opening my mouth shoves an excess of way too much into my mind. None of it is bad in a vacuum, it's not unpleasant in and of itself, but there's so much of it and it won't stop because it's my body, it's just like this now and I don't know how to make it go away!

All I feel is Lia. Lia, Lia, Lia, every fucking inch of Lia has been branded into my brain with a burning iron. It's so overwhelming that I can barely even focus on the thundering footsteps of the Behemoth until they're close enough to make us stumble.

And that's pretty damn close.

Emily has been leading us through narrow patches of rubble, weaving between the remains of houses just barely far enough apart to give us a clear path through but still close enough together to force the monster to climb over unstable ground. I have no idea how she's picking the path so well, but every turn she takes has been buying us precious seconds to make more distance. Of course, the beast has still, inevitably, caught up. It… its legs are pretty long.

I, uh. Earlier, I thought something about my power being scarier than the monster. This close to the thing, I'd like to revise my opinion. It's huge, with thick gray skin armoring its bulbous torso. Each leg is over seven feet long, the bottom four feet composed entirely of a giant sapphire-blue blade, glossy and shimmering with cloudy patterns of white throughout. They'd be beautiful if not for the mortal danger or the fact that they're already stained with extremely worrying quantities of blood.

The upper part of the leg is a thick pillar of muscle, connecting to the ovular main body by a shoulder bone embedded too deep within layers of skin and what I think is subdermal armor for me to actually make out anything that might be a skeleton. This close, I can see long, whisker-like hairs on the monster's belly, along with rows of what are definitely breathing vents (the way they flex to let airflow in and out is impossible to confuse for the contractions of liquid-favoring pores wait why do I know that) and a collection of what look like fist-sized black marbles imbedded around the creature's body are doubtlessly its eyes. Worst of all, however, is the monster's overwhelming stench, a hundred smells all at once that claw at the inside of my nose in ways that I'm sure I'd have pithy metaphors for if I was capable of recognizing any scents at all, ever.

"Eyes forward!" Emily shrieks at me. "Focus on keeping your balance!"

Oh shit, right! The panic and the running and the mortal danger! I stumble a little as my brain reminds itself that it needs to be terrified, but Emily and Lia both catch me by an armpit and keep me on my feet.

"No falling, Jules!" Lia hisses. "We're all getting out of here, okay?"

God, I want to believe her.

"Do we have a plan?" I ask her, and holy fuck that's not my voice, that's not what my voice sounds like, what the fuck was that!?

"I dunno, I was kinda hoping you'd shoot lasers at it!" Lia shouts.

"Yeah, me too!" I snap. But no, instead I have freaky clone powers!

"Left!" Emily shouts, and she yanks Lia and me towards her moments before a leg crashes down into the ground next to us.

"Emily, where are we going?" I ask. God damn it I sound so weird now. Is this what Lia hears her voice as whenever she speaks?

"I don't know!" she shrieks. "I'm just trying to keep us alive in the next five seconds, okay? I don't have anything long-term!"

We scamper around like rats, zig-zagging to use the monster's huge size against it as much as possible, but this is a losing battle and we all know it. We're going to die here. There's no real point in running, beyond that fact that it ups the chance of being rescued from less than one percent to still less than one percent, but maybe with an extra digit after the period. The thundering footsteps of the Behemoth hound our every move, snapping through rubble and swatting aside fences like blades of grass. Throughout it all, the monster makes no other noise. Its stomps and slashes might be loud, but it does not roar or bellow or call for its fellows. It remains eerily silent the entire time, its body angled so one of its many pitch-black eyes always points our way.

It's only a matter of time, and I'm ultimately the one that fucks it up. The beast cuts us off, leaping in front of us, and I trip trying to change direction. Lia and Emily can only save my clumsy ass so many times before I fall on it, so they topple down with me as I inevitably do. I wince as pain shoots up my tailbone, my body deviating from its template as an involuntary crack forms in the bone. It hurts, but pain is easier to ignore than the constant feeling all over my skin so I don't really care. I don't have time to care anyway.

The Behemoth is on us.

We try to coordinate ourselves back to our feet, but the best we can manage is a faulty leap backwards, avoiding the first blow but tumbling into an even worse tangle of limbs than when we started.

"Sorry," Emily mutters.

"Huh?" I say, and she shoves me directly into the monster's next attack.

The four-foot-long crystal blade that acts as this thing's leg pierces through my stomach in the span of a heartbeat, embedding itself in the ground behind me. It hurts—holy shit it hurts—but the experience of simply being in contact with it at all is somehow worse. The pain, I can manage, but that new little something in the back of my head, excitedly seeking all it can, it's just…

…A crystalline structure, not technically organic but formed from organic processes, its lattice grown molecule by molecule within the cells (units? Fragments? Divisions.) at the underside of the knee. (They aren't cells, they're nothing like cells, cells are what Lia's are called.) I can feel myself hyperventilating, blood gushing from my torso as the blade extracts itself back out of the gaping wound but I grab it, I can't let it escape me, I have to finish. The blade is fundamentally simplistic, and after decoding the way the crystallization divisions ensure and maintain its specific shape over the course of its growth, I can move on above to the rest of the leg. I was right about the thickness of the skin and the subdermal armor, but the muscle is nothing like I expected: sturdy, hollow bone-equivalents filled with dense liquid form a hydraulic movement system, collections of pressure-containers deep inside the ovoid body where a puncture would be less likely to end up risking an entire leg.

