I sat there, listening to the clicking sounds as my face bones rubbed against each other, Nell making minute adjustments as she slowly changed my face to the Crowman’s.
“I kinda hate this,” I murmured, trying not to move despite every instinct inside me screaming that I needed to get away.
“Why?” Nell asked, frowning in concentration.
“Isn’t it just natural to not want a part of your identity erased?”
“Hmm. I guess so. That’s not how I see you though.”
I watched the others. Graham was talking on the phone with Sullivan. Terry was crouched next to the sleeping Crowman, speaking with Zola. AJ was leaning on the shoulders of Vanessa and Bailey as they poured over the laptop, chatting energetically.
A bone slid past another. Click.
“How do you see me?” I asked.
“I’ve told you before how my sixth sense is like a weird mix of different sensations, right? Like seeing, hearing, and feeling all at once. It doesn’t just turn off when I’m not focused on it. It’s always present, overlaid on reality. When I was really young, I thought it was how everyone saw the world. I got better at differentiating, but you’re on another level. I can sense it now, with way more detail than any other living thing…”
She reached across and touched my cheek bone, moving it beneath my skin. “A whole world that you can’t see. Living inside you.” She quickly withdrew her hand and I felt her embarrassment. “It’s easy to get caught up in it. So I don’t think of your face as particularly precious. You could change into anything and I would still see you.”
My heart felt funny, sitting on the wrong side of my chest, where Nell had made it. I thought about what it represented. A second chance. To be something different. Something that could break away from the wrongness that I’d always been trapped by.
“I need to keep learning,” I finally said. “About all this Shaping stuff. Since minute one I’ve felt like it was the key to something important to me.”
“Then be quiet and focus on how it feels,” Nell said.
I obeyed. Right. It was possible for me to replicate what Nell showed me. It would take time, practice, but I could do it. So I sat in the uncomfortable feeling. I could feel the connection between Nell’s emotional pulses and her intent, how it was Shaping me. After a while, the physical movement of the bones and tendons in my face and her Shaping force were intermingled, impossible to tell one from the other. And it didn’t feel so bad anymore.
“Okay.”
My eyes fluttered open.
Nell examined her work. “All done.”
The feeling of wrongness returned a thousand times worse. I could feel the way my eyelids glided across the orbs. The way the air whistled through my nose when I breathed out. Even just touching my teeth together, it was all wrong.
Terry came over, his eyebrows shooting up as he saw the finished work. “Bravo,” he said, clapping slowly. “Very well done. Although he looks a little surprised.”
“Relax your muscles, Nick,” Nell said.
“I don’t think I know how,” I responded. My voice had changed too, although it didn’t sound like the Crowman’s to me. It took me a few long minutes to find the resting position of my new face muscles.
“Perfect,” Terry said giddily, like a kid with new toys. “I’ll teach you a few phrases and you’ll be on your way.” He handed me the Crowman’s long coat.
“Does it look natural?” I asked as I slipped it on. “It feels like I’m wearing a mask. A really, really tight mask.”
One of the crows flew at me. I flinched, but it just landed on my shoulder, cocking its head curiously.
Terry chuckled. “Is that a good enough answer?”
He then got me to repeat a few phrases back to him, making corrections on my pronunciation. Nell had swelled up my lip and bloodied it a bit to make the inevitable mispronunciation easier to miss. I shouldn’t have thought that part was any stranger than the rest, but the fact that Nell could make me bleed whenever she wanted to was a thought I hadn’t fully realized in my head until now. In an alternate world, one where she hated me, Nell could have crumpled me up into a ball and tossed me away. That made me shiver.
Terry snapped his fingers, getting me to focus. “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” he explained. “Because it’ll never be how he would actually say it. Instead, we cover it up with appearing fatigued, muttering angrily, looking too busy to bother. Remember how we did it during the recruitment. Move fast, be authoritative.”
Graham patted me on the shoulder, still on the phone. He gave me a thumbs up.
I took a deep breath. It rattled strangely in my lungs.
“You got this,” AJ said, raising up his hand for a high five.
I patted it gently.
Nell gave me a nod. There were no words of encouragement for her to say. She had imbued her feelings into me for the last five minutes.
“We will clean up here and we will come running if things get hairy,” Zola said seriously. “But I think it will go off without a hitch. Every cloud has its day.”
I descended the stairs, wondering what that even meant. My movements felt stiff, like a mannequin moving its legs for the first time. Nell had even shortened my spine and limbs to match that of the Crowman. None of this had been painful, in the strange way the Shaping didn’t seem to activate my nervous system. It almost made it feel worse, like my body didn’t think there was anything wrong with what just happened to it.
My eyes were taking longer to adjust to the darkness than I was used to. I was focused so heavily on making sure my feet found the way beneath me that I almost ran into something when the stairs stopped going down. Squinting at it, it finally clicked what I was looking at.
