Resistance

██ █████, 1763.
██████, Moscow, Russia.
Roughly three years after the start of the war.

Val hated many things. She hated the war, she hated her country, she hated the body she was stuck in, and most of all, she hated her customers. Most of the people who hated the same sorts of things that she did just left. They snuck over the border and went to places like Estonia, the Union, Free Copenhagen, or even Italy, or really anywhere that wasn't here. She hadn't, out of some sort of misguided kinship, a vague sense of responsibility to make things better, and plain fear of the unknown. No, Val had stuck to the life she knew, working at a cafe two blocks away from the Ministry of Intelligence, serving almost exclusively the same people she hated. Fortunately, she'd managed to avoid the draft. The government still considered her to be a man, but her asthma was sufficiently resistant to permanent treatment to exclude her from military service.

Val spent most of her free time online, where her location or appearance didn't matter too much. That wasn’t to say her appearance was intolerable. Val was a fairly ordinary young man at work, and an attractive young woman outside of it. She had picked up enough magic to fix that issue, at least when there weren’t too many people around. Unfortunately, the illusions didn’t work in public— too many eyes for the thaumaturgy to correct the projection —and they didn’t do anything for touch. There were possibilities to fix that, of course, but none were particularly permanent or achievable if she stayed here. Why she was still here when so many of the people she knew had left was hard to answer, but she was.

“That’s how they get you,” her uncle had said years ago, shortly before she’d moved out. “Things get a little worse, and that gets some people to leave. Then everyone who’s left doesn’t care so much. Then things get a little worse again, and again, and again. Eventually the only people left are the ones who don’t care about fixing it.” She didn’t know if she believed that, but she was still here. She even joked about joining the resistance (“it’s four of us in a chatroom, and we’re each a different kind of cop trying to entrap the other three”), but it wasn’t the movies. There wasn't a resistance, there weren’t signs that read “secret meeting this Thursday” or anything like that. Maybe if you had local friends… but Val didn't anymore. There were occasional news articles about saboteurs being caught and that sort of thing, but it was impossible to know if it was just propaganda or if there was a kernel of truth in any of it.

“Hey, Val, you still in there? Entered a gaming trance?” Raven asked. Whoops. She’d gotten distracted.

“Yeah, sorry. Just thinking.”

“What about?”

“Just… It sucks here. I want to do… anything, but there’s nothing I can do. It’s frustrating.”

“Are you asking if I know any beautiful secret agents who will come whisk you away?”

She gave a quiet chuckle. “Yeah, you all know each other, right?” Raven lived outside of Dublin, in the Union. Their respective nations were at war, but with the power of a cheap VPN, there was little that could be done to prevent them from chatting and playing games together.

Raven put on a gruff voice. “Of course. Why, Sandy Beck is an old family friend. I’ll just ring him up and ask for his hottest assassin.” Both of them had a good laugh at that. Beck was well-known even outside of the Union— at the start of the war he’d given the now-famous (or infamous, depending on your position) “We’ll Get You” speech.

“Another match, then?”

“Sure. Not like I have anything better to do.”

A few days later, Val’s phone buzzed shortly before the lunch rush. She pulled it out of her pocket, revealing a message from an unknown contact.

[ENCRYPTED CHAT REQUEST] Hello. A friend told me you might want to help out.

Who is this?

Who do you think would want to send you encrypted messages?

Val stared at her phone like it had suddenly grown legs and was trying to walk away. She resisted the urge to stress-laugh. They really do all know each other. The café was mostly empty, aside from a few officers sipping on coffee. They didn't pay her any notice. No team of policemen barged through the door to arrest her. She tried to steady her hands and tapped at the phone again.

How do I know I can trust you?

Your name is Valeria.

She had told exactly three people that.

Raven?

No.

Is there something I can call you?

No.

What do you want?

Information, for now. You're in a useful position. Pay attention to what your customers do or say. Big ranks, more or less people than usual, talking about operations, that sort of thing. Don't draw attention to yourself.

You know where I work? Are there others?

Yes, and yes. Maybe you’ll meet them someday.

The bell on the door jingled as the first customers of the lunch rush arrived. Val steadied her nerves. It was an easier decision to make than she'd expected.

Well, my uncle’s always saying that I should get a second job.

Think of this as more of an unpaid internship. We'll talk again soon.

It really was that simple. Val had taken to spying with enthusiasm, and she no longer aimlessly hated the various soldiers that visited the café. No, over the last few months she’d moved on from amateur hating, and was now a professional hater. It was amazing what some motivation could do. She knew all the regulars by name, and had learned what the various doodads on their uniforms meant. She even knew what missions some of them worked, or could guess at others. Work was war, and she was winning it.

Her contact had been helpful, steering her towards specific people, but steadfastly refused to task her with anything beyond simply watching. Raven, for her part, had played dumb. Val wasn’t sure if she actually didn’t know anything, or was just trying to get her to shut up over the unencrypted chat, but she wasn’t going to push it.

The door jingled again. It had been a busy morning, and all the military types had been getting their orders to go. That was normal. The less-than-normal part was that they were getting the office-sized orders. Generosity was a rare trait amongst the officers, and it only came out when there was something big in the works. Unfortunately, intelligence types didn't tend to volunteer details, and they were smart enough to realize that something was up if she asked too many questions.

“Next!” The next person in line was in uniform. Normal, given that the MoI was two blocks away. They made up most of the shop’s customers these days, thanks to rationing laws that the military was exempt from.

Val recognized the man immediately: Captain Ilyushkin. Bronze star, distinguished service medal, military intelligence branch insignia, combat arms emblem, 187th Armored Regiment deployment badge, 32nd Intelligence Regiment unit badge. One frontline tour, then transferred to military intelligence. More importantly: coffee boy for General Pushkov, commanding officer for the entire military wing of the MoI.

“Morning, sir. The usual?” Pushkov was nothing if not predictable, and his aide got him the same coffee and croissant every day.

“The usual, plus one of the travel boxes of the hazelnut roast.”

“Long day, huh?” She set about ringing him up.

“Yeah, tell me about it. A lot on the docket.”

“Good things, I hope? And your total is ₱28.05.”

He paid with his card. “Good things indeed. We'll have the snakes on the run by this time next week. Hell, a young man like you should be out there instead of being a waiter!”

And how many times have you almost had them on the run? she thought. The Army hadn't accomplished anything of note in the last eighteen months besides getting the KIA numbers higher. They’d taken Helsinki before the Union had gotten their scaled asses in gear, but the lines hadn’t moved much since. If the “snakes” were good at anything, it was attrition: transhumans could ditch one body and shift on to the next like a hermit crab swapping shells. Russian military doctrine countered by simply sending more men.

“I tried, sir. Asthma, unfortunately.” A lie, but a minor one. She really did have asthma. She turned to get his order ready.

“Ah, unfortunate. Not much glory to be had here. But you keep us running, at least.” I hope I get to watch when they shoot you, she thought, pouring his coffee.

The door jingled again. Val spared a glance over her shoulder. The newcomer was a whitejacket— Internal State Security, a combination of counterintelligence and political enforcer. More notably, they were a she, a rarity these days. President Kabinov had done his best to get “weaker” women out of the uniformed services, or at least out of combat roles. Anyone left was a real psycho, and doubly so for anyone in the ISS.

The rest of the line passed quickly— enlisted getting coffee for their superiors, nothing as interesting as the whitejacket at the back of the line. Not very good at your job, are you? There's a spy right here.

She ordered without making small talk: medium black coffee and an apple strudel muffin. Val mentally filed away her uniform for later reporting: Inspector Belinskaya. Secret service medal, two oak leaf clusters. Red braid on the left side, so a trained armswoman. Perfect marksman badge, and a ribbon that Val didn't recognize. A sniper, maybe? Curious.

The inspector paid with cash. Val wished that she could do more than just watch. I'd love to poison your coffee, fascist. Something nasty and slow. An alpha emitter, or maybe a prion. She enjoyed a brief fantasy of her being told that there was nothing the doctors could do— besides conversion, of course. At least she paid. Half the time the ISS didn’t even pay at all. “Our service is generous enough,” she'd heard a whitejacket say, completely seriously.

A few customers later was a captain that Val didn't recognize. His face might have been new to her, but the unit badge and the blacked-out name plate were not: 17th Intelligence Regiment, an “interrogation” unit. While the 17th was notionally responsible for interrogating prisoners of war, they served double duty for disappearing anyone the MoI wanted gone. What are you doing here, torturer? As far as she knew, there hadn’t been much in the way of prisoner-taking over the last year, but they must have taken some, or the good captain would have been out of a job.

“First time here, sir?” Val asked as he looked at the menu. Come on asshole, figure out what you want before it’s your turn.

He raised an eyebrow, “You keep track?”

“Oh, most of the uniformed folks here are regulars, I memorize their orders.”

“Ah. But yes, I've heard good things. A large of your caramel dark roast, please.”

