4. Thanks For The Soup (Patreon)

"Can you run?" Emily suddenly asks me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…Wait, did I kill a person?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can't help but feel a bit vindicated by that brutal irony before I suddenly pass out.

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

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

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

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

I scowl but do as she says, swallowing the rest of the energy bar as quickly as possible. Ugh, that thing is awful! She immediately hands me another. Cruelty! Betrayal!

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

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

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

My body is exactly as healthy as Lia's was, but I still take another bite. It's wretched. I want to complain, to whine, to lament in confusion of how normal people ever survive with having to feel and taste things all the time. But I don't. That wouldn't really be helping the situation, and it's obvious Emily is on edge. I can't do anything to make that worse.

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

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

I freeze. What? What the fuck? What did I do wrong? Oh, shit, yeah. I can see how that sounds like a probing compliment. Plus it wasn't really what I was thinking about, so it maybe sounded a bit fake. I need to get better at that.

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

She gives me a considering look for a moment, frowns, and stares a bit longer. Then she snorts in amusement.

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

Okay, now I'm really worried about her.

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

"Just eat and get dressed," she insists. "I think we're pretty safe now, but I still want to get out from behind enemy lines as soon as we can."

Ugh. Again, she's not wrong. I just hate leaving it like this. It's frustrating feeling like I don't understand her anymore. Her reactions to everything have completely stopped making sense, and I hate that. I need to understand her. Understanding people is what I do. It's the only skill I have to prevent disaster with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do I really need it?" I whine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then why were you dating her?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you still hungry?" Emily asks.

"I…"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We carefully exit the house, packing as much travel-worthy food as we can into a backpack so I can munch on the go. As much as I hate the experience of flavor and texture, the energy bars do a decent job of calming that jittery need inside me. I still can't stomach more than a couple.

We hurry our way ever-further from the scar, Emily still choosing our route via some incomprehensible method she will not explain. I'll give her this, though: it works. We hear a bit of stomping from time to time, but the next couple hours of desperate travel are free from alien attacks.

And then, suddenly, I feel it. At first it's indistinguishable from the heavy haze of sensation constantly assaulting every inch of my body, but the atmosphere changes so completely and so abruptly it forces me to take notice. I panic at first, assuming nothing this drastic could be good, but then I realize what it is I'm feeling.

The pressure from the Queen is gone.

I look back, gazing at that ever-splitting mass of flesh that now forms a new mountain on the horizon. The skyline of Chicago is no longer a demonstration of human achievement, but instead a mere backdrop to the shifting, dividing, conquering mass that is the alien Queen. The skyscrapers are theirs, now. This whole area is theirs. We lost before even getting a chance to fight back.

And that all really sucks, don't get me wrong, but the sight of it is still a relief because it is a testament to what Emily and I have just successfully escaped. The need to cut is finally gone.

"What's up?" Emily asks.

"We're out of range," I say. "At least, I think so. I don't feel the Queen's power anymore."

"Oh! Are you sure?" she brightens up. "That's amazing! We should be getting close to the defensive line, in that case!"

"Yeah," I agree, the giddiness already starting to fade. "Not much further now."

But what does that mean? What does freedom and safety mean, with my foster family dead and my future destroyed? I'm too old to get another family, but I can't take care of myself alone with all my… wait. I can take care of myself alone now. I mean, hypothetically. I'm less in need of someone who's always close enough to help me to my feet if I fall, but I'm not exactly a treasure trove of independent skills, and that's the important stuff, not my body. I've either been uninterested or straight-up unable to learn the sort of stuff that my body makes problematic but would be really helpful on my own. How can you expect me to cook when I can't taste? Not to mention how horribly dangerous cooking is for someone who can't feel external injuries. I could get seriously messed up by boiling water or oil and not even know it.

Though I guess I'm still missing the real problem: I have powers. All this 'taking care of myself' business is somewhat irrelevant when the military is going to be taking care of me whether I like it or not. I just got out of the hell of being drafted, but there's no escape now.

Not unless I lie.

"You… said that Lia had a combat exemption?" I awkwardly bring up.

"Yup," Emily nods. "Donation-based. Money is as important as manpower, after all."

