The Traitor, Part 4

Somewhere in Central America.
August 5th, 1766.
36 hours after landfall.

Vaya flickered back into her scales, "Clear up here."

"Roger," Astrid replied over the radio, "moving up. We lose anyone?"

"Aaliya's down a SIB, everyone else is fine. We've got one still alive, what do you want to do with him?"

"Prisoner? Ziptie him to a tree and mark it in ICAN, our rear line will deal with him."

Vaya spared a glance at their prisoner as Citra restrained him, clearly terrified. "Think there's hope for him?" she thrummed. Maybe he'd end up like they had, free of the confines of their humanity.

Citra hummed, thinking. "Probably not. Also, your face is literally covered in blood."

"It's not mine."

"Yeah, that wasn't what I was saying."

Vaya's reply was interrupted by the warning tone of incoming artillery. The sergeant must have gotten the ping too, because she was immediately blowing out their eardrums with the radio. "Shit, that's suicide arty on you! Forward! Now!"

"Wait, what?! Forward?" Citra said, panicked.

"Assault through! They won't arty their own positions!" the sergeant yelled into the radio, "GO!"

Vaya was already moving before the sergeant had finished her sentence, leaping up and over the berm as her bioceramic claws dug into the damp topsoil. Even with the drifting smoke from earlier, she had a pretty good idea on where the closest essie asshole was, she could— wait. She could smell them, the whiff of hydraulic oil and testosterone sweat and gunpowder and—

And the other half of the squad blitzed by her. "Vaya! Fucking move!" Kiran thrummed, their volume practically a shout.

Right. Artillery. Don't need to get blown up twice, she thought, sprinting after her squad. Once was bad enough.

As they closed, crimson tracers flickered out from the next sizeable clump of ruins, an autocannon lighting up her vision with muzzle flashes, and she was already shifting, sliding onto her chest with her gun raised and firing. Something punched her in the shoulder, but whatever damage it did was ignored in the adrenaline rush as her rounds kicked up fragments of stone and puffs of dirt. She caught the briefest flicker of movement as a series of grenades arced towards her, a belt-fed launcher somewhere in the ruins desperately trying to make her go away, and she was suddenly three tons of armor and muscle, a perfect grid of steel ball bearings cratering her scales but leaving her flesh unharmed. Her fireteam was with her, somehow ignored in the desperate chaos, dumping round after round into anything that exposed itself from behind the rock, a frantic fight to keep Odie from pointing his autocannons at the other four members of the squad as they dashed closer.

And then that beautiful call rang out as the other fireteam closed in, dragonspeech pulsing into her bones: "Hold fire, hold fire, CQC, CQC!" There was a triple-flash of concussion grenades that reflected off stone doorways and eroded windows, the thud-thud-thud of an autocannon firing, and then silence. Or at least relative silence, because the cacophony of gunfire never stopped, just changed position, the same battle playing itself out over and over across a mile-long front.

"All clear! Move up!" Astrid thrummed, "before that artillery—"

Oh, shit, right. The artillery. Vaya glanced at the screen on her forearm, the time-to-impact counter ticking down.

TTI: 0m:07s

A flash of movement with their Sprinters later, and her fireteam was ducking behind stone as the artillery hit, airburst shells scything the jungle flat in a two-hundred-meter cone where they had been just a minute ago. Vaya suddenly understood why they had run forwards and not back.

Everyone else okay? Astrid asked, flicking viscera off her bladed tail. Vaya looked around, Everyone else—? Oh, shit. Sona laid unmoving, her fanged jaw a ruined mess where an explosive shot had caught it.

"Hey. Look at me," Astrid thrummed, "Tell me if you are damaged. We can mourn later. Vaya?"

Vaya ran a mental inventory as she flickered back to a Bladewyrm. It wasn't the first time she'd seen someone die, but it was the first time she'd cared about them. She managed to force her attention back to the task at hand: that "punch" she'd felt had shredded her entire shoulder joint, and her Shatterscale's armor was ruined on the entire right flank.

"Down to one SIB, and my Shatterscale's armor is fucked."

"Aaliya?"

"On my last SIB," Aaliya replied. "Good on dragons."

"Down a Bladewyrm," Kiran volunteered. "Two more left, SIB's are fine."

"Citra?"

Citra shook her head, trying not to look at Sona's body. "Nothing here."

"Do we need to run again?" Vaya asked.

Astrid flicked back to a human form and tapped her wrist screen. "Don't think so. Pull security while I call it up."

A nagging thought crossed Vaya's mind, shortly followed by a much more serious one.

"Oh, fuck. Sergeant, the prisoner—"

"Fuck. Fuck! Vaya, Citra, go see if he's still alive. Don't get shot."

There's no way he's alive, don't throw good lives after bad ones, she managed to keep herself from saying. Instead, she simply replied with "Roger, sergeant."

The pair dashed back over the flattened terrain, ceramic claws and inhuman muscle fibers carrying them to the first set of ruins without issue.

"Oh, this is weird," Citra vibrated, "look at the plants."

