Are You Even Human

"Can you run?" Emily suddenly asks me.

We've been making our way away from the site of my battle at a decent pace, the huffs of our breaths and the distant rumble of other Behemoths being the only breaks to the silence. I guess Emily wants to speed up though, and I can't really blame her.

"I don't know," I admit. "I… I've never done it before."

But I guess I've never grown a giant hydraulic blade-limb and impaled a monster before either, yet my body still knew how to do that. Emily stares at me for a moment, as if trying to figure out what to say.

"...Just don't think about it," she settles with. "Come on."

She accelerates, dragging me along, and I do my best to keep up. What else can I do? We haven't even stopped to get me any clothing, and while that's certainly mortifying it's ultimately small potatoes in the shitstorm that is an extradimensional invasion. Besides, there's no one here but Emily anymore, and I get the impression she's seen this body naked plenty of times before. …Or maybe she's just good at focusing on the task at hand. Probably both.

It's not like it's my body anyway, as much as I'm wearing it.

As we continue to speed up, I do my best to take Emily's advice and just let my stolen instincts take over, the methodology of running seeming to move my limbs on its own. It's terrifying, not just in the way that I feel like something other than me is in control, but also just… the process of running is kind of insane? Like, I've spent basically my whole life having no fewer than two, ideally three points of contact with the ground at any given time, but all of a sudden I'm completely leaving the ground with every single step? Emily is right, I need to not think about this, or I'll absolutely panic and fall on my face.

Although speaking of panic, it isn't long before I start to hear a buzzing noise behind us. I look back, and I see a Wasp approach. A Wasp. Sharper and spindlier than my memories, but a Wasp all the same, the acid-spewing organ in its body ready to unleash painful, painful death. Don't think about it, Julietta. Don't think about it. It's just your shit luck rearing its ugly head again, that's all.

It really is shit luck, though. Did Agnus Dei not get them all? I guess I shouldn't expect her to be perfect, no matter what her propaganda says, but there can't be that many Wasps left alive! More monsters are still spilling out of the incursion scar after their Queen, and there might even be some Angels among them, but Emily and I are far enough away that we should make it to the edge of the incursion zone before reinforcements from the scar show up. This has to be part of the original deployment of Wasps, and while the bastards aren't terribly effective against fighter jets they sure can do a number against us.

How do we get out of this? Actually, better question: why is it after us in the first place? Is it because I'm covered in alien guts? They can definitely smell that, if Wasps have anything like the absurd, mind-crushingly overwhelming olfactory sensors the Behemoth had. …Yeah, that's probably it. I can spot similar organs on the Wasp. I'm not really sure I can do anything about that, of course. Maybe try to cover our smell with something else?

"I'm pretty sure they're tracking us by scent," I tell Emily. May as well share information.

"Good to know," she hums. "I don't think we're gonna figure out a way around that before that thing catches us, though. Can you stab it?"

Can I stab it? God, I don't know. I don't even know how I stabbed the last guy; I was in a bit of a fugue. But my body writhes in affirmation, the skin of Lia's arm itching to comply. But how? Why? What is any of this? In the back of my head my power churns, and though I feel it as part of me I can't say any of it makes any sense.

"I can try," I say anyway, because what else can we do?

I think I can do the same thing to my arm that I did against the Behemoth. I remember how I felt. The problem, this time, is more likely to be my target. If I try to stab that thing and I miss, it's just going to fly out of my range. I can only attack like seven feet into the air, tops, so we need to lure it really close.

"Do you need an alleyway for something?" Emily asks, frowning as she glances around between the approaching buildings.

"I… yeah," I nod. How did she…? "We need to lure the Wasp in range of my arm or there's nothing I can do."

"Right," she nods. "Okay, I'll find something."

What the heck does she mean, she'll find something?

"Emily, what's going on?" I ask her. "You've been acting weird and dragging me all over like you already know where we're going."

"I feel like now isn't the best time to have that conversation," Emily grunts. "Just trust me?"

"Already do," I tell her, and she smiles.

"I pushed you into a giant sword," she reminds me.

"Well yeah," I agree, "but it worked out?"

Except for Lia, of course. Lia is dead, her body reduced to a gruesome smear of bloody flesh. Yet I watch my foster sister carefully as she laughs at my joke all the same. I had a feeling she would, based on how she's been acting, but why? Isn't that her girlfriend? I've been hoping and begging her to stop giving a shit about Lia for close to a year, but now that she suddenly has it's in the most fucked-up possible way. What happened?