We're still holding hands, despite the fact that I don't feel the Queen anymore. It's… probably prudent. Maybe there are other superpowers around that I can't feel. Who knows.

"You can just buy your way out of military service, huh?" I frown.

"Only if you're rich enough," she shrugs. "It doesn't get you out of serving if you have powers, of course, but… I don't think anyone has to know."

She squeezes my hand a little tighter, sending a tingling feeling all the way up my arm.

"They aren't going to be able to tell I'm not her?" I ask. "I'm a pretty decent actor, but…"

"I know you are," Emily grins. "You're like me that way. I think it'll work out well for both of us, Lia."

I scowl. I hate that name. But she's got a point. I can't be myself anymore, no matter how hard I try. So if I want to avoid fighting, I need to be Lia.

"The military is going to be pissed if they find out I'm lying, right?"

"Oh yeah," Emily nods. "It'll be bad. Like, they'll still train you and use you and stuff rather than put you in jail, but your deployments will be hell."

"How the heck am I supposed to prove that I'm Lia, though?"

"The same way Lia proves that she's Lia, duh," Emily says, and then waves a chunky leather square in front of my face.

I gape as she drops it into my hand, opening it up with mounting dread. Yep. This is Lia's wallet. Her driver's license, her credit cards… everything.

"How did you… when did you…?" I stammer, and Emily laughs.

"Let's just say I know a good opportunity when I see one," she grins, and there's something so remarkably happy, so playfully teasing in her smile that I almost go along with it, letting myself get swept up by the strange, fluttery feeling in my chest that just wants to do whatever she asks me to do. But I catch myself, pin a mental warning for whatever part of Lia that is, and pay some fucking attention to the subtler signs.

She's got the voice down, and the smile. Her face is almost spot-on. But there's tension in her jaw, and when I follow it with my eyes it's obvious how it spreads everywhere, down the neck, through the shoulders, into every step she takes. Emily is stressed to hell and back, defaulting to some false front.

…This is how she's used to acting with Lia, isn't it? No matter how freaked out she is, she puts on a smile. That's the Emily I know.

"Stop it," I growl. She blinks in surprise, her eyes flicking back and forth for a moment.

"Sorry," she mutters, shrinking in on herself in an instant. Too fast. Too practiced. Fake.

"I said stop," I insist. "You're still putting on a front. What are you really thinking about, Emily?"

"Look, I just really need you on board with this, okay?" she groans. "You've gotta be all-in, or I lose my ticket out. And I know you hate the idea of being Lia, so…"

I scowl, still struggling to get a read on her. I've always been good at vibechecking people, since that's a pretty important skill for interpersonal crisis management. I can't play therapist for somebody if I don't even know when they need help. It's a skill I've been honing my entire life, yet I never would have noticed that there's something up with Emily if not for all the suspicious crap she did to keep us alive. Now that I know to look for it, there's obviously something there, but I have no idea what it could be. God I want to pick it open and figure it out.

…But that's not what's important in the immediate sense. In the immediate sense we simply aren't safe, and I'm not going to be safe when we return to allied-controlled territory either, unless you think 'being forced into military service against a deadly foe' counts as safe. (I don't.) So do I have any options, beyond pretending to be Lia?

The obvious answer is no, unless I figure out how to stop looking like Lia. But even if I steal a different identity, it won't matter because most people have to sign up for the military anyway. I could copy a body that's too old for military service maybe, but not before returning to human territory and certainly not without somebody wondering why there are two of whoever I copy all of a sudden.

The other option is basically to be a rogue person with powers. Most people call them 'supervillains,' because it's funny comic book shlock and obviously anybody that doesn't want to assist our glorious military with the defense of the human race is automatically a villain. And there's not much point differentiating between them anyway, because no matter how nice they are the official response to them is the same: fall in line and follow orders, or be forced to. …Or perish, I guess. The military, being the military, is also pretty good at killing people.

This isn't really an option for me, I think. Staying ahead of the government requires serious skill or serious power, and I don't have either. I can probably hide pretty well, but for what? Would that be a better life in any measurable way? So that's that. I can either go along with Emily's plan and help her out, or I can consign myself to fighting aliens until the day I die. No matter how repulsive the idea of having to be Lia is, the answer is pretty obvious.