"What about them?" Vaya glanced at the vegetation around the ruins. There was nothing wrong with it... aside from the fact that there was nothing wrong with it, out to a certain radius where the blast effects became apparent again. "Wait, what the fuck? Did they miss or something?"

"Old magic, maybe?"

"Who knows. Maybe it means the guy's still alive."

"Yeah, and maybe he'll try to grenade us again too. Wish I'd killed his ass and Sona was still here."

"Let me handle it." Vaya took a moment to listen, trying to tune out the sounds of gunfire and explosions they'd been hearing since battle was joined. "I don't hear an active suit in there, at least."

"Go, I'll get up above, jump in through a window if you need help."

"Sure."

Vaya flickered back to a human form, an inversion of space folding two tons of dragon into something much smaller. "Hey! You still alive in there?"

"Leave me alone, snake!"

"Well, he's alive I guess. One less death on my conscience."

Vaya resisted the urge to tell Citra to shut up. "I'm coming in. I'll stay human if you don't try anything. Okay?"

No response awaited her besides her own anxiety and irritation.

Fuck it. Fuck this. Should have just fucking killed him, she thought. Pissy little fascist is going to try some shit again, isn't he. But she stepped into the ruins anyway, feeling a Bladewyrm pooling in the back of her brain. No sudden gunshots awaited her entrance, just a teenager crumpled in the corner with zip-tied hands. He looked up at her morosely.

Vaya exhaled, but still pointed her rifle at him. "Stand up."

He did so, looking like all the energy had been drained out of him. She motioned outside, "walk." The soldier— Private Karnik, going by his uniform —wordlessly did so, flinching away when Citra entered his field of view. Vaya couldn't exactly blame him, given what she'd done to the rest of his fireteam with her own Bladewyrm. But, she thought, I don't feel guilty about it either.

"Vaya, careful. To your left."

"What—" Vaya instantly regretted speaking, because it meant that Karnik looked around at her and followed her eyes, slitted and prismatic as they may have been. The reason for the lack of blast damage became immediately apparent: an artillery shell embedded in the ground, unexploded. A dud. She resisted the urge to laugh, and ignored her mind insisting that it was making a ticking sound.

To her relief, the marine made no sudden moves, and she decided to reinforce that. "If you try to kill us all a second time—"

"No, I'm done."

"Good," she replied. "Let's clear the area, then. I already died once from artillery, I could do without a second. Citra, call this in for me, yeah?"

"Sure." She shifted, two tons of lethal predator condensing into human flesh with a blink, and began chattering at her radio. Vaya let the stress bleed out of her and tuned Citra out, sneaking a quick glance at what was left of a decaying stone arch. Was it an old boulevard marking the entrance to the ancient city, decorative, something else entirely? Had it been crafted by hand and hoisted into position, or simply summoned out of the ground with ancient magics? Whoever knew the answer was certainly far away from this battlefield.

There was a quiet hissing behind her, like meat placed on a hot stove, and Vaya turned around to see a tiny wisp of malevolent red light dart hovering a few centimeters off the ground behind her, as if it was an insect disturbed by her footfalls.

"Citra—"

She turned her head to look in Vaya's direction. "Wha... the fuck? A bug?"

"No, there's no... anything?" The object had no physicality, just a point of light without cause. There was the tiniest pinprick of heat at its center, as if it were a burning cinder.

"Walk away," Citra suggested, "briskly but calmly."

"Yup." Vaya did so, keeping her eyes on it the whole time. She flinched when it darted, zipping around in a circle like it was looking for something, and she slowly reached for the antimagic grenade on her rig.

It froze, as if it had sensed her intent, then zipped away. Vaya breathed a sigh of relief, and then noticed where it had zipped to: the unexploded artillery shell, some thirty meters away. One single thought crossed her mind before the world went white:

Fuck me, not again.

Vaya, you need to wake up. You're dying. Again. You really have bad luck with artillery, don't you?

Well, infantry is the queen of battle, and artillery is the king. And we all know what the king does to the queen. Winky face emoji.

Can we focus on the dying part, please. And I'm letting you die if you say an emoji again.

You're very negative.

I'm literally you.

Nuh uh. You're a voice in my head. Do I have schizophrenia?

No, you have blast, shrapnel, and crush injuries, which you are, again, dying from. Not schizophrenia. This is called an internal monologue. They're normal. Most people have them.

Usually they don't argue with you. Or address you directly.

Usually you aren't dying.

Fair.

Vaya attempted opening her eyes. Nothing happened.

That usually works.

You usually have eyes.

What, did they go somewhere else?

The shockwave from a 170mm artillery shell tends to make most fluid-filled membranes burst. Eyes are fluid-filled membranes. As is most of your body. Again, you are dying.

That's unpleasant. Wait, I know that?

You know many things.

Cool. Okay, so what do I do?

Your training suggests that you should try to shapeshift. Your other forms are probably uninjured.

I can do that?

Yes?

Cool.

I don't like that you're excited about facts that you should know about yourself.