The members of the Jiezhi, rooted in their final resting place. Six of them, all contorted by Nell’s Shaping. She had targeted their faces first, making their eyes and mouths sprout flowers so they couldn’t warn the others. Each person had their own body turn against them, tree branches and limbs turning in strange angles to incapacitate them. The changes weren’t sustainable. It was a forest of the dead.
I forced myself to keep moving, keeping my eyes on my feet to avoid staring into the places where their eyes once were. It was chillingly familiar to the two people in Nell’s memory that I had seen, although they had still been alive.
Crossing the construction site towards the warehouse, I saw floodlights had been set up that were quite visible through the windows. They were likely trying to get this done quickly before any passerby decided to investigate. No doubt they had some deal with the construction companies to stay away for a few days. Lookouts lurked in the shadows of the building, away from the light of the moon. I muttered the phrases Terry had taught me under my breath as I widened my steps into a purposeful stride.
I passed the first lookout and nodded to her. She said nothing. The next lookout was leaned against the slightly ajar door of the warehouse. Light leaked from the crack in a thin beam. The guard asked me something. It wasn’t one of the handful of phrases Terry had taught me to recognize. Brute force it is then. I spat blood onto the ground and spoke the first Mandarin phrase angrily. The man held up a hand and said something else. I smacked his hand away, with my heart trying to break free of my chest. I muttered the second phrase, the syllables feeling unwieldy on my tongue. This seemed to work and the man let me push the door open and go inside.
The lights inside made the activities of the Jiezhi look like crazed shadow puppetry. Shapes darted between the trucks parked at one end and rows of large boxes on the other end. People were unpacking these boxes before moving to help move the next one in. The printers were big, large enough that they should really have been using a forklift to be safe, but they were managing with a dozen people per machine lowering the boxes by ramp onto pallet jacks.
Some people stood at the sides of the room, observing. These were likely the higher ranking Jiezhi, so I would have to stay clear of them. Counter-intuitively, I would have to stay close to the center of the room to avoid getting close to anyone who could challenge me. I marched my uncooperative body towards the unboxed printers. I didn’t take a direct route, instead I walked in and amongst the Jiezhi moving boxes. Some gave me strange looks but none spoke to me. The Jiezhi set another box down and began unboxing it. There were easily fifty printers here, maybe more, all set up in rows.
One of the printers being lowered from the trucks banged against the ramp and angry shouts rose above the general din. People’s heads turned and I used the opportunity to slip into the rows of printers.
I avoided Jiezhi who were laying out wires and hooking the printers up to generators that supplied the power. The machines stood at about my height allowing me to hide from prying eyes. I looked towards the skylights in the ceiling, but I couldn’t make out Bailey’s drone, which should have been somewhere above me, observing and broadcasting her network.
Reaching a spot with less traffic, I decided it was time to start. The instructions were simple. I hit the power button on the machine, praying it didn’t start making noise. Luckily, it just made the screen light up. I navigated the menu, finding the network and connecting before making the machine run its initial setup.
I paused as a person walked past me. They said nothing and moved on. I suspected the more I strayed from a neutral expression, the more the face would look wrong, the muscles not moving quite like Crowman’s would. But the weakest aspect of the disguise was unquestionably my acting. I had no idea how Crowman interacted with his subordinates or superiors.
“Updating” appeared on the screen. Perfect. I moved on to the next one. Now that I knew how to do it, the process was faster. The Crowman’s coat was large, good for hiding what I was doing from onlookers.
I continued moving between printers. No one bothered me, they were busy with their own tasks. Eventually I reached some that weren’t plugged in yet, in an area near the back of the warehouse where the floodlights didn’t reach. I moved to the side and fumbled around for the cord. My hand closed on it and I dragged it towards the extension cord that ran down the line of printers.
Footsteps approached. I kept my head down and finished plugging in the printer.
“Zǐruì? What are you doing back here?”
My head whipped up. I couldn’t stop myself.
You were the last person I expected to meet here.
The man stood before me with short spiky hair, a black jacket that was open in the front to show off his muscles, cargo pants tucked into combat boots. I couldn’t see his tattoos on his arms under the jacket but it was him, without a doubt.
Alek stood before me, a bemused look on his face.
My mind exploded with questions. What was he doing here? Alek is working with the Jiezhi? How did the Crowman know him?
I didn’t know how to respond. How would the Crowman talk to Alek? Who was superior? The unknowns paralyzed me, making me hesitate.
Alek saw my reaction and his expression darkened. “Zǐ,” he said and stepped forward.
“Alek.” I responded quietly, trying to regain my composure.
That was the wrong response. Alek’s face went still and then in a flash he was in my face. My neck and arm were seized in a crushing grip. Alek lifted me off the ground before slamming me into the concrete floor. Stars danced in my vision.
“Imposter.” Alek growled with cold certainty.