"It's fine," I tell Emily. "I'm in."

"Really?" she beams.

"Yeah," I nod, pocketing the wallet. "It's better than death, and I get to help you out. I may as well."

Again, her expression flashes through something complicated before she settles on a fake smile.

"Thanks, Julietta," she says.

"Yeah, that's not working on me, Emily," I tell her. "Not anymore."

"But you still want to help me, right?" she presses, bumping her shoulder into mine.

"Of course I do," I nod. "I'd be a hypocrite to be offended by someone who says one thing and thinks another."

She laughs at that.

"In that case… thanks, Lia," she smiles, this time and the way she uses that name is so natural it makes me shudder. But I guess I'd better get used to it.

"You're welcome," I sigh, and we keep moving.

Eventually, the buildings start to thin out. We're nearly out of the suburbs, and soon we'll be entirely out of anything that could be called a town. It's at that point, out in the open, that I expect to finally run into the military. And I turn out to be right, but not in the way I expected.

The small collection of helicopters near the ground and the even smaller collection of jets high up into the sky does indeed indicate where the military's defensive line against the soon-to-be-named Chicago Incursion is set up, but when we actually get the ground troops in view, 'defensive line' starts to sound like a misnomer. In reality, it's only comparatively small collections of troops, mainly deployed on the major roads out of the incursion zone. We could very easily just avoid them entirely and walk right on past, though the visibility is clear enough that they'd certainly notice us.

"Is this really all the troops they could spare?" I ask aloud, frowning. "Chicago is one of the major cities we had left, and it's next to the Great Lakes. Isn't this kind of a huge deal?"

"Yeah, but what are they gonna do?" Emily asks. "Drive an entire tank battalion into range of that Queen and get them all instantly destroyed? Amass a thick defensive line that an Angel or two could walk right through without super support? There's nothing they can do until they know what this enemy can do and how to stop it, and there's no sense giving them free targets in the meantime."

Hmm. I guess that's a decent point.

"Well, let's go say hi to the troops, then," I sigh. "Wait, I'm not covered in alien blood, am I? That'd be suspicious."

"No, the acid cleaned it off of you," Emily answers. "I was covered in alien blood, but I cleaned most of it while you were unconscious. We should be fine."

Ah, acid. So very good at cleaning things off of Juliettas. That smell is definitely going to haunt my nightmares.

"Are we gonna get in trouble for looting that house?" I ask.

"I doubt it?" Emily smirks. "But I won't tell anyone if you won't, Lia."

I refrain from wincing this time. Because I am Lia, a perfectly normal and powerless girl with too much money and not enough brain cells.

"Deal," I agree, and we head for the closest collection of military men. They spot us pretty soon, motioning us towards them and chatting into their radios and sending a small squad out to come grab us. At first I'm worried that I'll screw things up, that they'll get suspicious about two teenage girls emerging alone from enemy territory, that they'll figure out I'm secretly a super powerful eldritch-brained idiot who looked directly at an incursion scar until blood came out of every orifice on my face simultaneously. But then I forget how walking without a cane works for a second and fall on my face, so I start to suspect they'll think I'm just a normal idiot instead.

Besides, Emily and I don't have to fake being exhausted and completely over our heads, so when the squad reaches us and hands us water bottles and tells us we're safe and everything is going to be okay, we don't have to fake the tears either. I am so, so terrified of whatever fucked-up future I'm going to be stuck with now, but I'll have a future. I lived. We made it.

Just two of us, but we made it. Despite the death, despite the pain, despite losing my body and my family and my future and everything.

Things get a little blurry for a while after that. For all I tend to not have nice things to say about the military, I have to admit these guys are trained pretty well for dealing with people in shock. The next thing I know, I'm sitting in the back of one of those military vans where all the seats face the center with a blanket around my shoulders and some kind of warm drink in my hands, a uniformed man calmly asking me if I can tell him how many fingers he's holding up. I blink at him a few times, slowly processing the question, before I finally answer.