Don't be a buzzkill. Shapeshifting.

Vaya touched the little bump in the back of her mind that was anything but this. Something twinged in her soul.

That was new.

You need to hurry up.

Why can't I shift?

You're being crushed by rubble.

Oh. Does that mean my bleeding is internal?

No. Most of your blood is no longer inside your body.

Define "most".

Let's just say it's a good thing the Army made your body instead of Mother Nature. Now stop asking questions and stay alive, please.

She tried again. The twinge was still there, but different. Not the twinge of blocked shifting, she'd felt that before. No, it was something more mutable, more specific.

Well, at least your brain is working. For now. You have about a minute until it runs out of oxygen, though.

How do you know that?

Because you know that.

Maybe she could still do it if she was slow. Maybe she could use the shifting as leverage, a larger form to push the rubble that was restraining her.

No, that's not how shifting works. You can't force things away with it.

I know. Shut up.

She tried again. Anything, please. Just the littlest smidgen of change. Just enough to change the broken parts, please, I don't want to fucking die like this.

Something changed.

She did it again. Something knitted back together. No, that's not it. Something exchanged, not repaired. A lacerated brainstem for a fresh one. Ruptured eyeballs for a working pair. An intact skull. Lungs— no, there was no space for those. Arms? Those were there, limp and shredded. New ones, then, flip through the deck and pull off a set. Better ones. Draconic muscle, carbide armor. Fresh blood inside, plenty of oxygen.

Vaya pushed. Nothing moved.

Your spinal cord is damaged. Also your brain, I think.

You know that for sure?

No, we're guessing.

Easy enough to replace. New brain, human or not, doesn't matter. Nerves to control and feel— Ow. Maybe not so many nerves to feel. Just to control.

Vaya felt her arms. She pushed. Something moved, and something went snap.

That was a rib. And a shoulder blade.

It needed reinforcement, then. She had stronger chests, ones that even matched the arms. Select, swap. PUSH.

Moonlight!

More space to replace ruin with function. Guts that were inside her, carbide-scaled skin, an abdominal wall without shrapnel perforations. More nerves, bones, connective tissue, ligaments, tendons...

What's the difference between a ligament and a tendon?

I don't think we know.

Whatever. She stood, finally, a pile of her own wet gore sliding off of her, lucidity slowly returning to her thoughts. The blurry form of a Bladewyrm was walking away, and she desperately tried to call out, to no avail. The effort made her vision swim, and she sat down rather than fall and shatter her skull a second time.

Time passed. She wasn't sure how much.

When Vaya woke, the first thing she noticed was that her arms looked really good in scales. The second thing she noticed were the people in Army uniforms staring at her like she'd grown an extra head.

One managed the courage to speak. "What... what the fuck are you?"

Another bout of unconsciousness claimed her before she could reply.

"Hey, Vaya, can you hear me?"

Nope, I've had enough internal monologues for today.

"Vaya? Please, it's me."

Wait. That's not internal.

Up and at 'em, sleepyhead.

Vaya awoke gasping for breath, and got her eyes open just in time to see a startled Citra jump nearly a full meter straight up.

"Gods, Vaya, what the fuck! You scared the shit out of me!"

With some effort, she managed to get her mouth to form words again. "Sorry. I'm uh. Not doing well, I think."

"Well... no, you're doing really well, actually. You should've died."

"What a wonderful way to wake up." She glanced around the... hospital room? The fuck? "Wait, where—"

"Military hospital in Portsmouth."

"Where the fuck is Portsmouth!"

"Jaega, Union."

"Oh." Her panic subsided slightly, then returned. "Why the fuck are we in a military hospital in Portsmouth? What about the fucking— wait, no how long have I been out?!"

"Fifteen hours, give or take. Just sleeping. Are you gonna ask about the war?"

"Yeah, I'm gonna ask about the war!"

"We tied, I guess. Drone ops got some of Odie's AA, we hit him with arty real good, and he blew up whatever the fucking magic doodad was. They're still fighting to keep Odie from extracting. You got airlifted out. Yes, the squad's fine, except—"

"Except Sona."

Citra's face fell. "Yeah. Except Sona."

Vaya exhaled, the dislocation-induced freakout dissipating, and she tried to shove her thoughts on her dead squadmate to the back of her mind. "So, why am I in a hospital? My body seems to work perfectly fine, and my brain's not leaking out of my ears." She tossed the sheets off and stood up as if to demonstrate. Citra blushed, her look of worry disappearing upon receiving full-frontal nudity.

Oh. Right, she was nude. Vaya shifted into flirting mode almost as easily as she breathed. "What, first time?"

The worried look on her face reappeared. "Not now, please."

"Sorry." Vaya looked around for clothes, immediately finding a set of fatigues folded on the chair.

"Do you remember what happened?"

"Um," she replied, pulling on pants, "There was a little red light. A wisp? I think it set off that shell on purpose. Then I got shredded and buried under rubble... and then I think I got out?"

Citra stared at her.

"Wait, how did you survive?"