"Okay, this way," Emily says, yanking me between two mostly-intact houses. "You focus on getting ready, I'll guide us and tell you when to strike."

Why do you know how to do those things, Emily?

"Okay," I say out loud, pushing those thoughts away. She's at least right about now being a bad time. We duck past a few houses, scampering away from a few globules of acid. The horrible stuff hisses when it hits the ground, toxic fumes visibly rising into the air.

For the first time, I think I recognize a scent, but I wipe away the panicked tears and just keep running. I'm not a vulnerable little girl this time, and the Wasp is going to learn that.

Eventually we get a pair of buildings that are tall enough and close enough together to block attacks from most angles. The Wasp could just melt everything around us and get a clear shot, but unless it knows I have powers, it has no reason to. And if it knew I had powers… why would it be pursuing us alone? I guess this assumes a level of intelligence to the thing that it might not have, but… well, its equivalent of a brain was pretty huge and complex. At least as complex as Lia's.

…Wait, did I kill a person?

"Focus, Julietta!" Emily hisses. Right! Right, yeah. The complexity could have nothing to do with personhood; computers are plenty complex. And either way, this thing is trying to kill me, so if it's going to complain about being killed in retaliation, I'm going to have to tell it to shut up. With my seven-foot-long blade limb. Which is a thing I can choose to have.

The buzzing is loud now, the roar of the Wasp's wings kicking up a powerful storm of wind. I suppose it only makes sense; those things are at least twice as heavy as a human, and while their four dragonfly-like wings are enormous, they've still got to beat terrifyingly fast in order to keep the Wasp in the air. Other than the wings, the fundamentals of the Wasp's body are remarkably similar to the Behemoth's, just shrunk and squished and stretched in a bunch of different ways, like how a lion is still fundamentally similar to a ferret. They're unmistakable for each other, but they still have the same number of eyes, the same number of limbs, the same fundamental body shape, just deformed for a different purpose.

This is mostly good because it gives me a solid guess for where to aim.

"Wait for it," Emily whispers. I nod, thinking once again about those beautiful crystal blades, hydraulic pumps pushing aside my heart. Every twist of flesh is as easy as breathing, mass bubbling into my body from nowhere as my arm thickens and elongates. It's disturbing. It's terrifying. But it's what I need to do.

The Wasp lands on the roof of the building next to us, the crash of it resting its weight nowhere near the same volume as the beat of its wings had been. It crawls towards our location as I prep my strike.

"Now," Emily hisses, and I extend my arm as fast as I can, intercepting the Wasp as it leaps down from the roof. My blade pierces through the armor again, chipping but not bursting the organic pressure tanks. Immediately, my mind starts drinking up information about the beast, the complex systems that make its wings work, the weight-saving methods for its body construction, but I don't have time to indulge my insane power, I need this thing dead.

It thrashes furiously, attempting to free itself from my blade but I know if I let it we're screwed. I try to yank it away from the wall and ruin its footing, but I don't have the leverage or the weight, ending up only shoving myself into the side of the alley as my human muscles can't keep up with the hydraulic arm. It is, ironically, tripping and falling while I have a weapon impaled two feet into the monster's body that ultimately yanks it to the ground, but adrenaline rages through my brain and lets me react barely in time to stab the Wasp again before it can get to its feet and fly off.

I'm running entirely on instinct, half because I don't have any idea how to fight and half because my conscious brain is busy soaking up impossible levels of biological information, identifying the organs that mix whatever wild chemicals make that goddamn acid that killed everyone I knew and ruined my entire life.

Which is the point it decides to spit some at me.

My conscious mind registers a few things in short order, namely the sphincter muscles locking down each acid component opening and injecting their payloads into a central chamber, which immediately disgorges the acid at my face and self-washes with another mixture before the volatile compound can devour the Wasp from the inside. Which is all very neat and interesting.

My animal brain, however, registers a horribly familiar globule of acid heading towards me and absolutely flips the fuck out.