"Two," I say, taking an automatic sip of the drink in my hands. I flinch and nearly drop it, not having expected the taste.

"Yeah, that's right," he says. "Can you tell me your name?"

I open my mouth to answer, then remember I need to lie. Even in shock, it's not hard to remember to lie.

"...Lia," I say.

"Okay, Lia," he says. "We're taking you to the refugee station, alright? You made it. You're gonna be just fine."

Ha. Not likely. I nod anyway.

"Thank you," I croak, taking another sip of whatever-this-is. The flavor is still a surprise, but it's not awful like I expected. I glance down at the chunky, yellowish liquid and take a moment to realize that this isn't a drink after all. It's chicken noodle soup. They just put it in a cup for some reason.

Huh. Chicken noodle soup? I would have assumed it tasted awful, since you're supposed to eat it when you're sick. But I kinda like it. I take another sip, catching a piece of chicken in my mouth as well. It tastes a bit different from the broth, blander in a way that's somehow bad and with a more distracting texture. I stick to avoiding the chicken chunks as I continue to drink.

I finish the soup right before the van comes to a stop, leaving only a sludge of chicken at the bottom. The noodles were alright; a bit slimy and firm in ways that grossed me out a little, but generally inoffensive. I really liked the vegetables, though. I didn't even need to chew them; just pressing them lightly between my tongue and the roof of my mouth made them squish into paste, each bursting with an individual flavor. Carrots are the best, I think. I wonder if they'd still be good if they weren't absolutely drowning in chicken broth.

It's weird. Everything is so weird. Sensation is still overwhelming, but now that I don't have anything else I really need to focus on, I can just… let it be. If the concept of flavor wants to overwhelm my thoughts, well, that's better than whatever else might be overwhelming my thoughts right now, as long as the flavor is good.

And it is, I've decided. Despite the chicken, I think I like chicken noodle soup. What a weird thing to be able to have an opinion on.

"Hey there, you good to get up?" the military guy from earlier asks me, holding out his hand.

"Huh?" I blink. "Oh, yeah. Sorry."

I take his gloved hand and still almost fall, ironically surprised at how quickly and easily I end up rising to my feet. That's right, Julietta! You can walk without a cane, now. You can taste things. You can be everything you ever wanted to be, as long as you aren't yourself.

Lucky you.

I take a deep breath and let the soldier lead me out of the van, Emily following after me as we step out into… the parking lot of a decently-sized building in a perfectly normal city. I'm a little stunned, but I'm not sure what I expected. A small sign next to the building reads 'St. Joseph Missions Women’s Shelter.' Oh. It's a place for homeless women. That… makes sense, yeah.

"Where are we, exactly?" I ask dumbly.

"Fort Wayne, Indiana," he says. Oh. That's like, three hours away by car, isn't it? Maybe two from how long Emily and I were running. On one hand, that's way longer of a drive than I thought we took. I was really out of it, I guess. But on the other hand, that's way too close for comfort to everything I just experienced. I look West, straining to see Chicago's skyline overtaken by otherworldly flesh, but I don't see a hint of it. Even the great tear in the sky is beyond my view, though I suppose if it's really been that long since the Queen appeared it might be closed by now. Still, though.

"Isn't that pretty close?" I ask.

"It's safe," he promises me. "Now I'm going to take you in here and they're going to set you up with a place to stay, alright?"

I struggle to find a response, but Emily grabs my hand in two of hers, giving me a nod when I look her way. God, she looks exhausted. I guess I probably do too.

"Alright," I say, and follow the soldier into the building. "Hey, um, what's your name?"

"David," he says, and though most of his face is covered by a helmet I can still tell he smiles. "Lance Corporal David McMullen."

Hmm. Yeah. I'll remember that. He's been good to us.

"Thanks for the soup, David," I say, trying my best to return the smile.

"Just doing my job, ma'am," he says, though he speaks the cliché with such a lighthearted joy that it's clear he knows it's a cliché. I give him an obligatory chuckle, and he happily leads us into the homeless center. There are a couple more military people inside, but they're just in service dress, not combat gear, chatting to each other behind a desk. They react with surprise when we walk in, but David is the one to salute to them so I guess at least one of them is higher rank than whatever the fuck a Lance Corporal is.