"I shifted before you, I think. Lost most of a Bladewyrm. We thought the shrapnel turned you to mist, there wasn't anything left until they found you half-buried in rubble."

"Oh." Vaya wasn't used to being the slow one. Though, admittedly, she had probably spent a little too long thinking "not again" instead of shifting.

"Is that everything you remember?"

"Uh, I remember someone asking 'what the fuck are you', which has kind of been a personal goal for a while. At least, I think that happened. I kind of had some hallucinations. Not quite sure where those started and ended."

"Vaya, look at your hands."

"What, they're—" Vaya looked down, following Citra's increasingly-worried gaze. "Oh." Her arms were coated in carbide scales, overlapping like a miniature form of a Shatterscale's armor, and her fingers ended in claw-tips. How had she not noticed that? She turned them over and flexed slightly. It felt perfectly natural.

"Vaya, you shifted parts of your body to survive. That's... not possible."

"Guess those weren't hallucinations, then." A brief thought, and the draconic features on her left arm retracted, folding up into nothingness as if miniscule parts of her had shifted. "...and neither was that." Her right arm resisted slightly, and Vaya realized that it was because she didn't have a human right arm remaining. Her first had been shot off at the shoulder, her second had been shredded by artillery shrapnel, and she didn't have a third because she'd forgone a third SIB for more dragons. So it was just this... draconic replica? Somehow it still followed the human body plan, just with scales and claws instead of skin and fingernails. She thought about it, and it flowed from a Shatterscales jutting, thick scales to the smoother ones of a Bladewyrm with the barest sliver of intent.

"Vaya." Citra was dead serious. "The doctors don't know what you are."

"Well, that makes two of us." A knock on the door interrupted her. She took a moment to take a deep breath, and at least get the t-shirt on before she nodded to Citra to open it. A man in blue scrubs entered. Transhuman, obviously, given his eyes, but otherwise average height and build, not quite physically fit enough to be an obvious SIB.

"Hello, Private Bhatavadekar." His voice was almost obnoxiously calm, despite Citra obviously being on the edge of freaking out. "I'm Doctor Franklin, Army Medical Research. I'll be your doctor while you're here."

"Why exactly am I here? What's happening with me, why can I do," Vaya shifted her left hand again, a Bladewyrm's claws and scales unfolding to replace flesh, "this?"

"That's a good question. The bad news is nobody knows. The good news is that it's definitely not going to kill you, so we have some time to figure it out."

"Wait, you don't know what's happening? At all?" The panic in Citra's voice was starting to creep into Vaya's own.

"Easy, easy. We have some ideas, but at the end of the day this isn't something that needs fixing. We want to figure out the how and the why so we can replicate it, not put you back to normal. Well, unless you want to be normal. I assume you'd like the arm back."

"So no human experimentation?"

Dr. Franklin raised an eyebrow. "Do you identify as human?"

Uh oh. That was a question Vaya had avoided touching. "Uh."

"Ah. Sorry to open that can of worms on you. But no, we're not going to vivisect you or anything like that, not without your consent." Vaya briefly wondered if the phrasing there was intentional. She supposed that sort of thing was eminently survivable for shapeshifters. "Would you like to sit somewhere more comfortable than a hospital bed while we talk? Get some food in you, perhaps?"

She glanced at Citra, who nodded. "You haven't eaten for... I dunno, most of a day?"

That felt about right. "Can Citra come?"

"If you want her to, and she wants to, yes. However, I believe Ms. Kishori has been awake for about twenty-four hours, and I would suggest she lay down in that bed and sleep for at least six."

Citra visibly sagged at the suggestion of sleep, and Vaya decided to step in before her friend passed out standing up. "Citra, I'll be okay. Get some sleep, I'll be back later."

She smiled with all the exhaustion in the world. "Thanks."

"Now, food?"

"Follow me."

Shockingly, the hospital food was good, some sort of chicken and potato curry she'd never had before. There was no heat at all to it, which was disappointing, but it was a far cry from the bland glop she'd had the last time she'd had hospital food. Which, to be fair, had been in a very different country and under far more mundane circumstances.

Dr. Franklin smiled as she tore into the bowl. "The cafeteria here's pretty good. This one's a Thai fusion dish, massaman curry. Not as hot as a real Thai curry, but it's not like that matters with a SIB, you can't taste the heat with those things anyway." Ah. Having no receptors for capsaicin entirely would explain the lack of heat. "Is it okay if I explain some things while you eat?"

Vaya nodded, practically inhaling her food. Would they mind if she got seconds?

"Right. So, here's what we know. You can shapeshift parts of your body. This should be impossible, at least under the Hodgson model of shapeshifting, which means you have something very exciting going on in there. Which is why we'd like to figure out how it works, with your help and permission."

She swallowed. "Wait, you need my permission? And who is we?"

"The military can't order you to undergo a medical procedure just to satisfy our curiosity, so yes, we do. A lot of very smart people would be quite upset if you said no, but it's your choice. And 'we' is just about every shapeshifting expert in the Union. Rumors like this spread fast, unfortunately. I'm your doctor so that you don't have to deal with a dozen other doctors poking and prodding you at once. Or reporters. They'll all have to go through me first."