“Of course, sir.” She glanced at the clock. Two hours until my break…

Hello, Val. Anything exciting today?

A couple things. Big news is that there's definitely something going on. Pushkov’s coffee boy thinks they’ll be making some gains within a week, and it sounded like there's an operation that's about to kick off. No clue where or when though. Also had an “interrogator” who I haven’t seen before, 17th IR, and new ISS inspector. Blonde woman, last name Belinskaya, probably a sniper or ex-sniper. Also, lower enlisted I haven't seen before, from a dozen different units I don't recognize. No details about what’s actually happening to bring all these guys in from out of town, though.

Interesting. Do you have any plans this evening?

Nothing serious. Why?

I'm in town. I think we should meet face-to-face. We have a job for you.

Her breath caught. Isn't that dangerous?

Yes. The Roadside Motel, off of M119. Room 110, 7pm. I know it’s a little last-minute. If anyone asks, you're going to see a friend visiting from out of town.

Should I bring anything?

Your wallet, keys, and a change of clothes. Nothing else, especially not your phone or any friends.

She paused before responding.

I'll be there.

Val didn't have a roommate in her tiny apartment to bother her with questions as she headed out. And thank god for that, because her hands were shaking so badly from nervousness that it took her three tries to get the key in the lock when she left.

She didn't have a car, but she did have an electric motorcycle. The range sucked and it wasn't fast, but it was cheap and easy to find parking with. Somehow she got to the motel without crashing into something or getting pulled over. She pulled into the parking lot, and belatedly realized that she should have driven past it first and checked for a trap. Or something. Oh god, I’m so in over my head.

“Well, here we go,” she whispered to nobody in particular. Her heart felt like it was going to beat straight out of her chest, every heartbeat pushing a roaring tide of blood through her veins, and she gripped the gym bag with the change of clothes like her life depended on it. Maybe it does. How would I know? She managed to get the twenty-five meters from the parking lot to the room labeled “110”, and then froze. Bringing her hand up to knock was a herculean effort.

There were a few agonizing seconds of silence. The dingy yellow lights of the parking lot buzzed. Then, a muffled voice through the door spoke, “Come in!”

She entered. The room was dark, with the lights off and blinds drawn. She peered into the darkness, managing to pick out the shape of a person in the darkest corner of the room.

“Toss the bag over here, close the door behind you, then raise your hands and turn around, please.” Val did so. She heard the sound of the bag’s zipper. A few seconds passed.

“Okay, you can put your hands down. The light switch is to the left of the doorknob. Go ahead and hit that.”

The light came on to reveal a woman, now sitting on the bed. The best word Val could come up with to describe her was “average”. Average height, average build, maybe thirty-five years old, brown hair, unremarkable face, vaguely eastern European, but nothing specific. Really, she was perfectly nondescript.

“Um. Hi?”

“Hi! Valeria, yes?”

“Yeah. Um…”

“Here, take a seat,” she motioned to the sole chair in the room. “My name’s Faust. Nice to meet you in person. I’m sure you’ve got questions, right?”

Val’s nerves started to calm the smallest amount. “Can I ask anything?”

“Yes, but I might not be able to answer.”

“Are you Raven?”

“Your friend? No. More like a friend of a friend of a friend. Your name came to me through the grapevine. Raven probably knows someone in the NID, or actually works for them directly.”

That makes sense, in retrospect. The National Intelligence Department was the Northern Union’s intelligence apparatus, the largest (and most well-known) in the Pacific Defense Treaty, and Raven knew an awful lot about computers and the war. “Who are you… we? Working for? The NID?”

“No. Simple answer, we’re working for a future without these fascists in charge. We don’t have foreign bosses, and we decide how to run our operation. Well, by ‘we’ I mean the rest of us. You’re not quite there yet.”

“So are you… what, anarchists? Really angry liberals?”

Faust laughed. “Don't expect any ideological coherency here. People are mostly on the left, but we’d never be working together without things being this bad. This little coalition won't last a day after the war ends.”

“Why the face-to-face?”

“Because I have a job for you. Think of it like an interview. Okay?”

“Okay.” And what happens to me if I fail this interview?

“Alright. Are you willing to stay and fight? And kill? I'm offering you more, but it's dangerous and violent. If you’d rather leave the country or stick to surveillance, we can do that.”

Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. “Yes. I’m not going to bomb a daycare, but yes.”

Faust nodded. “That’s fine, that’s not our style anyway. How do you feel about transhumanism?”

“I… I mean, I’m not one. But I want a future where I can be.”

“Okay. Last question. Are you ready for conversion?”

“Um.” If I was ready, I wouldn’t still be in this country. “I think so,” she said, haltingly, “but I’d be no good to you. They’d pick me up the second I went through a detector.” Everyone knew that transhumans were easy to find, even in the post-Hodgson world where they could take almost any form. Simple handheld thaumometers could pick up their innate magic; it was why Kabinov had been able to “cleanse” Russia. The sensors were everywhere these days, and paranoia ran high.

Faust smiled. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.” She shifted, a ripple of dark motes pulsing across her skin. In her place sat the ISS inspector from earlier that day, white dress uniform and all. Val flinched, almost standing to run before her brain processed the fact that there wasn’t such thing as a shapeshifting whitejacket.

“Does that mean that you were—”

“Yes. Thanks for not spitting in my coffee, by the way.”

“Well. I did actually fantasize about poisoning you,” she replied. She tried to laugh, but it came out more like a cough.

Faust did actually laugh. “Wouldn't be the first time I’ve gotten friendly-fired.”

“So… that's just a copy, right? What happened to the real inspector?” Val had a pretty good idea of what the answer would be.

“She’s dead,” Faust said, shifting back to her original nondescript form. “It wasn’t planned, but it means we have an opportunity now, which is why you're here. I got flirty with her at a bar, implying that I was available for a fee. Turns out, she had a thing for gunplay. Mid-session I find out that she had a thing for pulling the trigger, too.” She motioned towards her heart with a finger gun. “Blew my heart all over the bedsheets. Easy way to skip the bill, I guess.”

“How are you…” Val trailed off.

“Alive? She shot me in the heart, not the head,” she said dismissively. “I had spares. She didn't.”

Val stared. It was altogether too much for her. Nobody killed a whitejacket and got away with it. And wearing one was… it was something out of a bad propaganda movie. It took a few moments for her to process the emotion she was feeling. Jealousy. Things felt unreal, like she was breathing honey instead of air. She took a deep breath.

“Yes. Yes, to all of it.”

Faust smiled earnestly, a tension that Val hadn't noticed before suddenly disappearing from her expression. “I hoped as much. How much do you know about conversion?”

“Um,” she fidgeted. “I'm not sure, there's a ritual, it takes a few hours? I don't really know the details.” She left out the reason why she didn't know: it was easier to keep going if she didn’t know what she could have had.

“That's the general idea. The working itself is pretty quick, but the prep takes a few hours.” Faust dug into a suitcase, pulling out a ruggedized tablet and inscriber. Val recognized it— standard-issue NU combat thaumaturgy kit.

“So, here's how this is going to work. You're going to sit there and fill out a big questionnaire on this,” she held out the tablet, “while I paint the ritual circle. Help me tip this bed up, we’ll need the whole floor.”

“Wait, tonight?” She wasn’t ready. “Right now?! What about my life, I can’t sneak past scanners for the rest of it!”

“Yes, now. And don’t worry about the scanners. How good are you at handling pain?”

“What?”

“I can get you two new forms and mod your current one with what I’ve got on hand, but it's going to be tricky. Normally, we’d do a little sex and self-sacrifice, but I don't fuck on the first date. So, you're going to slit my throat, then I’m going to stab your heart. Unless you think you can handle knifing yourself.”

“What?!”

“What, didn't you take a thaumaturgy class in school?”

“Yeah, we teleported a rabbit, we didn't kill each other!”

“We’ll be fine. I've got three more bodies, and you'll be getting new ones before the one you're in kicks the can. We need the energy and we don't need the bodies. Easy decision. Besides, you could use the practice, unless you're a lot more interesting than I thought. Now come on, help me with this bed.” She was painfully nonchalant about the entire process.

“Oh.” She was terrified and embarrassed at the same time, but the physical labor of moving the bedframe helped a bit. “It’s really that simple? Just kill each other in the ritual circle?”

“More or less. We don’t need to die, just be mortally wounded. Sacrificing an old body to replace it with a new one is pretty standard for a Hodgson working. The abnormal part is doing it with your only body, but we’re a little pressed for options.”

“What am I going to… become? Turn into?”

Faust started spreading out a sheet of inscription paper on the floor. “Well, transhuman, obviously. As far as actual form, we're going to mod your current body, then give you two more. Just a little bit of endocrine tweaking to get you in a better physical state, and some other things that I'll tell you when you’re wearing it. Any health conditions you want fixed?”