I fail to dodge, shrieking in panic as the flesh-eating liquid splashes into my body hard enough to make me stagger back. Pain remains an old friend to me, but the experience of having my skin boiled off into noxious bubbles of gas for the second time is maddening, every nerve bursting and burning away, one by one, as even this stolen beauty gets torn away again by the same damn monster. I scream and rage and cut, tearing into the Wasp harder and harder, refusing to think about anything beyond the next way to hurt it, the next stab of my arm, because any amount of idle thought means an eternal split-second of knowing the intricate agony of my body. The acid is on me again. My parents aren't here to dilute it for me. I am going to die, but so will it. That is my promise.

But then my body starts to realize that unlike me, Lia is supposed to have skin. So even as it all burns away, my skin also grows back.

The acid hisses and devours, but it can't reduce me to nothing. My power simply pulls more out of nowhere, replacing each evaporating cell with new matter, new material, born from somewhere within me that isn't quite inside me. And the more the acid reacts, the more it burns away, the less it remains acid. Soon, all that covers me is an unreactive, half-organic sludge, sloughing off my body in toxic globs and leaving behind only more of Lia's pristine, perfect, and horrible skin.

I note, idly, that I have successfully killed the Wasp during my rampage. Ironically, the nail in the coffin seems to not have been any of my actual stabbings but more the general ravaging of all of its acid component sacs, causing them to uncontrollably mix their payloads and force the Wasp to meet a similar fate to my own, but without the power to survive it.

I can't help but feel a bit vindicated by that brutal irony, but the lingering acid continues to burn my flesh, too. And worse, the more I regenerate, the more the regeneration pulls at something within me, draining a reserve of energy like a marathon runner trying to go one more mile. I stagger as I pull the blade-limb out of the wasp, returning the massive alien structure to a more humanoid shape, but the effort of it aches in me like a deep hunger. I find myself starting to panic for reasons I don't quite understand, my consciousness flickering.

"Oh, shit," Emily hisses, and I realize she's not touching me. How is she not dead!? I turn and try to grab her, but she bolts away from me, sprinting down the alleyway in a panic as I trip and fall on my face, my power screaming at me that I'm about to die. Is she leaving me here? After everything I did to help her? Am I being abandoned again, like every sorry excuse for a family I've ever had?

Of course I am. Of course. I should have known better than to expect otherwise. I feel my body shake with another seizure, and then I pass out.

…And then I wake up. I'm lying on my back, an aching pain in my stomach and a roof over my head. Emily is sitting next to me, grabbing my wrist, and seconds after my eyes open she shoves what appears to be an energy bar into my mouth.

"Eat," she orders me. I blink in surprise and start to chew, twitching and having to choke down an urge to spit it all back out as the dry granola attacks my tongue. Do normal people really have to live with all this feeling all the time? This is absolutely non-stop! The softness of the quilt below me, the chill of the air around me, every tingle and twitch and breath… I desperately seek a distraction, focusing on Emily as much as I'm able.

"What happened?" I croak after swallowing. Emily just answers by pushing me into a sitting position and handing me a glass of water. "...How did you get all this while I was unconscious?"

"I carried you," she sighs. "Obviously. Now eat and drink before you die."

Didn't you leave me to die? But… no. I guess she obviously didn't. I scowl but do as she says, swallowing the rest of the energy bar as quickly as possible. Ugh, that thing is awful! She immediately hands me another. Cruelty! Betrayal!

"When you're done with that you should put some clothes on, too," she says, pointing to an outfit she laid out nearby. "Just let me help and give me time to reposition so I don't end up losing contact with you."

"...But you already let go of me," I point out. "When I fought the Wasp. You let go of me, and you're fine."

"No, I didn't," Emily says flatly.

I blink.

"Yes… you did?" I point out reasonably.

"I didn't," she insists. "You must have dreamed it. You killed the Wasp and fell unconscious. Then, I carried you here. I never let go."

My scowl grows deeper. Bullshit. But I guess we're playing that game now.

"Why do you think my shapeshifting powers protect people from getting cut up in the first place?" I ask. "Isn't that kind of incongruous? What does changing my body have to do with protecting you from giant psychic alien flesh monsters?"

"Who knows," Emily shrugs. "Just eat, okay? Passing out from exertion definitely isn't a sign of health."

My body is exactly as healthy as Lia's was, but I still take another bite. It's wretched. I want to complain, to whine, to lament in confusion about how normal people ever survive with having to feel and taste things all the time. But I don't. That wouldn't really be helping the situation, and it's obvious Emily is on edge. Making that worse for no benefit would just be moronic.