"And you really don't know... why?"

"Not really. There's a little bit of historical information on this sort of thing, but it's basically urban legend. Very, very rarely, someone will die mid-shift, and their biology will mix between two forms. Sometimes, they'll have of the same scaling or mixing attributes you exhibit, but obviously they are dead, and you are not."

Vaya slightly delayed another spoonful of curry for a question. "Scaling and mixing? What's that?"

"It might be best to have you demonstrate. Can you put the Bladewyrm claw on with this hand?" He motioned to her left.

The barest thought and her left hand was melting into a claw. She stopped just past the wrist, abruptly realizing that she could slide the transition point up and down her arm.

"Right. So, this looks like a normal Bladewyrm front claw, right? Three fingers, one pseudo-thumb, shorter than human fingers. But your wrist joint and palm are still human, even with the scales. And the scales themselves—"

Vaya had another thought, and suddenly her hand was fully draconic, her wrist reshaping to support her weight instead of grasp tools. The curry was suddenly much less interesting than her own body.

"...fascinating. You have conscious control over that?"

"I'm learning this as you are, doc." A quick test revealed that yes, she did, her hand's flesh and bones reconfiguring towards whatever body plan she wished. "I guess? It's like... sliding it towards or away the other form. I don't have to do that mental push for it like normal shifting, it just sort of happens, like there's not a barrier for it."

"Amazing... how does that biology mesh?" Franklin seemed lost in thought for a few moments before getting back on track. "Right, scaling. See how your scales here are tiny, like you've shrunk the dragon form down to fit?"

"Huh. Oh, I think I can—" Her scales grew, re-tesselating as they increased to something closer to a non-shrunken Bladewyrm's scales. "—do that. Huh. I don't think I can control the pattern there, just size." Her hand blinked back to plain human.

"I feel like I'm going to be repeating this a lot in the near future, but, fascinating. Do you know if you can still shift normally?"

"I... think so? The little bump is still there, I can still feel my other shapes, it's just the barrier is so much thinner. And I don't think I had a high barrier before."

"Now that's interesting. Do you mind if I write some things down?"

"Go ahead." The doctor pulled a notebook out of his pocket and clicked a pen, scribbling what looked like incomprehensible gibberish inside.

"So, you knew what the shift barrier was before? You've only been transhuman for... two months, three months, right?"

"One month."

"Wow. Okay. How did you know your barrier was lower?"

"Uh, I can just sort of flow between forms as much as I want. Other people got kind of... tired, I guess? I didn't really have time to look into it, our sergeant just said it happened sometimes."

"Well, your sergeant was right. There's a distribution of how easy shifting is, sort of like a flattened exponential— well, the shape's not super important. Most people have about the same barrier thickness, which I'll loosely define as how many shifts they can do comfortably in a given time period. There's some sort of minimum there, since everyone can shift without too much trouble. But there's also some folks with a lighter barrier, less and less common the thinner it is."

"That tracks, I think. I wasn't the only one like me, but we didn't, I dunno, compare? One of my squadmates could do it too."

"It's not an empirical measurement, just self-reported, so the numbers are always a little fuzzy. Anyway, it's correlated to your personal experience of being transhuman. The less strongly you identify as any one specific form, the lower your shift barrier tends to be. And I suspect you are very strongly not some specific form."

Vaya laughed sardonically. "I guess nobody knows what I am, not even me." A new thought occurred to her as she worked on finishing off the curry while the doctor wrote. "When can I get a refresh, by the way? I only have two SIBs, and they're both kind of fucked. And my Shatterscale's a little broken."

Franklin looked up, a look of concern crossing his face. "A refresh would be a bad idea right now. We don't really know if your brain is still operating on the Hodgson model, so doing a Hodgson ritual on you now might wipe out your... well, whatever we're calling this. Or worse."

She decided to ignore the "or worse" for the moment. "You don't even have a name for it?"

"We have some theories with names, but it's your body. Or bodies, I suppose. You get to name it."

"Well, I don't have shit for ideas, so let's hear the theories."

He shrugged. "Sure. First theory is the lich theory. You died while shifting at the exact right moment, something prevented your consciousness from actually dissipating, and the Hodgson model broke because you're not alive in the specific ways the model cares about you being alive. Or at least you temporarily weren't."

"That's, uh."

"Yeah, I know. If it's any consolation, continuity of consciousness is already kind of a joke for shapeshifters anyway."

"Wait, what? How?"

"When you shift, your self is basically translated into a thaumaturgical construct and forcibly inserted into the brain of your target form. Your brains aren't kept in sync across all your forms, time only progresses for them when you actually inhabit them. If you ever see essies talking about how shifting kills you, that's what they mean."

"...does it?" Shifting certainly never felt like death. Quite the opposite, if anything.

"Not in any way that matters, no."

"Hopefully there are other theories?" The idea of being technically dead wasn't exactly comforting.