“Uh, asthma? …and why the secrets? It’ll be my body, right?””

“Yeah, I think we can fix asthma. And secrets, because I can’t trust you not to share them if you back out.”

Oh, god. “I've… seen your face. I can't really back out at all, can I?”

Faust shrugged. “This face isn't important. If you back out, nobody will see me again. You included.”

Val shook her head. “No, I’m in.” She thought things over a bit as Faust got more supplies out of her bag. “Wait, you said ‘mod’, right? Not replace?”

She shrugged as she set up the inscriber on a tripod. “Technically there's no such thing as modding, you’re replacing the body with a modified one. But yes. I need you to maintain a normal presence, not be off the grid like me. And we can't really explain away a sudden gender swap.”

She hadn't thought of that. Her heart sunk. “So, I do all this and… I’m still stuck like this.”

“Definitely not. One of your new bodies is going to be a covert operations form with all the bells and whistles. That’s going to be female, we need that for the job. A real looker too, should be good for you. The other’s going to be a dragon, a Snapscale. That’s a military form, wings and armor, just insurance in case things go really south. But, before any of that, you need to do the pre-working questions.” Faust handed her the tablet. “There’s a lot, so get started.”

She exhaled with relief, trying to steady her finger as she scrolled through the page. “What are these… for?”

Faust was rummaging through her suitcase again. “The working needs an accurate thaumaturgical descriptor of you. The questions help get it pretty close, then we do a few final calibration steps before we pull the trigger. If we were in a transhuman country, they'd have big sensor rigs that knock out a lot of the questions for you, but…”

“Huh.” She looked at the first question. Which of the following best describes you? A) A rat living in a subway. B) A horse running through a field. C) A songbird in winter. D) A weathered stone obelisk.

“Are they all like this?”

“By ‘like this’ do you mean weird and abstract, or extremely personal? The order changes.”

“Abstract.”

“About two thirds of them, yes. The other third are uncomfortable and personal. Just do your best, there aren't right answers. And it isn’t a personality quiz, don’t try to think about what the questions would mean to someone else. Think about what they mean to you.”

She thought for a few seconds. A songbird, I think.

There had been exactly three hundred and thirty-three questions. It took her just over three hours to get through them all, and that had given her some time to process what she was about to do. She was more nervous the same way one might feel nervous about getting surgery, rather than a fear of the unknown. Faust, for her part, had burned a massively detailed diagram onto the big sheet of paper with her inscriber, then slowly and painstakingly painted over the laser burn lines with silver paint and a thaumaturgy brush. She’d finished that half an hour ago, and spent the remaining time peeking out of the blinds.

“I'm done!” Val was triumphant; the questions had been exhausting.

“Good. Time for you to pick a body.” Faust took the tablet for a few seconds, bringing up a different menu before handing it back. “Okay, here’s your options. I assume you want a female dragon form?”

Val nodded, looking at the screen. It had a half-dozen pictures of very conventionally attractive red-headed young women on it, each standing in the same neutral pose, completely nude. “These are… all my options?” She tried to scroll the page; it didn’t move.

“Yeah, we need a honeypot, and the target’s got a type. We’re a little limited here, since we can’t safely get a big datalink back to the clusters they use for custom forms. So it’s either one of these or the ISS bitch, and I don't think you're ready for that. First-timers get a little weird about wearing a corpse.”

“It’s not a literal corpse, right?” She tried to put some bravado on, “and besides, she was a whitejacket. Fuck her.”

“I admire the attitude, but you need some practice first. And, it doesn’t stop people from getting upset about it, no matter how abhorrent of a fascist you do it to. This sort of wetwork is real taboo in the Union, but they've been living nice and comfy for the last few hundred years.”

She’s not wrong about that. As powerful as the Union was, it had a bit of a reputation. She turned her attention back to the tablet. Faust took her thoughtfulness for hesitation. “Don’t stress about it being permanent. You're leasing, not buying, it's not too hard to trade it in later.”

“Not sure why I'm being picky,” Val mused, “it’s a lot better than what I've got.” She pointed to one of the pictures. “This one.” All of the options had a body shape that wouldn't have been out of place on a magazine cover, but her choice was… particularly extravagant. “Um. You said ‘the target’. Are they a man? That could be an issue.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem, all the honeypot models are pansexual,” she said, as if that was a fact she should have known.

“What the fuck? You can do that?” She’d heard a lot about transhuman sexuality, but not that.

“Yeah, sexual orientation has some serious biological factors. Something with brain structure and fetal development, I don’t know the details. For niche schemas like this, they just make them pan instead of dealing with tweaking them in the field. It’s not going to change your identity or anything, you just won’t have the same sort of negative reaction that you do now. Very useful for fieldwork, obviously.”

The little printer-inscriber chattered as Val tried to take that all in. “That said, the hard part’s going to be that this guy’s an Essie, not that he’s a guy,” Faust continued, “I’m sure he's going to be offensive in ways besides his appearance. You won’t need to fuck him, but you will have to at least get him alone for a few minutes.” The printer beeped, spitting out a dot-matrix arcane diagram on what looked like receipt paper.

“Alright, calibration time.” She drew a knife and held it out, handle first. A thaumaturge's choice of ritual knife tended to say a lot about them as a person, and Faust was no different. Hers was, aesthetically speaking, a combat knife: a double-edged straight blade fifteen centimeters long, cold steel with a leather grip. “Put a drop of blood right in the middle of the circle.”

Val took the knife and pricked her finger. That part was normal to her, at least, and she’d done it countless times for her own workings. “Does not using my own knife matter here?” The drop of blood poofed into soot when it touched the paper, leaving a misshapen splotch.

“Yes and no. It would reduce the potential we need a bit, but not enough to get you another body. Mostly, I didn't want you to come armed in case you reacted badly. It’s a lot to take in for some people.” She scanned the ash mark with the tablet’s camera, and the printer chattered as it spit out another piece of paper. “Same thing again.”

Val squeezed out another drop of blood. “I don’t think a knife would pose much threat to you, would it?” The smudge of soot was shaped differently this time.

“No, it wouldn’t. That was more for your safety than mine.”

She handed the paper over, her mind racing while Faust worked on scanning it in. A thought came to her. “Isn’t Faust a little on the nose? Devil’s bargain and all?”

Faust laughed. “Faust isn’t a cover, that’s my actual last name.” The printer chattered again. “Again.”

Another drop of blood, another puff of smoke and soot. “Isn’t it dangerous to tell me that? What if I get captured or something?”

“What use is my name? All that gets them is a face and fingerprints that I haven’t had for five years.” She handed over the last piece of paper. “I’m very, very off the grid here.”

“Five years?” A final drop of blood. This time the ash mark was almost perfectly round.

“The ISS took my parents in 1758.” It sounded like there was a lot more to that story, but Val wasn't going to press it. She scanned the last piece of paper, and Val saw something on the tablet screen turn green. “Okay, now we just wait for this to crunch some numbers, then we’re ready to go.”

Val’s heart started pounding again. “Is that… it?”

“I mean, there’s something like eighty years of research that went into it, but we don’t need to know how it works. I’m told this is actually very complex.”

They sat for a few minutes, waiting for the tablet’s processor to do… whatever it was that it was doing.

A few minutes ticked by. Val sat in the chair and fretted; Faust alternated between checking the ritual circle and peeking out the blinds. After what felt like an eternity, the tablet made a ding noise.

“Finally. One last inscription.” She tapped a few buttons on the inscriber. The laser flickered, filling the spaces between the painted ritual lines with thousands of tiny runes.

“We’re ready. Want to double check?”

“Um.” She looked closer. The structure was vaguely familiar— some sort of transmutation —but not anything she’d seen before. There were three primary clusters at each point of a circumscribed triangle, depicting what looked like her current body, the woman’s form she had picked, and a dragon she hadn’t seen before. The rest of the free space was filled in with painted geometry and grids of pictograms. “I don’t think I really understand most of this.”

“You need a doctorate or two to really get it. Most of the little stuff is describing your mind, and the big triangle is the forms we’re targeting. I just don’t want you freaking out halfway through because you think I’m lying about what the ritual does. If I just wanted to kill you, there's easier ways of doing it. Any questions there?”

She nervously shook her head, and Faust continued, “Ever killed anyone or been stabbed before?”

“N- no.”

“I’ll walk you through it. Here, get behind me. You’re right-handed?” Val nodded. “Okay. You’re going to take the knife and pull the blade from here,” she motioned to the left side of her neck, just below the jaw, “across to here, with a sort of around-and-back motion.” She mimed the slice. “Don’t go easy. Think like you’re trying to cut my head off, you want to make sure to sever both sets of jugulars. And let my knees crumple, don’t let me fall across the paint. Okay?”

Val nodded again, a little more shakily this time. Intellectually, she knew how transhuman injury worked— as long as they stayed conscious, they could shift, and wounds didn't transfer to their other forms —but that didn't help her nerves. Emotionally, Faust was still a person, and she was asking Val to do what would amount to murder for anyone else.