"I guess I'm just impressed you managed to carry me all this way by yourself," I say. "I wouldn't have imagined you could do something like that, not to mention grabbing all this stuff without letting go of me."

"If you don't trust me, Julietta, you can always just leave me to die," Emily snaps.

I freeze. What? What the fuck? That escalated quickly. Does she think she can get me to back off by just acting extra emotional when I call out her bullshit? Ugh, maybe she can. I can't give her a good justification to use that tactic. Plus, on the offhand this is genuine, I should treat it that way, and simply put? Trust isn't the issue here. Emily is lying, but she's also my lifeline. If she says jump I'll say how high, I just want to know why I'm doing it.

"I'm not saying that because I don't trust you, Emily," I backpedal. "Even if I didn't care about your survival—which I very much do—I still need your help just as much as you need mine."

She gives me a considering look for a moment, frowns, and stares a bit longer. Then she snorts in something that sounds like amusement, but is definitely anything but.

"...Nah," she says, looking away. "At this point you'd be better off without me. Go ahead and leave if you want to."

Okay, now I'm really worried about her.

"Emily, seriously, why the fuck would I just leave you to die?" I press. "Are you okay?"

"No, Julietta!" she snaps. "I'm not okay! Everything is very not okay right now. You were out for a while. The aliens are everywhere and it is a fucking miracle they haven't cracked this house open like a tin can and eaten the juicy humans inside. So would you just eat and get dressed?"

Oh. Shit. Shit! Did I really sleep for that long? That's… bad, that's really bad. I guess we have more pressing problems than Emily's weirdness, but I just hate leaving it like this. It's frustrating feeling like I don't understand her anymore. Her reactions to everything have completely stopped making sense, and I hate that. I need to understand her. Understanding people is what I do. It's the only skill I have to prevent disaster.

…But my experience is telling me that right now isn't the time to press her about anything. When someone's distressed enough to talk about me leaving them to die, they're a bit too distressed for nettling.

"...Fine," I say, and return my attention to my awful, awful energy bar.

At least whatever abandoned house Emily dragged us into is pretty well-kept, and the more I sit on this soft bed the more I'm surprised to find I don't hate the texture of something. It's still a lot, but there's something nostalgic about the fancy quilt that doesn't seem to come from any particular source. Whatever the cause, it's nice for my overwhelming senses to be partly pleasant for a change, and I can't help but feel a little bad when I finish eating and need to stand up to get dressed.

Emily seems to have picked me out an outfit that looks irritatingly like something Lia would have worn. It's a tight tank top and short shorts, of all things, and it instinctively makes me cringe for showing so much skin. And like, yes, I get that I'm currently naked, but I've been trying to pretend that isn't real and having to actually perceive my future outfit makes that somewhat difficult. I know my skin isn't nasty to look at anymore, but I still hate the idea of wearing so little. It's not a bad idea though, given how hot it is outside, so I regretfully slip the bottoms on before scowling a little bit at the bra.

I… do not actually know anything about bras. No puberty meant no boobs, and while my chest was pretty lumpy it was all in the wrong places. Lia, conversely, has a quite sizable chest, enough to surprise me literally every time I look down. While I'm struggling to deal with any sensations, the irritating and often painful flopping of my chest ranks fairly high on the list of distractions. Still, I don't want to finagle with a new kind of underwear while we're in a rush. I leave the bra and grab for the shirt.

"...Don't," Emily interjects. "Do you need help with the bra? I can probably do it one-handed."

"Do I really need it?" I whine.

"Yes, absolutely," Emily nods. "This isn't exactly the right size, but it'll be better than nothing. I can't believe I couldn't find any sports bras, I don't know how the women here even survived."

"Why do I even need one?" I ask. "Aren't bras some kind of patriarchal oppression or something?"

"Not when your chest is that big," Emily laughs. "Trust me, I know a lot about Lia's boobs that you don't. If you were distracted before, it's going to be way worse if those things are rubbing the inside of your shirt."

What? Does it work like that? Is this a sex thing? Ugh, I hope I don't have to deal with any of that. No, wait, there are more important questions here. As much as I don't want to press her, this conversation is suddenly setting off my red flag alarm in a completely different way. Why is she laughing when she was straight-up suicidal barely a minute ago?

Fuck it, if her emotions are going to zip around so fast I can't keep track of them, I may as well take a blind swing.