"Right, yes. The second is the amalgam theory. The Hodgson model works on the idea of a shapeshifter being a series of isolated forms, only inhabiting one at a time. The amalgam model has you existing as all your forms simultaneously, just hiding most of them, which is what lets you move bits and pieces around. That one's a little less clear on how you got like this in the first place, though."

"That one feels more correct, I guess? It's sort of how I've felt about being transhuman all along, anyway."

"Hm. There might be something there, but I'll save you from my baseless speculation until we can get some imaging done."

"Any more theories?"

"Just one. You died, some mote of old magic slithered into your skin, and it is currently puppeting you around." He held up a hand, interrupting Vaya's panicked exclamation, "We ruled that out. We might not understand ancient thaumaturgy, but we can detect it. You're still you."

The possibility that they had missed something was unpleasant to consider. Vaya decided to revisit an earlier topic, "You said that a reset could wipe this out, or worse. What's the, 'or worse' part of that?"

"You could die. In fact, we're pretty sure you would die. The Hodgson rituals all work on a specific model of shapeshifting, which doesn't seem to apply to you. Trying to move your mind around with the wrong model might just... well, delete it."

"And without resets... Am I just out of combat until you can fix me?" Vaya asked, bracing herself for an answer she really wouldn't like.

"Bluntly, until we know how to give you resets, the Army doesn't want you unless you can somehow regenerate. But since you're still using a dragon arm..."

Right. Transhuman soldiers used bodies the same way everyone else used ballistic plates. If she couldn't replace her metaphorical armor, she was just a walking corpse.

Dr. Franklin caught her dejected look. "Vaya. It's okay. You are singularly unique in recorded history. Your worth is more than just as a soldier."

Vaya avoided replying that she wasn't concerned about her worth. No, she was afraid she'd never get to feel her blood singing again as she ripped out a fascist's throat.

Two more bowls of curry later, and the two of them were headed to the imaging wing. Vaya kept trying out different combinations of shapes as they walked, hoping with some perverse glee that she might be able to freak out the doctor. Instead, she found that Dr. Franklin was practically overjoyed to watch her in action, and discovered a very quick method for squicking herself out: take any dragon form and apply human skin. After vowing to never repeat that particular abomination, she settled on the form she'd woken up as, just her plain SIB with Shatterscale-patterned arms.

"How much awareness of your body do you have when you're shifting like that?" Franklin asked as Vaya fiddled with her scales.

"Um. More than I used to, definitely. I don't think I can feel individual cells, but I can feel... systems, I guess? Like I could swap out my blood for draconic blood," and she did so, the transition happening almost without a thought, "and I can feel that it needs other changes to work, since I know that biology isn't compatible. But it just sort of happens without me having to think it all through? I wonder if I could force it to not—"

"I'd prefer if you didn't give yourself a novel blood disease," the doctor remarked as she attempted to switch blood without changing anything else. Something pushed against her, like the two were sympathetic somehow.

"...I don't think I can, actually. It's like... trying to curl only one finger without letting the others move?"

"Interesting. Hopefully that works for every way a novel combination of forms might kill you." They walked past a orderly's desk, and Vaya felt a strange combination of embarrassment and pride as he stared at her. Franklin interrupted her thoughts by stopping next to a room labeled, plainly, "IMAGING 2".

"In here. We're going to start with a TMRI scan. I'll warn you up front that we'll probably need to do this more than once, and probably under a few different scenarios. Shifting, awake, asleep, that sort of thing. Have you ever had an MRI before?"

"Maybe right before I converted? I had copper shrapnel in my brain."

"That was a CT. I mean before then, in your old life."

"No, then."

"Right. An MRI, and a TMRI, work by using some pretty insanely powerful magnetic fields. If you have anything in your body that responds to magnets, it'll literally rip them out of you. The main concern is iron. Since you can replace parts of yourself freely, there's a concern that you've shifted some piece of shrapnel back into yourself since the x-ray we gave you on the plane here."

Vaya gave that a thought, running a little self-inventory. "I could feel all the shrapnel before. Still can, actually, that body's still... kind of there. None of it's in this one."

"Good. We can give you another x-ray if you'd like to be certain, but I'll take your word for it. The second thing is that this is a T MRI, which means it uses very intense aetheric fields. If you've got any sort of charms or wards on you, it'll do the same thing to those that the magnets will to metal."

She shook her head. "None of those. I assume the shapeshifting isn't a problem?"

"No, same with your CCT. Just don't try to fight the scan, it'll force a shutdown so that it doesn't shred your skull."

"Comforting."

"I hope you're not claustrophobic. The other thing is that we need your head to remain as close to perfectly still as you can make it. We can't really sedate you since we're scanning your brain, and it helps if we can talk to you. Do you remember the neural vocoder they used during your conversion?"

"The thing that spoke for me?"

"Yes. We're going to put one of those on you. Don't move your jaw, just subvocalize."

"Got it. Do I need to take my clothes off?"

"Down to your underwear. Go ahead and lay down, the tech will come get you oriented properly."

