Early in the morning, something was saying his name.
Josh had gone to bed before midnight for once. Yesterday had been three shopping carts, Rodey, and a whole move. He'd earned that sleep.
Luna, it turned out, was a morning person.
He hadn't known that. He was finding it out now, at close range, at volume.
The bed was finally big enough for both of them. There was space between them. No closeness this time.
She just leaned across it.
"Josh."
He wasn't a coffee person, so nothing was going to wake him up. Left alone, he'd have slept till two in the afternoon.
"Josh. Josh! Are you listening?" She shook his shoulder.
He wasn't listening. He could hear her going on and on, but none of it went in. Why was she nagging? No idea. Food, probably.
She didn't stop. In the end he got up just to make her stop.
✦ ✦ ✦
He washed his face. When he came out of the bathroom, he could finally understand her, and it was stupid.
"—so we should go through the whole thing together. Properly. Every room."
Josh stood there with a towel.
"We did that."
"When?"
"Last night. We walked into every room in this apartment. You opened the oven."
"That was looking."
"That's what going through it is."
"It isn't."
"Luna, there's four rooms." He hung the towel on the door. This apartment allowed him to do that, and he was still enjoying it. "It's not a museum. The awe's over. I did the awe last night. I stood in the kitchen and got emotional about the counter for a minute and now I'm done, and if we go and look at it again it's just going to be a counter."
"You're not understanding me."
"I really might not be."
So they sat down and talked it through properly, and then he understood.
She didn't want to look at the apartment. She wanted to map it.
Every room, every wall, every doorway, everything in relation to everything else, memorized: where the counter ends, how far the fridge is from the corner, what's on the second shelf and which way it faces.
"Why?"
"Because I don't always go and get things."
"Yeah," Josh said. "I've noticed."
"I reach." Her arm shot out across the room and came back. "And right now, to reach into a room I'm not in, I have to lean and look at where I'm putting it. Around the corner. Every time. Like a person feeling for a light switch."
"So look."
"It's slow, and it's ugly, and I've been doing it in a room the size of a wardrobe for a week, where everything was already within arm's reach of everything else." She put the hand down. "This place has corners."
"Okay," Josh said. "So walk around and learn it."
"I need you to be my eyes. Just for the first few times."
Josh looked at her.
Josh sighed.
"That's stupid," he said. "Just grow an eye on your hand."
✦ ✦ ✦
She looked at him.
Then she looked at her hand.
Then it started.
The skin on the back of her hand moved. It didn't break. It moved like something underneath it turning over. A line opened along the tendon and didn't bleed. It parted slowly, unhurried, wet at the edges, and went on parting, and rounded itself out into a socket, and the socket filled.
The white arrived first. Then the iris came up into it and took its time about the color. Then a lid folded out of the skin above, came down once, all the way, and lifted.
Josh watched every second of it and didn't blink.
He had drawn this. Four hundred times, easily.
The eye swiveled up and looked at her.
She looked back at it.
Then it turned in its socket and looked at Josh.
And Luna smiled. A mischievous smile. Josh had about a quarter of a second to see it coming before the hand left.
It came off the end of her arm at chest height and covered his entire face, and the impact took him off his feet and put him flat on the floor. He got out most of a syllable. The hand didn't adjust its grip. It picked him back up by the head, straight up, no leverage he could locate, his heels leaving the floor, and started moving, and the arm behind it kept getting longer to allow it, unspooling out of her shoulder in a smooth unhurried feed, like rope going over a side.
He was carried, by the face, across his own apartment.
The hand put him down on the bed. Carefully, actually. It set him down and made a small correction so he was on the pillow instead of next to it, and then it let go and lifted away from his face, and the room came back.
A mouth opened in the palm.
Then the arm withdrew, not all the way to her, just out through the bedroom door, unhurried, hand first, still going. He heard it turn the corner without anything hitting the corner.
Then he heard the kitchen.
A cupboard. Then a different cupboard. Then something ceramic being set down harder than it needed to be, and a drawer coming out to the end of its rail, and a run of small noises going down the counter.
It sounded like it was tearing the kitchen apart. But at least the hand could see now.
(Luna:She was confused. Grow an eye on her hand? How could he suggest something like that with a straight face?)
Josh lay where he'd been put, face still damp, a red mark across it. He ignored all of it. She was leaving him alone, and that almost never happened.
He went back to sleep.
✦ ✦ ✦
It was a good, long sleep.