"How can you just talk about her like that?" I ask. "Do you even care that she's dead?"

The question takes her by surprise at first, something like fear passing over her face before she just sighs, using one hand to direct me to put my arms up while her other hand maintains contact with my skin.

"...I care a little," she mutters. "I didn't hate her or anything. We spent… a lot of time together, you know? I have good memories."

"So then what's the deal?" I press. "You're acting way different from usual, Emily."

"Yeah," she agrees. "I guess that's the thing: I'm not acting anymore. Lia tried to be a good girlfriend, she honestly did, but you and I both know she had serious issues."

"Then why were you dating her?"

Emily doesn't answer at first, just focusing on getting my bra on one-handed. Which would be fine, but I'm sort of trying to explicitly not focus on that feeling, because it's weird and overwhelming and intimate in a way that makes me even more painfully aware that I am wearing someone else's corpse.

"...Because she's stupid rich and her whole family has a combat exemption," Emily finally answers. "Marrying her was my ticket out of the draft. That's pretty much it."

I gape at her, stunned. I don't even entirely disapprove; I just never thought Emily, of all people, would do that kind of thing. She's always been so sad and kind, but now she just seems sad and cold. It's a brutal shock, but honestly? I get the necessity of it. The fact that she hid this from me hurts a lot more than the fact that she was doing it at all.

I mean, seriously. I put so much effort into trying to help her with that damn relationship, and she was just pretending with it the whole time? What a waste.

"You could have just told me," I frown at her. "I would have helped you."

She smirks, though there isn't an ounce of humor to it.

"Well if you want to you still can," she says, affixing the bra in place and giving it a tug. "'Lia.'"

I freeze, the implications of her statement both obvious and terrifying. I look exactly like Lia. Emily could corroborate the story that I am Lia. This would let Emily continue with her plan, and it would protect me from having to fight in the war by pretending to be the powerless, exempt rich girl. After all, if it gets out that I have powers I will be drafted, regardless of any other factors. Powered people don't even get to retire, some of the oldest ones having been forced to stay in the military for decades now.

But the idea of pretending to be Lia for the rest of my life? Of never being Julietta again? I hate that. Even the thought of it burns.

"...Don't worry about it right now," Emily sighs, shifting her point of skin contact to my hip. "We can deal with the problems of what comes after when we're safe, okay? Put a shirt on and we'll get out of here."

"Alright," I agree, and I quickly finish getting dressed.

"Are you still hungry?" Emily asks.

"I…"

Am I still hungry? Hunger has always been a bit weird for me, but I can usually feel it. Right now though, I don't feel hungry or full, I feel… something else. I guess it's like hunger, in that it's a hard-to-define urgency that makes me want to eat more. Maybe it's just what hunger feels like for people who have a working nervous system. …It's still super weird that the category now includes me.

"I guess so?" I conclude. "Yeah. More food, please."

"Okay. We'll carry as much of the kitchen as we can. You good with eating and walking?"

"Yeah," I nod. "Thanks, Emily."

"Hey, don't thank me," she shrugs. "You're the one keeping me alive."

I could hold that over her, I think. Maybe I should. She has obviously been lying to me about quite a lot.

"It's a team effort," I insist anyway, mostly out of habit. Causing a conflict would be bad. It's always bad. It's better to resolve things and cooperate as much as I can.

"Thanks, Julietta," Emily says, looking relieved. "You're the best."

"So what's the plan?" I ask her. "Do we just… head east, and hope we don't run into any more deadly aliens? I'm not sure I have it in me to win another fight with a Wasp."

I can feel that I don't, that I wouldn't be able to handle the acid well right now. I'm not even sure I could grow out that blade limb right now. Something is… emptier than it was before.

"No," Emily says. "We're going northwest."

I stare at her. She doesn't elaborate. Which… no, I'm definitely not letting pass without comment.

"West is the direction where the giant eldritch hole in the sky is currently barfing out aggressive monsters," I point out reasonably. "Why in Nietzsche's name would we ever go towards it?"

"Because a huge group of aliens walked past us earlier, heading away from the scar," Emily says. "I told you we were lucky to not already be dead, right? You missed some terrifying shit while you were unconscious. We can't go east. That's where the aliens are gearing up for an offensive, or maybe a defensive, or something else. We'll never get past them. Well, you might, but I won't. We have to survive until the military musters a response and makes us an opening."