Vaya did so, the act of stripping somehow more embarrassing when she knew the people watching were doing so out of scientific curiosity more than sexual excitement. The tech was blessedly silent, positioning her inside the great ring of the scanner and putting the vocoder on her neck without speaking.

A tinny voice exuded from her headrest: "Hello, Ms. Bhatavadekar. Can you hear me alright?"

Yes, she replied, making sure to not move her jaw.

"Good. I'm here with Dr. Mille, who I am physically restraining from bombarding you with questions that you've already answered. She's going to be running your scan."

Another voice, this time an older woman's. "I'll do my best. Do you have any questions for us? It'll take some time, and it's good to talk so we can see your brain activity."

That hadn't been an expected question. Um. What are your specialties? I assume the Army didn't give me the first doctor they found walking by.

"I feel like I might need to defend the honor of other doctors, but no, they did not," Franklin replied. "I'm a doctor of medical thaumaturgy, with a specialization in shapeshifting. Dr. Mille here is one of the world's foremost experts in neurology, again with a specialization in shapeshifting."

"Dr. Franklin tends to understate his own contributions," Dr. Mille countered. "He's responsible for the energy reductions that make Hodgson rituals possible without needing a resonator."

"Not purely," he objected, "I was on the team, but I'm in no way solely responsible for that. And even if I was, those solutions weren't particularly exotic, we were just the first to do them."

"Of course." Vaya could hear her eyes rolling over the shitty microphone. "Anyway, Ms. Bhatavadekar, you are in very good hands... huh."

Huh? Vaya asked.

"Huh indeed. Can you shift your... I don't know, anything below the waist?"

She slowly layered scales over her thighs, moving down towards her knees. Like this?

"Perfect, thank you. Can you keep shifting and unshifting that for a little bit?"

I think so.

"Thank you, dear." The speaker went silent, letting the room once again fill with the whirring of the scanner's machinery. Vaya kept fidgeting with her form, scales unfolding and refolding from nothingness over her legs for what felt like a few minutes.

Eventually, Dr. Mille's tinny voice spoke again, "You can stop now, thank you."

What was that about?

"You appear to have a novel neurological structure and associated thaumaturgical junctions between your parietal and frontal lobes. It's producing a very clear aetheric cascade out into the shiftspace between—"

"What Dr. Mille means," Franklin cut in, "is that we can see what's letting you do this."

That easily?

"Unexpectedly so. I didn't want to get your hopes down, but we were expecting the initial search to take at least a week. Instead we just got it as soon as the scanner started up. Um, can you shift normally for us?"

I don't have a spare human form. And I don't think a dragon will fit.

"Right, not without reconfiguring. Um, can you— ah, wait one, please." The mic cut off, leaving Vaya wondering what was going on in the observation booth. Eventually, Dr. Mille spoke again, "Okay, can you shift just your brain?"

Maybe? I think— it happened before she could really formalize that thought —roghfjfds oougfh. Ah, right. A dragon brain might not work with a vocoder designed for a human one.

"Wonderful. Can you shift something small again? We're going to repeat this process a few dozen times to make sure we can trace all the structures here."

And she had been getting so hopeful about being done quickly.

When they finally finished the scan, the sun was going down. Dr. Franklin deposited Vaya back at her room with a fresh bowl of curry ("they had extras," he'd said) and instructions to get some sleep. Both of the doctors seemed eager to be rid of her, or at least desperate to go geek out over the readings. Vaya couldn't say she had much experience with being "singularly unique in recorded history," but it was a bit much to have on her shoulders, especially when it meant that she was stuck with one ruined body and two damaged ones.

Vaya gently shook Citra awake. "Hey there."

"Bleurgh," she yawned, "my sleep cycle's going to be completely ruined now."

"Getting blown up will do that to you."

Citra smiled, "Yeah, I've heard. Docs figure anything out?"

"Not really, they had me shifting back and forth in a scanner for most of the day. It sounded like they made more progress than they expected to, at least."

"Can I see?"

"What, now that you're not freaking out?"

Citra fidgeted, "We were both kind of freaking out."

"Yeah, fair. I, uh, didn't expect...," she trailed off.

"Didn't expect to get new shapeshifting powers? My squadmate, the superhero."

Vaya scoffed. "Not quite. Doc says I can't do a reset until they're sure it won't delete my brain, so I'm running on fumes. I can't regenerate anything, it's just... I dunno, swapping and resizing and mixing stuff I already have." She shifted her skin to scales and back again, as much as a demonstration as it was absentminded fidgeting.

"That is insanely cool."

"Yeah. Kind of a personal dream, if they can get me able to reset. Not sure why the Army's so keen on replicating it though, it was practically the first thing Dr. Franklin said to me."

"You wanna stay unique?" Citra looked suprised. And a little jealous, Vaya noted.

"No, no, not that. Gods, I fuckin' hope I don't stay the only one. Just, I don't understand why the military cares, outside of scientific interest and getting me back in the fight. Like, it's not useful in combat, I'm not any more dangerous or durable than I already was."