I laugh, blood dribbling down my chin as I continue hugging tight against the weapon that just ran me through. There's more to this, a lot more. The internal body and digestive system are nothing like Lia's, just a small hole near the top of the body, devoid of teeth or even much in the way of an esophagus, dropping directly into an intestinal-equivalent without anything like a stomach to break it down. It can't eat, not on its own. Whatever this is, it needs to be fed.

"Julietta!" Emily barks. I blink, nearly losing my grip on the blade, as slick as it is with my blood. Oh fuck, I'm bleeding everywhere and I'm clutching a giant monster leg and I need to kill it I know the best place to kill it.

I collapse, my arm twitching as it doubles in mass in nearly a second. Braced against the ground I extend it upwards, crystalline structures surging into place at obscene speeds, growing and elongating and sharpening and piercing directly into the core of the Behemoth. It rears back in pain, and though it still doesn't cry out (because it can't, it has no vocal systems) the monster is obviously wounded. I can feel, after all, exactly how wounded it is, a new configuration of its skin and organs marking themselves in my memory.

I missed the hydraulic pressure chambers, though. I'd better stab it again.

I pull my arm back (its arm? Whatever, it's mine now.) and flex the newly-grown piston in my chest as hard as it will go. My arm fires forward like a rocket, stabbing upwards and piercing through the first layer of the monster's armor. Still not enough. I take a deep breath (shallow, inefficient, oxygen low, had to remove a lung for space, expanding torso) and strike again, the Behemoth stumbling as I twitch and grow. My stomach protests as the acids inside it dry up, the lining withering away as my belly stitches itself back together bigger, stronger, different, cells and divisions competing for real estate in the free country of my flesh. Taller, bigger, more of my limbs growing into monstrosities, I roar the last roar I'm able to as my second lung finishes reconfiguring into nothing, and tackle the behemoth to the ground.

It stabs me back, but who cares about pain, deviations from the template can be remade anyway, I just need to pierce through. With my enormous weight behind the blow, I finally, finally cut past all the layers of armor and into the pressure tanks.

Organic fluid blasts out of the wound like a geyser, launching my arm clear back out of the Behemoth's chest and ripping into a full complement of other organs. It's dead in seconds, and as I stumble backwards from the force of the explosion, my transformation finally completes.

I wish I could still scream.

It hits me all at once. Omnidirectional vision, a sense of vibrations that both is and is not hearing, a proprioception that is impossible and nonsensical because a person cannot be that tall, but worst of all is the agonizing, devastating, eruption of smell.

I hate it. I hate it I hate it I hate it, it's nothing but cacophonous gobbledygook, it's just nonsense and chaos and it's too much but it needs my attention right now, but it's always right now, it won't stop and I can't… I can't I can't I can't!

"Stop!" something shouts. "Julietta, stop! W-whatever you're doing right now, it's bad!"

The more I try to focus, the more everything becomes smell. It is smell, right? How could I even know, I don't… that's not something that's in my life. It's one of the hundreds of fucking things that everyone knows everything about but will never be part of my life! And yet here we are. I can't stop trying to figure it out, it's everything right now, and though the impossible complexity of it makes me want to scream, some of it is… it's starting to feel like…

No. Wait. What's happening to my brain?

I shrink even faster than I grew, my body shriveling up and collapsing back into humanity. My bladed limbs seem to dissolve into nothing as my skin thins, my pistons depressurize, and my eyes vanish just in time for a head to start growing in with a new pair. I fall from one being to another, hitting the ground and collapsing to my knees, naked and vomiting.

My skin is dark, and smooth, and no more mine than it was when I was a monster. I know it's a stupid idea, I know Lia's body is better for escaping a monstrous apocalypse-scape, but I try to will myself to turn back into my real body anyway.

Nothing happens. I don't know how.

"Julietta?" Emily says, her hand grabbing my shoulder. "Julietta, we need to go. Now."

"I…" a cough steals whatever words I was going to say, if there even were any.

"Julietta, I know this is a lot, I know this is hard for you, but there are more coming. We have to go."

"Okay," I agree, staggering to my feet. "Okay. Where's—"

I spot what's left of Lia before I can finish the question, a bloody array of meat scattered out across the ground. She must have died falling away from me, her grip broken by Emily's shove or my transformation or… any number of other things.

"What happened?" I ask, breathless.

"I don't know," Emily says, trying to pull me into a run. "She let go."

I stare at her, feeling her hand on my shoulder. Because I have feeling now. And… it wasn't there before, was it?

"Didn't you?" I ask.

"No, I was holding your leg," she says. "The crystal part. Now let's go."

A stomp in the distance punctuates her urgency, so I nod and follow. She's right, we have to go. We have to get out of here.

Other mysteries can wait until later.