"Two Chicago survivors, collected at incursion-post-four-hours, designated for assessment and rest at this location, ma'am," he says.

The woman behind the desk lazily returns the salute, and David just walks out, leaving us inside. The other uniformed woman also departs into another room as the officer gestures for Emily and I to sit down across from her. We do.

"Can I get you two anything?" she asks. "Water, food? There's a bathroom to your left, if you need it."

"I'm fine," Emily insists.

I wrinkle my nose. I'm still weirdly hungry, and I definitely need to go to the bathroom, but I'm not really looking forward to doing that without being numb for the first time so I shake my head as well.

"Alright then," the officer nods. "Either of you let me know if you need us to take a break, alright? I know what it's like out there. But for now, could I get your full names and birth dates for me?"

Wait. Fuck. As Emily starts rattling off her information, I quickly realize that I don't know Lia's last name, let alone her birthday. No, no wait. This is fine, I can roll with this. I pull Lia's wallet out of my pocket and fish out her driver's license. Lia Morgan, born July 18th, 2038. Huh, I guess 'Lia' isn't actually short for anything. I commit the information to memory, and when it comes my turn to tell her my information I just hand her the license instead of speaking, since pulling out my own driver's license just to read her the information on it would be a weird fucking thing to do.

"Ah, thank you," the officer says, taking the card and typing the information into her computer. "Alright, I've got some good news for both of you. Lia, your parents are confirmed alive in one of our shelters. Emily, we don't yet have information on most of your family, but I do have a 'Peter Edwards' marked as your… brother?"

What? Peter's alive? That dick must have managed to hitchhike with someone after abandoning us. I guess I can't be too mad; if we all went with him, no car would have stopped for a group that big.

"Oh," Emily says softly. "Well, that's something, I guess. You can go ahead and mark the rest of my siblings as dead, though."

Andre, Max, and of course, Julietta. All dead. I swallow, sick to my stomach at the realization that my own 'death' hurts me more than the real deaths of my foster brothers. God, I'm such a selfish bitch.

"I see," the officer says. "I'm sorry for your loss."

It's so practiced, so emotionless. I wonder how many times she's had to say those words today. I can't help but feel a kinship for her, at that thought.

"We'll let your families know you're alive," she continues, "but it's unlikely we'll be able to reunite you until tomorrow. Please be patient, and you'll see them soon."

"Thank you," Emily says as the officer hands me Lia's license back. "We won't bother you about it."

"Yeah," I agree, grabbing the little plastic card and accidentally brushing my fingers against the other woman's for a split second, which—

Oh. Oh, wow, I never thought the difference between two humans would be this striking. My senses spark up her arm, soaking in information at speeds far beyond my first two templates. This woman has completely different phenotypes and completely different practical expressions than Lia, differing not just in genetics but in age, fitness, strain, stress, damage, repair, and microbiome. While both Lia's and this woman's bodies are well-optimized for high-calorie, high-endurance lifestyles, the specific way each of them have developed over their lives speaks to completely different optimizations; the officer has a lot more raw physical strength, especially upper body strength, with a density of shoulder and arm muscles that Lia can't even begin to compare to. Lia, conversely, has less cellular degradation and fewer signs of suboptimal repair and microscarring, leading to a less powerful but overall less wasteful body.

Given the inherent similarities between them, though, it doesn't seem terribly difficult to combine the best features of both.

The difference in muscular density won't even require manipulating Lia's genetic structure; her own cells can simply be shifted into a configuration more like the new template. We can keep the skin color, the general body plan, and most other external features, though we can also partially adapt the other face since I hate this face I don't want Lia's face I'm not her I'm NOT—

"Lia!" Emily snaps, snapping my attention back to reality, where things are… different. Like everything is a very slightly different color. My skin feels wrong, and when I look down at my hands I can see the colors writhing between light and dark, shifting like the shadow of a tree in a windstorm.

I look up, into the eyes of the military officer now giving me a very different expression.

"Well," she says, "that changes things. I'm going to have to call some people."

Fuck. That plan sure didn't last long.