"Okay," I say slowly, "so why move at all? If we're stuck in a holding pattern, why not be stuck in the spot the aliens have already overlooked that has cover, food, clothes, and water? Why go towards the aliens, in the direction of the lake they're probably sending forces to capture?"

"Look, would you just trust me?" Emily snaps.

That is not a response. I'm trying to trust you, Emily, but you're not giving me a lot of reasons to right now! Why are you acting so strange? Why are you so confident in these weird fucking snap decisions?

…Why have they been right so far?

"You have a power that's feeding you information," I conclude.

"I don't have a power," Emily says immediately.

"Okay, then can you give me a single compelling reason why we need to go northwest, specifically, at this moment, despite the fact that we can't see more than a block away and have no way to know where any of the aliens currently are?"

She stares at me, her eyes distant like she's rapidly trying to find an answer to a question she's never thought to ask. Which, y'know, is not the reaction someone has when they've thought something through.

"You know something I don't, and you don't want to tell me what it is," I say, pressing the attack. "You've been asking me to trust you a lot, Emily, and I do. But it seems like you don't trust me, and I don't like that. Do you have powers?"

"No," she insists, but I am ninety percent sure she's lying. There's just something in how she's holding herself, how she's hesitating for just a second before she answers. Because that's how the Emily I knew always acted, and it seems pretty clear to me that the Emily I knew was a mask.

"Emily," I say, "you have saved my life. I trust you, and I want to trust you. But you're making it really difficult for me to do that. You've been acting suspicious this whole time, and I've mostly been ignoring it because we don't really have time to investigate stuff like that right now, but if we're going to be heading deeper into enemy territory, I don't want to have so many reasons to doubt your judgment hanging over my head. You get that, right?"

She stands stock-still for a moment, her eyes flicking around and looking at nothing. I'm not sure what's going through her head, and I don't like that. I just… don't know her as well as I thought I did.

"...N-northeast, then," she eventually stammers. "We'll go northeast. It'll be dangerous, but if you see for yourself that we're trapped, will you let me lead us deeper in? We just… we have to. It's our best shot. Please."

She squeezes my hand, holding me with a shaking iron grip. She seems… desperate. Terrified. And I can't help but recall again that she told me to leave her to die. She thinks that she needs me, but that I don't need her. She thinks I could get out of here alone. Or is that just part of the mask, part of the manipulation?

"When everyone else let go of me, they died," I say. "The Queen killed them somehow. I can feel it trying to do the same to us. How did you know I'd be safe? How did you know I'd be able to protect you?"

"Because Angels don't pop superheroes like grapes, even if the superhero doesn't have a durability power," Emily answers without delay. She was prepared for that one. "The natural conclusion is that superheroes resist alien powers somehow."

A practiced answer, clearly, but certainly not a bad one.

"Yeah, okay," I nod. "That makes sense. I felt like I was somehow protecting Li—um, the others while they were touching me. It must be possible to give the resistance out somehow. Maybe Agnus Dei was doing that for the fighter jets, and there were only four of them because she couldn't protect more than that at once?"

"I think you're probably right," Emily agrees easily.

"But I don't know how to do that," I say, unable to stop myself from flashing back to the minced piles of gore that were once Lia and Andre. "The others died the moment I stopped touching them. But I think that if I let go of your hand, you will be completely fine."

Emily freezes.

"...Or maybe," she says slowly, "I will be instantly cut into thousands of pieces and die. So let's not test it, okay? Why are you so caught up on this, anyway? I told you, I never actually let go of you."

"You did say that," I agree, allowing a smug smile to touch my lips. "But that's not all you said. You also said that powers resist powers. And the whole time I've been touching you, I've never once—"

I twitch, the thought cutting itself off as my power suddenly activates. Shit! I was so sure I had her in checkmate, there, trapped by her own words. Superheroes resist alien powers. Lacking any reason to assume that 'alien powers' are qualitatively different from superhero powers, it's natural to assume that superheroes also resist other superhero powers, and my stupid power has never once asked me before downloading all the biological data of whoever I happen to be touching at the time. Andre is an exception, I suppose, but if I'm right then I think my powers were still sort of 'booting up' at the time, overwhelmed by analyzing Lia's biology, changing mine into it, and dealing with the effects of my recent seizure-slash-brain-hemorrhage-slash-rollover-accident all at once. I analyzed and copied the biology of the Behemoth a lot faster, and I analyzed the Wasp's even faster still, though I don't think I succeeded in doing so until after I had already stabbed the thing a few times, so I think any Wasp transformations that I attempt would be relatively short-lived.