“There's going to be a lot of blood. I’m going to shift right before I lose consciousness, then take the knife and stab you. That’s going to hurt, but I need you not to panic. The ritual’s going to go off a few seconds later. As soon as it does, you need to shift. You’ll only have about thirty seconds of consciousness to do that, or you’ll die.”

“Have you done this before?”

“This specifically? Twice. Never with a conversion, though.”

“What happens to me if I mess up?”

“Better not to worry about that. Really the only thing you need to worry about is that conversion only works if you want it.” Faust turned around and started taking off her clothes. “So, be sure you want it.”

“Why are you…”

“Do you want to try getting bloodstains out of your clothes? I wasn’t kidding about there being a lot of blood.”

“I brought a change—”

“That’s not for bleeding on, it’s for the new body you’re getting. They don’t come with clothes, and mine won't fit you.”

“Oh.” Val shed her sweater and shirt, sparing a brief glance at the man’s chest that Faust was going to put a knife through. Well, at least I’m not going to be stuck with… this, no matter what happens.

“Pants too. Come on, everything.”

Val tried not to look too embarrassed as she squirmed out of the remainder of her clothes. It wasn’t long before the two of them stood, nude, in the center of the ritual circle. Faust was clearly a lot more comfortable with the nudity than she was. “Ready?”

She nodded shakily, white-knuckled fingers gripping the knife.

“Don’t worry, it’s sharp.” Faust turned around, bending her knees slightly. “Do it.”

Now or never. Val reached around Faust and pressed the knife against the side of her neck, hesitant. Faust touched her hand and whispered, “It’s okay. I promise.” Val closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and pulled the knife backwards, digging it into Faust’s neck, then through. The blade was wickedly sharp; it was disturbingly easy to slit her throat. The blood was instant— bright red and warm, pumping out of her in gushes. Faust made a gurgling noise and grabbed at her throat, slowly sinking down on her knees as more and more crimson blood spilled into the floor.

She didn’t have time to panic. The act of violence made the ritual circle light up like a spotlight, shimmering white arcs dancing between the silver-painted lines. It was more magical power than she’d seen in her life, so intense that she almost didn’t notice Faust shifting. When she stood, she was no longer the perfectly-unremarkable woman that she had been, but rather a dark-haired man in Air Force fatigues.

“Knife please,” she… he? said.

Val handed it over, suddenly realizing how much blood she had on her. Faust flipped the blade around and drove it through Val’s ribcage before she could react. She gasped with pain as Faust said some words in a language she didn’t recognize. The circle brightened again, almost whiting out the room, and she could smell ozone. The arcs jumped to her skin; it felt like she was being electrocuted and burned and frozen all at once and—

—and there was a snap, and suddenly something new was sitting in the back of her mind. Huh. She ignored the pain long enough to mentally poke at it, and reality lurched.

The sensations vanished, and the room went dark again. She realized she had screwed her eyes shut. When she finally managed to open them, she was… unchanged, aside from lacking her prior coating of Faust's blood and the hole in her chest. Faust grinned, rubbing her neck. “See! Knew you could do it. Barely even took you a second or two after it popped.”

Val looked herself over, heart still pounding from the adrenaline rush and her chest still stinging from the pain. She was the same, as far as she could tell. “Ow.” She looked around. The floor looked like a cartoon bomb had gone off where she was standing, a perfectly symmetrical scorch mark replacing the ritual circle. The walls looked like they had been acid-etched, swirling fractal patterns a few millimeters deep carved out of their surface.

Faust followed her gaze. “Backlash could have been a lot worse. Good thing I paid as the inspector, they won't ask too many questions. Get your clothes on, let's get you checked out.”

Halfway through getting her pants on, Val thought of a question. “Do you have a… gender? Do I?”

The corner of Faust’s mouth tilted up in a half-smile. “Surprised you didn't ask that one sooner. Yes. I identify as a woman, even if I’m not one when I’m working.” She shifted to the ISS inspector’s body, as if to prove the point. “As far as you, that’s for you to decide.”

“So when you're in a masculine form, do you change pronouns?”

“Some people do. I do when I'm working, obviously. But with friends, no, I'm always her, regardless of form.”

Faust looked her over as she pulled her shirt on over her head. “Okay, not missing anything obvious. Everything feel alright?”

She patted herself down. “I think so.”

“Good. Okay, let's go down the checklist of new things.” She grabbed the tablet again, tapping it a few times. “First, congrats, you're now transhuman. You don't have any visible physical changes to this form, but you should notice yourself getting a bit more toned over the next couple months and needing a little less sleep. That's the modified endocrine system. Also no asthma, hopefully. The other change is that you now have a biothaumic system. You know what that is?”

“Um. Kind of?” That was something that got touched on in high school thaumaturgy class. “Anything with innate magic has one.”

“Correct. In our case, it lets us shapeshift, and it's what the detectors pick up. The big secret I mentioned earlier is that yours won't show up on any of the detectors. It will be visible if you get dissected, though, so don’t let them do that.”

“That’s possible? How does it even work?”

“No clue. It’s classified to hell and back; the fact that we can hide from detectors at all is life-or-death for a lot of people. So don’t get caught scanning green by someone who knows you can shift. If that means killing witnesses, you do it. Understand? There are a lot of lives riding on this one.”

She nodded. “And they just… let you share this with me?”

“Not all on my own, no. We have a process, we checked you out beforehand. Okay, moving on to shifting. Go ahead and shift for me, please. You should feel a little bump in—”

Val did feel it, a new surface in the back of her mind. She touched it again, and her body flowed like water as space warped around her. She looked down and smiled. Now that's more like it. She was, well, herself, or at least something closer to herself.

“Good, you got it.” Faust looked at the tablet again and motioned towards Val’s bag. “Sorry, we don’t have time for euphoria. Get your clothes on while I give you the list, you can do self-exploration when you're home.” She started getting dressed as Faust spoke. “This is an I-209 covert operations form. You've still got the damper so you can still get through checkpoints and the like, but you’ve got major genetic and physical alterations. Anyone doing a medical scan will probably notice. Same with blood or DNA samples.”

She gave her new hips an experimental wiggle as she pulled her pants on. “Wow.” Good thing I brought sweatpants, because I don’t think my jeans would have gotten over my hips. Val looked around the room, seeing everything… differently, somehow. “What’s up with my vision? Am I seeing new colors?”

“That’s first on the list, that’s just normal draconic senses. You’ve got much higher visual acuity, and some new cells in your eyes that can see in infrared. That’s the new colors. Good for seeing when it’s pitch black. Now close your eyes for me.”

Most of the colors vanished, but Val could still see the tablet in Faust's hands, though not the walls or the floor. She tried looking around through her eyelids, but the picture didn't move until she turned her head.

“What you're seeing now is your electroreceptive sense, kind of like a shark. This is hooked up to your visual cortex, so it comes across as sight, but it's from an organ around where your sinuses are, not your eyeballs.” She watched through closed eyes as Faust moved the tablet around. “This will pick up things with electric currents within a few dozen meters. It's not sensitive enough to pick up on human nervous systems, but most people carry their phone around, so that works well enough.”

She nodded, pulling her shirt over her head on as Faust took out a lighter.

“Full draconic thermal insulation. That means you won't burn or freeze. You’ll still sweat, so be careful about dehydration. Hold out your hand.”

She finished getting her shirt on, then did as instructed. Faust held the flame under her palm. “Don't pull away. It can't hurt you.” Her hand shook as Faust passed the flame under it, but it just felt hot, not painful. “Now look at your hand.”

Val turned her hand over and yelped. Her palm was charred and cracked, severely burned from the lighter. “Why would—!”

Faust interrupted her by grabbing her wrist and tapping the burn. Her fingers passed through the misshapen layer of skin, touching the actual skin underneath. “Built-in illusion, very high-fidelity but very short-range. Automatically triggers in response to heat in case someone tries to burn-check you. It’ll fade in a few minutes.”

“You could have just told me that!”

“You won’t forget about it this way. You can toggle the illusion on and off, just think about turning it off.”

Val took a deep breath and rubbed her palm. Faust was right, she certainly wouldn’t forget now. She tried turning it off, and the burn vanished like she’d flicked a light switch. “Is there a limit to this?”

“In terms of temperature? Not really, but don’t go standing in rocket exhaust. Just be aware that's it's a giveaway they know to look for. You can’t turn it off, but it's easy to sell the illusion with a little acting. Be very careful in your original form, because that doesn’t have the insulation, and it’s really, really easy to get burned once you get used to it. You can just reset it if you get burned badly, but it’ll still hurt like a bitch.”

“Reset?”

“Ritual to restore a form to its original form. Literally, hits the reset button.”

“Are bodies just, disposable now?” She touched her throat. Huh. “Is my voice… weird?”