Citra gave her a look. "Yes you are! You might not be more dangerous, but you can put every injury onto one form until it's totally shredded. You lost your arm, right? What if you got shot in the chest the next time? Just put the hole on the body without the arm."

"...I guess I didn't think about it like that."

"Something like a third of combat deaths are from people getting fatally wounded after running out of spares. The Union alone has lost millions of people so far. Reducing that by even a little is still hundreds of thousands of lives."

"Shit, you don't have to rub it in, I get it." Vaya sighed. "Why'd they send you back with me, anyway? Wasn't there still fighting?"

"Charlie got pulled off the line for resets before Odie broke. Alpha found you on their way to replace us, actually. Top sent me with your VTOL to make sure the docs would give you back."

"Damn, I slept through my first supersonic ride?"

"Seems like it was worth it," Citra replied. She detected that pang of jealousy again, "and certainly better than the alternative."

Vaya sat down beside her, gently pulling her into a hug. "Hey."

"Hey."

"They'll figure it out eventually. And when they do, they'll need someone to volunteer..."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Twelve days later.

Dr. Franklin knocked on the open door as he walked into Vaya's room, drawing her attention away from her novel.

"Is now a good time?"

"Sure. Not up to much."

"Well, I have good news, and I have more good news. For both you and Citra." Citra perked up at that, and he continued, "We finished running the simulation batch on the ritual candidates, and we actually know what you are now. And, we're pretty sure we can both reset you, and replicate you."

"Whoa, all at once?"

"I can walk you through the process, if you'd like."

"Um. Sure?"

Franklin grinned, clearly eager to talk about it. "So, we start off with a huge number of random reset ritual configurations that match with our theoretical models. In your case, about a million different ones, half lich model and half amalgam model. Then, the computer crunches the numbers and figures out which of those actually get close to the desired effect. Once we've got something that passes that first test, there's a whole second optimization step that makes the ritual efficient enough to actually perform. And that ends up being used as our model for what actually describes you, which makes computing the creation rituals relatively trivial."

"Huh," she replied. "I assumed there was more... I dunno, magic?"

The doctor laughed, "Magic at this level is just math, and trust me, there's plenty of both involved. But, your results! You're definitely following a variant of the amalgam model. Symbolically, you're all of your forms, all the time, but fortunately you aren't physically all of your forms all the time. Which explains why you have normal caloric needs and otherwise follow the normal rules for temporal progression."

"So I'm an... amalgam? Amalgamation?"

"Amalgam, yes. Unless you had something different in mind?"

"It's a little less of a mouthful than Bhatavadekar-style, I suppose."

"Indeed. The other good news is that the effect that causes amalgamation is entirely neurological, and happened to you because your brain got damaged in the exact right way shortly before you converted. The copper fragments stitched together some funky thaumaturgy in there when that ritual went off. Your recent near-death experience seems to have brought it into full prominence rather than creating it in the first place."

"Huh. That's good to know, but why is that good news?"

Citra interrupted, "Because neurological and thaumaturgical structures can be replicated with the Hodgson rituals, right?"

Dr. Franklin nodded. "Got it in one. Reproducing the active effect instead of the latent one in rituals ends up needing some pretty drastic modifications, but they'll work just fine with any of the regular Hodgson casting setups. And on any shapeshifter, amalgam or not."

Vaya exhaled, the stress of the last two weeks leaving her in an instant. "So I can finally reset."

"You can. We've got a resonator charging up now, if you'd like. But before you run off, I have one very important warning. For both of you, since I assume Ms. Kishori is going to try to kill me if I stop her from volunteering."

Citra grinned wickedly in response.

"You cannot, under any circumstances, use regular Hodgson rituals of any sort after amalgamation. You'll need to only use the amalgam-specific ones. We've got that in your digital file, so it won't be an issue for anything with your specs loaded in, but don't try to do one by hand off the internet until this all gets published and triple-checked. Regular Hodgsons will just delete your mind entirely. Got it?"

They both nodded.

"Okay. Let's go put you back together, shall we?"

Vaya was luxuriating in the feeling of having skin on all her fingertips again when Citra left the ritual chamber, smiling like a toddler that had just been handed the world's biggest lollipop.

"So, how'd it go?"

Citra answered by way of rippling her skin like rippling water, scales replacing skin before flicking back to normal. "I'm not sure, I might have to go in for a second round."

"Don't get too comfy, privates," Dr. Franklin said, standing from the chamber controls. "I've still got you two for the next forty-eight hours, and I intend to make the most of it."

"I guess there's no such thing as a free lunch, even here," Vaya replied.

"...have you been paying for food?"

"No," she laughed, "no, just a saying from my previous home. Hit me with every test you've got, I'm game for anything at this point."

"Anything?" Citra asked.

"Hm. Sure, anything."

"How about a round of sparring?" She shifted carbide claws onto her hand instead of fingers, "full contact, just how you like it."

Vaya grinned, and the doctor raised an eyebrow. "I suppose I'll go arrange a room."