His phone got him out of it.
It wasn't one buzz. It was a run of them, a stack, the phone going off against the mattress at intervals, a thing that had been happening for a while and had only just reached him.
He got it in front of his face and squinted.
They were worried.
That was the tone. Not one of them was angry. He scrolled and it kept being true.
hey, you good?
is everything okay sorry if this is weird but it's been a while
And one from someone who had clearly gone and checked, and reported back to the others that he hadn't posted anywhere else either.
(A reader:Six days. He never misses six days. Something has happened to him.)
Six days.
He sat up on the edge of the bed and counted. The page had been four days late when he got over the fever. The mart and the move made five. Today made six.
He'd wanted the yelling. You can plan around yelling. Instead they'd gone and got concerned, and that was somehow the worst available option, because there's no version of the reply where you come out of it well. Sorry, I was sick.Sorry, I moved.Sorry, there's a girl here now.
He didn't answer any of them.
He sat down at the desk instead, opened the file, and started the page.
And it was wrong.
Nothing was off. Every line went where he put it, the way it had for six years.
It just wasn't right.
✦ ✦ ✦
He kept at it for a while. The page wasn't bad. Every line was clean and correct, and it still felt wrong, and he couldn't figure out why.
He found it on the second figure's arm.
He'd made it up.
Six years, sixteen hundred chapters, and he had made up every frame of it, because he'd never had anything real to look at.
He'd taken an arm and drawn more of it. That was his entire theory of what a shapeshifter does. The same arm, further.
And it isn't. He'd seen it now. It comes apart. It goes finer, and it travels, and the traveling has a speed, and the speed is slow, and every part of it is wet.
He'd learned that on the first night and had decided it was a mistake: one detail, the fingers, fix the fingers and carry on. He'd fixed the fingers. He'd been very pleased with himself about the fingers.
It wasn't the fingers.
He put the pen down.
It wasn't that he didn't want to draw the fake one. He'd have been delighted to draw the fake one. The fake one paid his loans. He couldn't do it. His hand put a line down and something behind his eyes said no, that isn't what it does, and there was no arguing with it, because he had been in the room. Six years of getting away with it, ended by one week of standing next to the real thing.
Which meant his reference was in the living room, on her phone.
✦ ✦ ✦
He opened the door and stopped in it.
There were three arms on the floor.
Long ones, long past any length that had a reason, laid out across the boards in three directions. One ran into the kitchen and around the counter and out of sight. One went the length of the wall to the far corner. One came almost to his feet, palm up, fingers loosely curled.
None of them moved. They lay there like they were dead.
One of them was holding a spoon.
He stepped over the nearest one, put a foot down carefully between the other two, and crossed his own living room like a guy walking through a cable run.
Luna was on the couch, in a shape.
Her hips were on the seat. Her back went backward over the armrest from there, so her shoulders had ended up lower than her hips, and her head had come back up off that in a way that put her chin somewhere above her sternum and her neck at an angle you could have measured with a protractor. One leg was straight up the wall. The other one was folded under something that Josh decided not to identify.
Something in the middle of her back was making a small sound every few seconds. A tick, like a pipe cooling.
Her phone was on the floor, a few feet away, face up. One finger was going down to it, one, longer than the rest of them, run out across the gap, and sliding up the screen at intervals, with no other part of her taking any interest.
"Won't you get muscle cramps?"
"Nah." The finger went up the screen. "Never had it. It's fine."
"Right." Josh stayed where he was. "Okay. Yeah."
He waited out one more tick from her back.
"Hey. I need your help. Come with me."
And then she came back together, and Josh made the mistake of watching all of it.
The arms came home first. The one at the kitchen counter started to move. Not to retract, not at first; to shorten, evenly, along its entire length at once, every part of it feeding back toward her shoulder at the same unhurried rate. Where it crossed the floorboards it made a low dry sound of skin sliding on wood, and the sound went on for a while.
Where it arrived at her shoulder there was nothing to see. No seam, no fold, no work. The material simply reached her and was taken in, the way water is taken in by more water.
The second one followed. The third came last, the one with the spoon. The hand set the spoon down on the floor first, unhurried, and then went.
It took the better part of a minute, all three of them traveling at walking pace, while she finished reading whatever she was reading.
Then she did her back.