“Disposable, more or less. It's easy to reset an existing form, you just sacrifice the damaged one to fuel the working. Takes about two hours since you've gotta do most of the questions again, but at least you don’t have to kill yourself in the ritual circle. As far as voice goes, shifting only changes your vocal cords, not your speech pattern, so your voice is pitched differently, but you'll still mostly sound like yourself between forms unless you make an effort.”

“And here I was, hoping that conversion would fix everything.”

“You sound fine. You don’t sound hyper-feminine, but seriously, look at yourself. Nobody's going to think twice.”

Val looked down at herself again. Even beneath the bagginess of ill-fitting mens’ clothing, she was a bombshell. No, I guess they won’t. She flexed her fingers, turning her wrist over as she did.

“Moving on, chemicals. You're missing the stuff that makes baseline humans sensitive to irritants like tear gas. About one in two hundred folks have a natural immunity to tear gas, so your immunity to that is plausible, but your immunity to pepper spray is not, so try to avoid that.”

“I wasn't really planning on getting pepper sprayed.”

“Good. This body's also mostly immune to nerve agents and radiation, but not much else. This isn't a SIB— you know what a SIB is, right?”

Val nodded. The omnipresent Standard Issue Body was the most common engineered form on the planet, and the face of human-form PDT troops. They were terrifyingly resistant to nearly every practical chemical weapon, and could withstand insane doses of radiation without harm— a ploy to keep ODI from using their own chemical or nuclear stockpiles.

“Okay, this isn't that. You don’t have the body chemistry or the liver that SIBs do, you’re not immune to everything. That said, you do have a little poison of your own. You've got a poison gland hooked up to the salivary ducts in under your tongue. Should be able to feel something new in the center of your jaw.”

“Huh. Yeah, like a little muscle. I flex that to use it?”

“Yes. It's batrachotoxin, which is popular with Asian organized crime, so it’s a useful cover if the body gets discovered. No chemical antidote, and no magical ones that’ll work before your victim kicks it. You’re immune, obviously. Works orally or on skin contact, but oral’s faster.”

“Have you… used that before?

“No. New in your model. Data sheet says it's fatal within a few minutes with, quote, ‘sufficient oral dosage’, unquote, which I'm reading as spitting in someone’s drink or giving them some tongue. Lower dosages and skin contact are still fatal, but not as quickly. Also says here to rinse and spit at least five times after using it if you don’t want to kill the next person you drool on.”

“That's…” Hot. “…good to know.”

“Be careful with it, this stuff persists for a day or so outside of your body. Touch it in another form and say goodbye to using that body again. Also, just to warn you, most of the combat forms end up on the over-productive side, you might end up needing to empty yourself in in the sink or something so you don’t leak. I had that issue when I had a body with fangs, kept having to bite stuff to get some of the venom out.”

She nodded. Sure, just pour the deadly poison produced by my body down the sink so I don’t leak. Cool.

“Last thing is some minor strength and endurance stuff. Nothing like what you see in the propaganda, the human body’s already pretty well optimized, just another twenty percent or so. Also a little bit of pain receptor damping.”

“Wait, how do I work out? Is someone going to notice at the gym?”

“Oh, you don’t need to do that, your body should self-maintain muscle mass. Eat when you’re hungry, don’t eat when you’re not hungry, and you’ll be fine. Don’t worry too much about that anyway, like I said, this body’s not permanent unless you want it to be.”

Faust looked at the tablet again. “Okay, we're out of time. I have to run, people to be and places to see. We'll take you shopping and get you checked out with your dragon form tomorrow. Don't use the dragon until you're with me, you'll break through your floor.” She started stowing the tablet and inscriber in her suitcase. “You don't have work, right? I'll text you.”

“What? That's it, so long and good luck? What about the job?”

Faust talked as she finished packing her kit. “Your part isn’t tonight, and knowing the details now won't help you. Go home and have some fun with your new body, your first experience with that shouldn't be on the job. And don’t poison yourself or take photos.”

“Go fuck yourself”, literally. Well…

Val was glad she hadn’t been scheduled for work the next day. She’d stayed up far too late exploring her new form. She wasn't sure if it was just the euphoria or a design choice, but she had discovered that she had a very sensitive trigger. And one that she could hit very repeatedly. Val had also found it quite easy to get off to the idea of watching someone choke on a poisoned kiss… and her horror at that hadn’t stopped her from continuing. She had eventually passed out after a fifteen-minute chain of violent orgasms, only to be awoken from her dreamless sleep by a new encrypted message from Faust, directing her to meet at… a mall food court? Well, she did say we were going shopping.

She arrived to find Faust in the masculine form that she’d used the previous night. She was most of the way through an entire, full-size pizza. Faust noticed her expression and spoke around a mouthful of food. “We need a lot of calories. You want a piece?”

Val was tempted. “I have some, um, questions. About last night.”

“Shoot.”

“What, here?”

Faust finished the last slice. “Mm. Too slow. Okay, probably not here. Follow me.” She tossed the pizza box in the trash and led Val to a bench by a closed storefront off the main path.

“Okay, shoot, for real. Keep your voice down, though.”

“Um. Does this,” she motioned towards herself, “have more changes than what you told me?”

Faust smirked. “You mean the repeat orgasms?” Val blushed, hard. “Pretty much every new-build body has that these days, even the ones with dicks. Fun, isn't it?”

She tried to compose herself. “That’s… one way of putting it. But not what I meant. It's serious. Last night, I, um…,” she trailed off.

Faust let the silence hang. “I fantasized about killing someone. You know, during.” She squirmed. “And I liked it.”

Her mentor raised an eyebrow. “With the poison?”

She nodded, avoiding eye contact.

“No, no changes like that. It’s not surprising, but it’s not a feature.”

“So…”

“So you have a snuff kink and didn't figure it out until you turned into a weapon. No big deal, you wouldn’t be the first.”

“No big deal?! I'm just like—”

Realization flickered over Faust's face. “Keep your voice down. No, you aren't like her. Are you going to go do that to people who you aren’t asked to kill?”

“No!”

“Then you're fine,” she said, nonchalantly. “It’s not all that uncommon, especially for us. You’re kind of expected to get weird about death in this line of work anyway, easier to get it out of the way now than later.”

“But…” I didn’t expect acceptance.

Faust shrugged. “You don’t change that much. You’re still you.” She did that little half-smile again. “And besides, we can do that sort of thing all we want. No dying for real unless this gets hurt,” she said, tapping the side of her head.

“…huh.”

“Something to consider. You should look at more transhuman porn, honestly. They’ve got some insane bodies built for kink these days.”

Val made an “eep” noise and tried to figure out what to do with her hands.

Faust smirked. “Very unbecoming for my little murderess to be flustered by words. Anything else? Sudden oral fixation or attraction to dragons?”

Fortunately for Val, she couldn't blush any harder than she already was. “…oral thing, yeah.”

“That one is probably the body’s fault, but not by design. Same thing happened to me when I had one with fangs, it's a thing.”

“…dragons, though?”

“That'll happen eventually, just by nature of being one. Anyway, let’s go shopping, you need some formal wear. And casual wear, too, I guess.”

As they stood to go, Val had a sudden thought that barged into her head like a wrecking ball. “Is… is this technically forcefemming?”

Shopping had been less painful than expected. “Sorry, we just flew in from out of town and the airline lost my wife’s luggage” was a powerful excuse, and Val realized quickly that she could just pretend to be ditzy enough to not know her own clothing sizes. The process had helped acclimate her to the new body, and to how easy it was to just lie.

They were headed south in Faust’s car, towards what she had described as “an undisclosed location.” Val was eager to try out the dragon, at least to see if she was as dangerous as the movies made her out to be.

“Okay, we can talk while I drive. What do you want to know? Besides the job.”

Val thought for a few seconds before asking, “What’s up with the surveillance you’ve had me doing?”

“The surveillance is mostly for getting pattern-of-life on whoever we can. Knowing when Pushkov comes to work and what roads he takes? Dangerous info to the right people.”

“And I guess we’re the right people. So what happens to Pushkov then? We kill him? Kidnap him?”

“Maybe, but probably not. He’s an admin guy, not an operations guy, knocking him out won’t really change the war. We’ll snitch to NID and see if they have any followup tasking for us.”

“We answer to them?”

“Only when we feel like it. The NID’s centralized a lot of the targeting and wants all the little movements like ours to run big hits through them. The overall plan is to degrade their war effort and let the military do the bulk of the killing. We don’t have to do what they want, but it’s the right call if we want the war over faster. We need PDT tanks to roll down Main Street for change at this point, so that’s what we’re going to make happen.”

Val exhaled. “So that’s why Kabinov’s still alive.”

Faust gave a dry laugh. “No. We’d have killed him if we could, but we don’t have any way of getting to him.”

Val gave her a quizzical look. “Even with all this? How could they stop us?”