Still. My point is that, despite all of this, I've never once analyzed Emily's biology, despite plenty of time, opportunity, and physical contact with which to do so. I'll admit I haven't really tried to analyze it, because I don't even know how I would try to do such a thing in the first place, but it's been passive and uncontrollable thus far and I see no reason why Emily would be an exception. But of course, the moment I try to announce how very incredibly smart I am for Sherlock Holmesing her ass, I feel her physical form blast itself into the front of my consciousness all at once, like a flood from a broken dam, completely obliterating my little theory before I can even finish saying it out loud.

I don't even have the mental capacity left to try to think about it any further, because just… wow. Wow, I never thought the difference between two humans would be this striking. My senses spark up her arm, soaking in information at speeds far beyond my first two templates. Emily has completely different phenotypes and completely different practical expressions than Lia, differing not just in genetics but in fitness, strain, stress, damage, repair, and microbiome. It's such a new and exciting collection of soft skin, silky hair, well-used muscle, and carefully stored fat. All these things are things Lia has, but there's just something about Emily's body that I really like, a beauty to it that sparks mere jealousy instead of the hateful envy I feel for Lia. Every detail captivates me, like it all tells a story about who Emily was. Like how her body is primed for endurance in a similar way to Lia's, muscles having grown in similar ways as they took morning runs together, but it's far from identical; Emily's natural fat distribution focuses more on her hips and legs than Lia's does, leaving her with slightly more leg muscle as her body compensates for the increased weight of moving them. Emily is shorter and heavier in general; not chubby, but very much not toned in the way that Lia is, her strength present but hidden behind a persistent layer of softness in much the same way I've learned her true competence hides behind a more innocent-looking shell.

My body is shifting before I can even think about whether or not it should, the ache inside me that warns I don't have power in my power right now ignored as my bones shift, my spine shrinking a couple inches, my muscles and tendons reweaving themselves to match every little minute alteration that defines the difference between a girl I hate and one of the only people I've ever truly cared about. It's an odd experience, far more mundane and somehow far more exceptional than the process of turning into a giant alien monster.

Emily's eyes bulge as she watches the process, her jaw starting to hang open the slightest amount as my face softens and shifts. I have no way to know what my transformation looks like while it's happening, not until I do it in front of a mirror, but I am certain, with a downright concerning degree of confidence, that the end result is an exact, identical copy of Emily's body, down to the length of each fingernail and the width of each pore. The only difference between us is the fact that I'm wearing a different outfit, and that my hair—though it is technically the same length, the same color, the same number—grew out naturally in a messy bundle rather than somehow forming itself into Emily's complicated braids.

She and I blink at exactly the same time. Then she flinches backwards, and I do the same, mirroring her almost perfectly—though since we're facing each other, I do the opposite of what a mirror would do, matching her right with my right and her left with my left. It's the most natural thing in the world to me, because we're still touching, still holding hands, so my power is still giving me a constant feed on every last detail of her body.

"What the fuck," Emily whispers, and I almost match her words, too.

"...Sorry," I say instead. "I, uh… sorry."

Holy shit I even sound like her. Like, I actually sound like her, rather than sounding like someone with her voicebox trying to talk how I usually talk. The tone, the pitch, the cadence, the way she says the words… it all came out of me perfectly without me even trying. I knew my voice changed while I was in Lia's body, but did my speaking habits change too? Wouldn't I have noticed that?

"Okay, that's… that's really f-freaky," Emily stammers, trying to look at me and look at anything other than me at the same time. And I can tell she means it, because her breathing is accelerating, her pupils are dilating, her heart is beating faster… "Can you, um, not… do that? I'm sorry, I get you probably aren't doing this on purpose, I just… yeah."

"Yeah, um, sorry, I'll… try," I manage. God, I feel kind of… hungry? But in like a freaky eldritch superpower way, not a physical way. I'm pretty sure I can shift back into Lia's body anyway, but… I don't want to. I fucking hate that girl.