She came up off the armrest by unbending, one section at a time, from the base of the spine to the neck. Each vertebra arrived in line and stayed there, the whole column reassembling itself in order under the skin, and he could see every stage of it happen and could have put his finger on where it had gotten to at any moment. The ticking stopped somewhere in the middle. Her chest rose as her back straightened, and her shirt pulled tight across her breasts. Her shoulders came around and squared. Her neck shortened and settled. Her leg came off the wall.
Then she stood up and walked over to him, and there was nothing left to look at. Ordinary height, ordinary width. A girl crossing a room.
Josh was already hard.
It was hard to stay cool. He turned around fast and went into the bedroom ahead of her, so she wouldn't see.
✦ ✦ ✦
"So." He got to the desk and turned around. "Starting today. You're posing for me."
"Ugh." She stopped in the doorway. "Why me? Why do I have to do this?"
"Dude." He put a hand at the monitor. "I draw shapeshifters. You're a shapeshifter. I need the real reference."
"What do I get from this?"
Josh couldn't believe it. What do you mean, what do you get out of this? What more do you want?
"I'm already giving you food and housing!"
"I'm responsible for getting us this apartment," Luna said. "And I carry the food home."
"And all of it comes out of my bank account." He didn't shout it, but it went up. "I'm serious. We've got money problems."
"Weren't you making ten grand a month?" She actually frowned at that. "How do we have money problems?"
"Because you're eating double that. Every month." He turned his phone around and showed her the spreadsheet.
ItemPer monthHer food$18,334.85His payout$10,186.42"It doesn't add up. It doesn't come near adding up. And unless we work something out, you're going to start eating into my savings account."
Luna went quiet.
"So my eating is a problem?"
Josh opened his mouth.
"You could've said so." No complaint in it anywhere, which made it worse. "I would eat less."
That wasn't where Josh wanted this to go.
"Hey. Hey, hey, hey." He came off the desk. "No. Nobody's — you don't need to starve yourself. That's not the plan. That was never the plan."
"You said—"
"I said the numbers don't work. There's two ways to fix that. You eat less, or we earn more." He was talking fast now. "We earn more. That's why I need you. Just be my reference for now. That's it."
Luna looked at him for a second.
"Okay," she said. "If you say so."
Then a pause.
"Do I have to be naked?"
Of everything that had happened to Josh since a girl knocked on his door, that was the sentence that did the most damage.
Because there was nothing in it. It wasn't a challenge and it wasn't a joke. It was the tone of asking whether to take your shoes off.
Holy fuck. She has to be naked. Clothes don't change shape. If he drew her in clothes, he'd be putting the fake right back in.
He told himself he'd already seen her naked a few times. It didn't help. It was still too much.
"No!" It came out too loud. "Fine. Clothes on. I'll change the story for this."
"Don't need to hold back." She shrugged. "I got no problems with no clothes."
"No. No, it's fine." He sat down and pulled the chair in. "Let's start small. Even I'd need some time to get settled."
"Sure. Go ahead." She came into the room properly. "So..... what do you need?"
"Two extra arms," Josh said. "Just that. That's plenty."
✦ ✦ ✦
She turned her back to him and did it.
Two points level with the tops of her shoulder blades rose. Slowly. They came up under the skin as a matched pair of smooth swellings with no change in the surface at all: no seam, no split, the skin simply having more underneath it and accommodating, going tight, and then going faintly shiny where it went tight.
They kept coming. They came up until they stopped being swellings and started being shoulders, and by then the skin over the top of each one had gone thin enough to show what was under it.
Then they drew.
Each arm came out of its own mound and kept coming: the upper arm first, then the length of it, then an elbow assembling itself as it arrived, then the forearm, then a wrist, then a hand with the fingers still fused and rounded off at the ends. It never once stopped moving and it never once hurried, and there was no point at which he could have said now it's out.
The fingers came apart last. They separated from each other along their lengths, one seam at a time, unhurried, and then both hands hung there and flexed once, and were hands.
Then the bases moved.
Josh was not ready for that. Both new shoulder joints started traveling, down out of her back and around, sliding under the skin toward her ribs. He could follow them the entire way. The skin over her flank lifted into a moving shape and the shape crossed her side at a walking pace, and everything it went through reorganized behind it and lay flat again, and the arm hanging off it swung a little the whole time, the way an arm hangs off a person who's walking.
They came to a stop level with the bottom of her ribcage, one to a side. Settled. Set.
Then she rolled all four shoulders at once, testing them, and looked back over her shoulder at him.
Josh was already hard.
"Great," he said. "Now get into a sexy pose."