“You might feel invincible right now, but if they put a password and a big enough gun between us and a target, we’re screwed. Anyone that high up has tight security. Same with places like the MoI or ISS. We can’t just waltz in, they’ve got controlled entry systems, and no biometrics we can trick.”

“I kind of figured… you know. ‘We have ways of making you talk’ and all that.”

“Torture is both objectionable and ineffective.” Her tone was deadly serious. “My predecessor didn’t agree, which is why you’re talking to me and not him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He got bad information out of an interrogation because the guy told him whatever he thought he wanted to hear. Three days later he got shot in the head by the ISS while trying to pass through a checkpoint.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to say.

“He liked violence more than he liked fighting for something. It was inevitable.”

Val looked out the window, watching trees pass by. “This might be personal, but… why do you do it, then? Fight, that is.”

Faust sighed. “I told you I started doing this five years ago, right?” Val nodded. “I used to be a soldier. Service for citizenship, right? Brought my parents from the HRE, moved here. Did my time and got out in ‘47. Very different world back then. Anyway, my folks’ health declined. Mom got early-onset Alzheimer’s, Dad got brain cancer, and I split working with helping them. One day I come home and the house is crawling with whitejackets, my folks are gone, and nobody will tell me anything.”

Val grimaced.

“My mom had gotten out and gone to the store. She got in some argument with a whitejacket. She was confused, didn’t even know where she was. The asshole hit her so bad it fractured her orbital. And then they stuck her in an asylum for it, as if she’d done something wrong. My dad tried to go and pick her up. They told me he got in an altercation with a guard, and ‘was shot.’ Took me two weeks to even get that much.”

She had no response to that besides a pained noise.

“Yeah. Poof, my family’s gone, just because some fascist at the store was randomly cruel to an old lady. I had enough of that shit. I was working at a place that did circuit boards. You know you can make some nasty stuff out of the chemicals they use to etch those?”

“I do now, I guess.”

“Well, I did. I had a beautiful plan, use a little gunpowder bomb on an ISS barracks, then a bigger and nastier chemical one to kill everyone who responded to it. Double tap, insurgency classic. Do you want to guess what actually happened?”

“It didn’t work?”

“Worse. The chemical half went off in my face while I was putting it together. I woke up in a hospital with everything besides the top of my skull and my brain put back together with thaumaturgy. They couldn’t fix what it did to my brain, though. They said I had a week or two before my neurons started falling apart.”

“So you converted to survive.”

“The doctors assumed I’d tried to off myself after what happened to my folks. One of the nurses realized what the chemicals I’d used were actually for. He asked me what happened, and actually listened when I told him. Poor guy took pity on me, and got me over the border to Estonia. They fixed me up with new bodies. A week later, some spooks came by and asked if I wanted to go back. So here I am.”

“Wow.”

“What’s your deal, then? I showed you mine, you show me yours.”

“Bad case of wrong gender.”

“I know that, obviously.”

“It feels like nothing compared to yours. I just… got fed up with it. If the Essies win the war, it’s just more of this, forever, for billions of people. And I can’t live with that, simple as that.”

“So why this, then? Why not sneak over the border and enlist? That's a lot easier.”

“Not easier for me, I guess. Easier to just stay here and live the life I was living, even if it sucked. Inertia, cowardice, whatever. But I'm here now.”

Faust nodded. “Not the worst reason I've seen.”

“There's a worst?”

“We had a full-on Essie once. He got so mad that Kabinov hadn’t nuked the snakes yet that he tried to turn traitor.”

“What happened to him?”

“What do you think happened to him?”

“Dead?”

“Dead.”

“Good riddance.”

Faust took one last look around the field. “Alright, we’re clear. Go ahead and put your scales on.”

Val touched that little surface at the back of her consciousness again. There was a brief feeling like the floor had fallen out from under her, and suddenly her point of view was going up. Then it started sliding to the left. Oh, she realized belatedly, I’m falling.

Faust watched as Val tried to stand on two legs and toppled to the ground with a thud. “Yep. That happened my first time too. I’d offer you a hand, but you weigh about as much as the car does.”

Val looked herself over. She didn't look quite how she expected. She’d looked up a picture of a Snapscale the previous night and had expected to have glittering carbide scales, not speckled green and brown tones.

“Rroorw aarr—” She shut her mouth out of embarrassment.

“You can’t talk like this, not like you can as a human.” Faust shifted, twisting and flowing into a dragon form of her own— a mirror image of Val’s.

“You talk like this. Try to force your words out of your chest towards me, without using your lungs.”

“LIKE THIS?” she thundered. “Sorry. Like this?”

“You’ve got it. It’s magic sound, basically. You make it with your body, not your throat, and your body hears it, not your ears. Anyone who can shapeshift will be able to hear it.”

Faust returned to her human form. “For shifting, watch how I move. I’m going to lean forwards, start shifting, then land on all fours as a dragon.”

She shifted in a single smooth movement, flowing onto all fours. “Same in reverse. Push yourself up, then shift on the way up.”

Val followed along, picking herself up off the ground and mimicking Faust's movements as they ran through it a few times. “Not so hard.”

“Now run to the treeline and back, as fast as you can.”

She started with cautious steps, just trying to to put one foot (or paw? claw?) in front of the other, then gradually picking up to a walk. The muscle memory was there, it just needed some practice to access it. By the time she got back, she was sprinting. Going faster was strangely easy, like just hitting an accelerator on a car instead of physically exerting herself.

“Good. Again, but use your wings this time. Stay below the treeline.”

“I… how?”

“Just spread your wings, hop up, and flap. Dragons can fly from birth, you’ll figure it out. Don't try to overthink it.”

Val shuffled her wings, suddenly realizing she had another pair of limbs. She spread them out as far as she could, feeling the membrane splay out and her tendons stretch. “So I just…” She crouched down like a coiled spring, then jumped. She pushed down with her wings, the tips barely brushing against the grass as she shot up. The trip to the treeline and back was over in seconds, though her landing was somewhat less than graceful.

“Good, it’ll work. Ideally we’d have a few weeks to get you acclimated, but we've got about half an hour.” Faust turned to the car, pulling a silenced handgun out of the center console. Before Val could react, she shot her three times.

“Ow! What the hell!” She craned her neck to inspect the damage. There were some marks on her scaled flank where the bullets had hit, but nothing more.

“Your scales are carbide, same thing that goes in ballistic plates. They’re thick enough to stop most handgun rounds entirely. Most rifles will break the scales, so try not to get shot in the same place twice. And don’t spit fire while you’re getting shot at, your mouth isn’t armored and they know that.”

“So, basically invincible. Got it.”

Faust laughed. “I wish. You’re not a Shatterscale, this only really protects against the last-gen stuff they give to cops and home guard types. Real infantry or ISS guns can penetrate, and anything full-auto will chew up the scales enough to get a shot or two through.”

“Invulnerable to cops, then.”

“Mostly. They don’t tend to carry guns that can hurt you, but they’ll usually have one in the squad car. This form is basically just for moving around— you’re faster than any human can run on the ground, and can hit highway speeds in the air. Just stay low to the ground when you fly, any more than a few meters above the treetops and you can show up on radar.”

“What about fire?” She flexed her throat, feeling an experimental dribble of fuel pool somewhere in her gullet.

“Whoa!” Faust held up her hands. “Watch where you point that!”

Val jerked her head away, surprised at her reaction. “Why? I thought we can’t get burned?”

“Yes, but Snapscales don’t just breathe fire. You shoot an explosive bolt, it’ll punch a few centimeters in and then explode.”

“Oh. So if it hit a person…”

“Even on one of us, a shot to center mass tends to go off inside the chest cavity unless you hit the sternum dead-on. Very messy.”

“Christ. Have you…?”

“Do I know from experience? No, but I’ve seen videos. Like I said, we almost never use dragon forms for anything besides mobility. But we need to make sure you know how to use your fire. Only one shot at a time, please, you don’t have more than eight or so.”

“What am I shooting?”

“Think fast.” Faust hurled a water bottle into the air. Val barely thought, she just reacted— feeling the buildup in her throat, then release. A bright purple-blue bolt shot outwards from her maw like a bullet from a gun, just barely clipping the corner of the bottle as it spun through the air and exploding with a shockingly loud bang. She didn’t catch where the bottle itself went; it was simply there one moment and gone the next. She turned back just in time to see Faust throw another one, which she didn’t quite manage to hit. The bolt disintegrated into a gout of sooty flame after a few hundred meters of travel.

“Holy shit, that’s powerful.”

“It’ll kill even with a glancing hit, breaks all the little blood vessels in their brain. Supposedly it can break armor if you’re lucky, but if you’re up against regulars, you run, don’t fight.” She looked at her watch. “We’ve got about a half hour before we need to head to the job, so let’s get some exercise.”