…Still, she's dead, and my only other option is quite alive and actively objecting, so the choice isn't really a choice at all. I reverse my change, each shift feeling quicker and easier than the last, and I find myself in Lia's body once again.

Ugh. It's… objectively the best body option for moving stealthily through a suburban environment, I guess. And it's not like I could reasonably use my body to walk around enemy territory in the postapocalypse even if it was an option.

But still… I really wish my body was an option.

"Alright, I guess we should get going, then," I say, and fuck, I do talk like Lia. How did I not notice that? But Emily gives me a startled look, and suddenly I'm worried I didn't notice because I didn't sound like this before at all.

"Um… quick thing first," Emily insists, and then she pulls me through the house, making me help her fill up a pair of backpacks full of compact food and a few bottles of water.

"This is enough food for days," I point out, making a conscious effort to talk like myself and feeling like I'm trying out for a bad bit part as some long-gone girl once named Julietta. Fuck, fuck, fuck, I'm kind of freaking out over this, but I clamp down on the emotion and refuse to let it show.

"Hope for the best, prepare for the worst," Emily grunts, unwrapping another energy bar and shoving it into my hand. "Eat more."

I quickly obey, the unpleasantly overwhelming texture and flavor doing its part to distract me from my superpower-induced existential crisis. For some reason, assuaging my nonexistent physical hunger seems to make my weird, extra, new hunger feel better. Is this just how normal people feel hunger, maybe? All my senses are pretty screwy right now. I have to hold back a flinch every time I touch… well, basically anything. I think I'd be having a complete mental breakdown over it if not for the fact that there are so many other impending breakdowns currently forcing this one to wait in line.

Case in point, when we finally get ready to slink out of the house, the gravity of what Emily told me earlier slowly starts to catch up with me. The aliens are already here. With everything else that was going on, I almost managed to forget that my useless ass slept for so long that the alien forces caught up with us.

We creep up to the windows, carefully peeking out from behind the drawn curtains at the street we're about to wander into. At first, everything seems clear—nothing but desolately empty Chicago suburb, aka home sweet home. But then a bit of movement catches my eye, and I realize how badly I screwed us over.

Down the street, I spot an alien variant we haven't seen yet pop its head out of one of those big square garbage bins like it's an oversized raccoon. Way oversized; this thing is nearly as tall as an adult human, though when it hops and flops the rest of the way out onto the street it almost—almost—looks kind of cute. It has two digitigrade legs, two stubby forelimbs that end in smaller variants of the Behemoth's blades, and indeed, unlike the other two kinds of aliens we've seen so far, it has a… head?

No, wait. That's not a head at all. That's a tail, an obvious fact when the alien finally manages to scrabble back to its feet. The bladed forelimbs curl in front of its body like a praying mantis' claws, the tail resting on the backside of the creature and dragging along the ground. I mistook it for a head at first, because the main feature of the tail is unmistakably the enormous mouth.

Which means this alien has to be a Raptor.

While the Wasp and Behemoth had very underdeveloped digestive systems and no capacity to chew, the Raptor looks like it's all a capacity to chew. Its tail is tipped with a giant, hook-toothed mouth designed to bite down and never let go. The tail doesn't have eyes or a nose the way an animal's head would, just a mouth, but I can see slight variations of the sensory organs the other aliens had on the creature's main body. Unlike the Wasp and Behemoth, only the Raptor's forelimbs end in large, crystalline blades—the hindlimbs end in much more recognizable feet, with large claws and webs between the toes. It's the combination of thick tail, digitigrade legs, and the way the little monsters hold their forelimbs kind of like a T-Rex that got them the name of Raptors.

Well, that and the fact that they're terrifyingly fast, hunt in packs, and can execute coordinated takedowns and ambushes without any apparent method of communication between them. Which is, y'know, a little bit terrifying.

…Or at least it is to me. Emily, for whatever incomprehensible reason, lets out a sigh of what sounds like relief when we spot the incredibly deadly monster.

"Alright, this isn't too bad," she claims. "Just follow my lead and keep pace with me, okay?"

Whatever secret this girl is keeping, it is terrifying. But fuck it, if she gets us through this, I'll hold my complaints.

"I won't let go," I promise. "Just don't do anything reckless, okay?"

"I never do," she insists, and despite all evidence it somehow doesn't sound like a lie. "Trust me."

I swallow my fear, she opens the door, and we make our way into the street.