“So?” Val asked. They were on the northbound highway, headed back towards Moscow. Val had changed into the formal wear they’d purchased earlier that day— a conservative black dress and flats. Unfortunately, whoever had designed her body hadn’t figured out how to set up muscle memory for heels. Faust, on the other hand, was a picture-perfect ISS inspector, complete with oversized integrally-silenced sidearm and white dress uniform.

“The job.”

“Finally.”

“You’re aware of all the new faces coming in from out of town the last two days.” Val nodded. “They’re here for a big ODI intelligence conference. Most of the ODI spook bosses will be there, as will a large number of experts who will be sharing what they know with everyone else.”

“Are we going to bomb it?”

“No, we can’t get in, it’s going to be inside the MoI. We have a lot of irons in the fire for this one, which is why we’re spread so thin. For the two of us, our specific target is Arman Diasev. Diasev is a senior radio-frequency engineer for KTC, which makes most of Russia’s air surveillance radars and electronic warfare equipment. Needless to say, there are some spooks who are very, very interested in having a private chat with him. Fortunately for us, Diasev should be an easy target. He’s a serial womanizer, with a very specific type. There’s a folder in the glovebox, but I think you can probably guess what he likes.”

“Brunettes?” Val joked, pulling out the manila folder. It contained a glossy photo of Diasev, along with five different printouts of very conventionally-attractive redheaded women. “I think I have an advantage here. Mine are naturals.”

Faust laughed. “Those are his ex-wives. The longest any of them has lasted is eighteen months. Fortunately, you don’t need to marry him. Or unfortunately, since apparently the last one got a pretty sizeable chunk in the divorce.”

“Any chance he’s sworn off redheads after the last one?”

“This guy posts porn on main. No.”

“Lovely. So what’s the plan?”

“You hit him up at the bar, then get him alone in your hotel room. I bust in looking like this, say that he’s been duped by a snake, and take you both into my custody. After that it’s just a matter of getting him to a safehouse and then out of the country, neither of which should be too difficult once we’re outside of Moscow.”

“I think I can do that. You know what room he’s in?”

“No, but we know what room you’re in, and we know he’ll be at the hotel bar, since his employer pays for the drinks there.”

“Does my employer pay for my drinks?”

“No. You have to work for yours.”

“Hey there beautiful, mind if I buy you a drink?”

Well, that was easier than I expected. In retrospect, the hard part hadn’t been getting Diasev’s attention. The hard part had been getting rid of the three men who’d tried flirting with her before him. She’d never been hit on by anyone, much less had to reject people, and the attention was definitely doing something for her.

Val made a show of looking him up and down while deploying what felt like her sultriest look. “Go for it, killer. Vodka, straight. Don’t bother with the top shelf, unless you want to spoil me.”

He smiled and motioned to the bartender. “Two shots of vodka. The good stuff,” he ordered, turning to her. “So, what’s a beauty like you doing in a dump like this?”

“Oh, just passing through on my way to Minsk. What brings a big guy like you here?”

Diasev sighed. “Work, sadly.” He brightened a bit, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t have some fun off the clock.”

The bartender passed them their shots. Val drained hers in a single go, then winked. Diasev did his best to match her, but didn’t quite maintain his composure.

“Oh? What’s work?”

“Oh, just electronics stuff. You would think it’s boring. Lots of math. I’m sure your job is far more interesting,” he replied.

“A little of this, a little of that. I… solve problems, you could say. Why, do you have a problem that needs solving?”

“I… you could say that, yes. I have this whole evening to myself and nobody to spend it with.”

“How fortuitous,” she said, running her fingers up his leg, “I have the same problem. Shall we skip to the good bit?” Please don’t make me flirt with you for half an hour.

“The good bit?”

“Oh, don’t play coy. My room.” She stood, “wouldn’t you like to come with me?”

Realization dawned on him. “But— I don’t even know your name.”

“Oh, I don’t think we’ll be needing that,” Val beckoned, and strutted towards the elevators. I hope they’re all this easy, she thought, though to be fair, this would have worked on me too. She made sure to walk directly past Faust, who was chatting with another ISS officer in the lobby. He was an impressive specimen, a slab of muscle nearly two meters tall. Really, she was being chatted at, not with, and appeared to be having little success at disentangling herself from the conversation.

The elevator doors closed behind her and Diasev, and he made a clumsy play for a kiss. She put a finger on his chest to push him away. “Not yet.”

A brief flash of anger clouded his face. “Oh, don’t play hard to get now.” He moved in again, grabbing at Val’s hips. She felt the poison gland in her jaw twitch involuntarily, and her saliva suddenly tasted bitter. Shit. She pushed him away, hard, her augmented strength putting a look of surprise on Diasev’s face. “Down, boy. I’m in charge here.” She felt a bit flushed from that. Am I getting off on this?

Diasev was saved by the bell. The doors opened, and she did her best to disengage without outright punching him or letting him touch her lips. Fuck, I want to kiss him so bad. Just not for the reasons he wants… She managed to get the door to her room open without letting him get to her lips and the bitter neurotoxin that coated them. “I’m going to slip into something a little more comfortable,” she flirted, ducking into the bathroom.

The hotel did at least have mouthwash. She took deep breaths, trying to calm her pounding heart. Fuck, she thought, Faust really wasn’t kidding. She spat and rinsed, trying to get the poison out of her mouth before Diasev could manage to inadvertently kill himself. She stalled another minute, took a final deep breath, then opened the door.

“I decided that I didn’t feel like waiting.” And also I remembered that I don't have anything more comfortable. She turned around and did her best to strike a pose. “So. Unwrap me.” And let’s hope I can keep the poison under control the next time you go for a kiss. He’d barely gotten his hands on the dress’s zipper when someone pounded on the door.

THUMP THUMP THUMP.

He groaned. “Don't tell me you're married.”

“I'm not. Are you?” He shook his head. She did her best to look plaintive. “I'm not expecting anyone. Can you make them go away?” Go defend your little prize. He regretfully disentangled from her to investigate the visitor.

“Fuck,” she heard him whisper as he looked through the peephole. Before she could say anything, he opened the door.

Faust and the whitejacket from the lobby barged into the room. She shoved Diasev to the side before leveling a silenced pistol at Val.

“Hands in the air, snake.” Val slowly raised her hands.

“What’s the meaning of this?!” Diasev blustered.

The other whitejacket spoke up, “You fucking idiot, you fell for the oldest trick in the book. You really think you're pulling women like that?”

Faust kept the gun pointed at Val, and fished out a pair of cuffs. “Luka, cuff her. She’s down to this body, but I'm not risking it.”

The big man nodded, taking the cuffs from her. Val glanced at Faust, who gave the slightest of nods. One of ours, then. She gave him a solid glare, sizing him up and giving him a little smirk. I think I could take him. Which way? Both, of course.

Diasev was clearly not fully on board. “What is going on—”

Faust sighed and pulled out a handheld thaumometer. She waved it over herself, then Diasev, then Val, where it flashed red and made an alarming beeping sound. Huh. A fake?

“But—”

“Try not to think with your dick next time. I’ve been on her tail for two weeks, and you’re the first one we’ve gotten to alive.”

Val gave a predatory grin. “Not for long, though.” She earned a fist in the gut from ‘Luka’ for that. It didn’t hurt that much— she wasn’t sure if he’d pulled the punch or if that was just the pain damping that Faust had mentioned.

“You’re lucky the inspector wants to ask you some questions, bitch,” he said, practically spitting out the words. “Otherwise we’d just shoot you in the head and go home.”

“Take the john. I’ll deal with the snake,” Faust ordered.

“I have a name!” Diasev objected, “I haven’t even done anything wrong!”

“Sure thing. You won’t mind coming with us for some questions then, since you haven’t done anything wrong.” She was clearly having some fun with it. “Luka, can we take my car? I don’t want to be in a squad car in case this thing has friends.”

“Sure,” he replied, “good idea.”

Faust moved to grab Val’s cuffs from behind, steering her around in what seemed like a proper police manner. She whispered into her ear as the other ISS officer turned away, “He’s real ISS, not us.”

Val tried to keep an even expression as Luka turned around. “You say something, Mira?”

“Yeah, just letting this thing know what’s in store for her. I’ll keep my gun on her, don’t worry.” Faust pressed the barrel into her back. “Now move.”

The ride from the fourth floor to the parking garage was tense. Luka clearly expected her to shift at any second despite the cuffs, and had kept his handgun unholstered the entire time. Diasev kept stealing glances at her tits. At least he's consistent.

They were halfway to the car when the air raid sirens sounded.

“Shit, we need to get out of here. Let’s go!” Faust picked up the pace, pushing Val along.

“What happened to shelter in place?” Luka asked.

“Not wanting to be buried under a hotel’s worth of rubble happened! You drive, keys are in the center console!”

The four of them slid into the car. The other two didn’t seem to notice or care that Val didn’t need much encouraging to get into the back seat with Faust.

“Where to?”

“Away from downtown. Just get on anything southbound.”

“Understood.”

They peeled out of the parking garage. Faust made eye contact with her and mimed breaking a pair of handcuffs. She kept her hands behind her, but nodded to Faust. Ready when you are. Faust held up a finger and shook her head. Not yet.

It only took a minute or two for the four of them to encounter a checkpoint. Between the sirens and the hour, there was no queue. Both the ISS officer and the “ISS officer” rolled down a window.

“We’re ISS,” Faust said, flashing her ID, “And we’re in a hurry. These two are with us, and this one,” she motioned towards Val, “is a snake.”

The policeman at the checkpoint put his hand on his holster. “Why are you transporting a—”

“First of all, boy scout, that’s above your pay grade. Second of all, why do you think? You think I have a handcuffed snake at gunpoint in the back of my car because it’s my friend?”

He turned red. Val supposed it was in-character for an ISS officer to antagonize the police, after all. “I have to scan—”

“Then do it!”

The cop pulled out his handheld scanner, waving it over them. It didn't beep when he passed it over Val.

“You're all coming up clean. Are you sure she's a snake?”

“Dead certain. Mine picks her up. Watch,” she said, pulling out the one she'd used previously. “Green, green, green… red.” It beeped.

He brought up his own scanner again. Still nothing. Val's heart started pounding. I hope you have a plan, Faust. He motioned over the other officer at the checkpoint. “We’re going to have to search the car. Procedure, you understand.”

“Skip it, this is time-sensitive.”

“Ma’am,” he said, putting on a diplomatic tone, “this is very irregular. You’re transporting a prisoner and a civvie in a private vehicle. You told me the prisoner is a snake, but she's clean on the scanner. I can either call it up, or we can search the car. It’s up to you, but searching the car will be faster.” The turf war between the Moscow PD and the ISS had been running for years with no end in sight, and this was clearly a prime opportunity to score some points.

“Alright. You can have this one, but I’ll be talking to your boss about it.” She opened the passenger door to get out, keeping her gun trained on Val the entire time. “Keep your gun on her, I'll go around and get her out of the car. She's out of bodies to run to, so you should be able to handle her.”

The cop did so, aiming his SMG at her through the open car door. Rather than going around the car, Faust stepped behind him, raised her gun, and shot him in the back of the head. Before the other cop could bring his gun up, she'd put three rounds in his chest.

Val snapped the cuffs behind her the second Faust raised her gun, the fake plastic chain breaking easily as her mouth filled with poison. While the massive ISS officer in the front seat scrabbled to get his gun out of his shoulder holster as soon as he heard the gunshot, Val spit in her hand, reached around the headrest, and rubbed it on his face. Diasev stared on in horror as Luka managed to get out of the car with his gun drawn, only to stumble and fall as the poison paralyzed his muscles in seconds. Faust shot him in the head for good measure once he hit the ground. Even with the chunky integrated silencer, the gunshots were deafening.

Val pulled herself out of the car. “Now what?”

Faust motioned to her ears and said something. Val didn’t hear anything beyond ringing. Right, gunshots.

Val shifted, landing on all fours with slightly more grace than a few hours ago. “How about now?”

“Clever. We need to move, get this spike strip down. I’ll clear these guys.”

Val padded over to the booth, only to discover a third officer cowering inside. He had a pistol in his hand, but froze when he saw her. “Faust! One more over here.”

“Make it zero! We don’t need another prisoner!”

She turned her head. “I’m not going to fucking execute him!”

He took advantage of her momentary lapse in attention to raise his gun and pull the trigger. It clicked. Unlike him, Val didn’t have a safety to toggle, and in response she shot a blueish bolt of dragonfire directly into his neck. He didn’t really die so much as cease to exist above the shoulders. The concussion blew out the booth’s windows, but the sheet-metal siding held. She returned to human form, strolled over, and hit the button to lower the road spikes, all before realizing that the interior of the booth was coated with a fine spray of red.

Val returned to the car in a combination of daze and adrenaline rush as the air raid sirens continued to wail. Faust grabbed the dead ISS officer’s gun and slid into the driver’s seat. “I guess that problem resolved itself. You okay?”

She took a deep breath, trying to calm her nerves. “…I think so, yeah.”

“Don’t hold your fire next time. They won’t ever do the same for us.”

“…understood,” she replied. It was the first time Faust had sounded actually upset with her. Eager to change the topic, she asked, “What’s up with the sirens? Is that us?”

“That’s just the Union poking the ABM net,” she said, accelerating onto the empty highway. Val squinted, managing to pick out a few orange dots descending through the atmosphere, and the IR lances of high-power laser beams reaching up to meet them. Faust turned to Diasev, “What about you, you okay in there?”

“No, I am not! What the hell is going on here?!”

If Faust is going to have fun with it, so am I, Val resolved. “You’re being kidnapped. She wasn’t lying about me, though. Your name’s Vladimir, right?”

“No! It’s Arman! Arman Diasev!”

“Damn, I think we got the wrong guy. You think we should toss him back?”

Faust clued into the bit immediately. “I don’t know, he’s kind of growing on me. We could keep him.”

“Please, I won’t tell—”

“Alright, alright. We’ll drop you off next time we stop. Right?”

“Yeah, a little catch and release. That’ll work.”

“Oh, thank you—”

Faust scoffed, dropping her jovial tone. “Your name is Arman Diasev. You are the senior radio-frequency engineer for Kola Technical Concern. You are responsible for leading the design for about a dozen different military radars and electronic warfare systems. Are any of these statements untrue?”

He sat silent.

“Your lifespan is directly related to how much you want to talk about your work. You want to talk, you get a comfy room somewhere in an undisclosed location for the rest of the war. You don’t want to talk, I let Val give you a wet, sloppy, and very lethal kiss. Your choice.”

Val felt herself flush at the thought. Fuck me, she thought, Faust was right. Guess I am her little murderess.

“…I’ll cooperate.”

Damn.

“This is where you get off,” Faust said as they pulled into a gas station. It was practically deserted; the only other vehicle present was a single MPD squad car.

“That’s it? What about getting lover boy here out of the country?”

“I don’t need your help for that, and you have work tomorrow.”

Val scoffed. “Right. I’ll just kill some cops and then go back to work the next day.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to do. We need someone to watch what the anthill does when we kick it.”

She sighed, ready to complain when she noticed the officer leaving the convenience store and heading their way. “Um. Do we have to kill this guy?”

Faust laughed, “Good luck, they’re one of ours. That’s your ride home.” She rolled down her window and waved. “Hey, Sasha, how’s my favorite cop doing?”

They waved. “Val, hop out for a second, I don’t want Arman to hear.”

With the car doors shut, Faust made introductions. “Sasha, Valeria. Valeria, Sasha.”

Val waved. “Just Val is fine.”

They looked her over. “Wow, she put you in that for your first op?”

Val smiled, only blushing a little this time. “Yeah.”

“Lucky you. I had to be a grandma.”

“And look at you now,” Faust replied, “a successful police sergeant making big waves in the force.”

“Oh, fuck off. I have to spend my whole day around these pigs, it’s exhausting.”

“And Val was just complaining about her cover. How’s the MPD handling our little adventure?”

“Whatever you did to those guys, they didn’t get a call out until about ten minutes ago. No ID or plates, someone just rolled up and found the bodies. Most of everything else went fine. How much does she know?”

“She’s about a day old, so not much.”

“Hey, I’m right here.”

“Sorry,” Sasha shrugged before asking Faust, “What do you wanna tell her?”

“Might as well tell her everything,” Faust said, turning to her, “you’re going to be in the thick of it tomorrow. The reason we’re short on people tonight is because we’re setting up to knock out the entire Moscow ABM grid at the same time as the conference keynote tomorrow morning. We’re not going to get it all, but we’ll get a lot. Then the Union’s going to shove a few hundred tons of ordnance through what’s left. We’re going to turn every military target inside the M2 ring into rubble, hopefully with most of the people still inside.”

“…holy shit.” Val couldn’t remember the last time ordnance had actually hit the ground in Moscow.

“Should be one hell of a show, at least.”

“Morning, sir. The usual?”

“Of course.”

“Your total is ₱7.98.” Captain Ilyushkin paid with card, like he always did.

Back to usual, she thought, turning to make his order. It almost felt like the last two days had been a dream. She hadn’t had the energy to do anything besides lay down and pass out when she’d gotten home the previous night. She’d even drooled on her pillow. She’d thrown it out, unsure if it had always tasted a little bit bitter, or if she’d let some poison out while she slept. Seriously, what did they think I would need this much poison for, she thought to herself, killing a whole auditorium? Putting her original body back on to go to work had been… challenging, however.

The captain’s phone went off, distracting her from her thoughts. Then two more. Within a minute, half the cafe was either on their phones or rushing out the door. Val resisted the urge to smile.

Maybe this isn’t so bad of a day job after all.