The thing about supernatural transformation, I'm learning, is that nobody knows what to do once it's finished.
Loki has migrated from Tim's lap to the back of the couch, where she investigates a throw pillow with the focused intensity of someone building a criminal case against it. She reaches her verdict: insufficient evidence. She drops her head onto Tim's shoulder with a long, boneless exhale. Tim puts her hand on Loki’s cheek, and Loki affectionately leans into her hand.
I shake my head. I turned a cat into a person and she's still, fundamentally, a cat. That feels like important information. I'm not sure what to do with it yet.
"Okay," Kevin says. "That was fascinating. You just turned an animal into a person."
"People are animals, too," I retort. Kevin gives me a look. I chuckle. “Yeah, I get what you’re saying.”
"This is incredible," Tim says as the cat-girl purs into her hand.
We all look at Loki. Loki yawns and then stares at me without blinking. I look away first. A person shouldn’t be able to have a stare like that.
"So," Kevin says, turning her glass in that slow rotation. "It turns guys into girls. Boy cats into human girls. And each time you use it on the same person, they become more feminine." She pauses. "It only goes in one direction."
"As far as we know," I say.
"So what happens if you use it on a woman?" She looks at me directly. "An actual woman. Born one. Does it make her into a man? Or just..." she gestures vaguely at Tim.
"More," Tim supplies with a grin.
"More," Kevin agrees.
The question sits in the middle of the room and makes itself comfortable. I turn the box over in my hand. It sits cold and inert and deeply uninterested in contributing, which I'm beginning to think is a personality trait rather than a limitation.
"I don't know," I admit. "I’m hesitant to test it out more than I have. Based on the connection, the feeling I get when I use it, it seems like it wants to move in one direction. Female. Always female. But whether that means it would push harder in the same direction on a woman, or reverse, or do something else entirely..." I set the box down. "I would lean toward making them more feminine, but I’m not completely sure."
A short silence.
"We should find out," I say. "Before the box decides to find out for us."
"An animal," Kevin says. "Not a person. If it goes wrong, it's..." she trails off, searching for the word.
"More contained," Tim offers.
"I was going to say less catastrophic, but sure."
I look at Loki, who is watching me from the couch with the specific expression of an animal that knows when it is being evaluated and has opinions about it. "We already know what it does to a male animal." I glance pointedly at Loki, who narrows her eyes. "We need a female one. Something small."
“But then we’d be stuck with another humanoid animal,” I groan, imagining gaggle of animals turned into humans, but still acting like animals. On second though, if I keep on using the box on them, they’d be incredibly beautiful with animalistic tendencies… I shake my head. Nope, bad brain, don’t go there.
Kevin shrugged. “It’s better to know sooner rather than later. Plus, it’s better on an animal than a person. It might even help to know how to change us back.”
“I suppose so,” I sigh.
I exhale. "I suppose so."
"Oh!" Tim sits up suddenly with the bright, uncontainable energy. She had been oddly quiet during the conversation, only half listening to the conversation while petting the cat-girl.
Loki, who had been using Tim's shoulder as a pillow, lifts her head in agitation when Tim moved and stares at her with an expression of profound personal affront.
"I think I have the perfect option," Tim announces, and is on her feet before either of us can ask what that means. She's out the door in the same motion, which is impressive considering how large the apartment is.
The door closes.
Loki stares at the door. Then she crawls into the corner of the couch, curls into a shape that looks anatomically complicated and probably isn't comfortable, and closes her eyes with the air of someone who has decided that the world has disappointed her enough for one afternoon and she is no longer taking appointments.
Then it's just Kevin and me (I don’t and won’t count Loki). I pick up my wine and take a sip. Kevin picks up her wine and takes a sip. Just two strangers drinking wine together in a fancy apartment. Ah, awkward moments.
"So," Kevin says. “I’ve been thinking...”
I wait patiently, but she seems to be lost in thought I clear my throat. “Yes?”
Kevin straightens the hem of her skirt. The city goes about its business outside.
"Quinn," Kevin says.
"Yeah?” I say, trying not to look annoyed.
She turns her glass in her hands again, the same slow rotation she's been doing since Tim poured it, a gesture I've started to recognize as her version of gathering herself. She looks at the coffee table. The box. Then at me.
"Use it on me again."
I blink. "What?"
"The box." She nods toward it. "Use it on me again."
I study her expression. She's not panicking. She's not running calculations behind her eyes, bracing for the answer. She seems, if anything, quieter than she has been since she got in my car.
"Kevin-"
"I know what I'm asking."
A beat.
"I want to hear why," I say.
She exhales. Sets her glass down. She pulls one knee up onto the couch cushion and turns slightly toward me, which pulls at the professional skirt in a way she doesn't seem to register. When she speaks, her voice is unhurried. Deliberate. The voice of someone who has been thinking about this since before the words arrived.
"I hated my job," she says. "Not, like, 'ugh, Mondays' hated it. I've hated it for years. Dead-end waiter shift at a place I'll never be able to afford to eat at. I've been doing it since I was twenty-three and I've never once thought about what comes next because I couldn't figure out what I actually wanted." She looks down at her hands. Her new hands, slender and unfamiliar, which she turns over once before settling them in her lap. "And I was..." She pauses, looking for the word. Finds it, and doesn't seem to enjoy it. "Depressed. For a long time. Not dramatically. Just quietly. The kind where you keep showing up to your life because you don't know what else to do with it."
The apartment is very quiet except for the traffic coming from outside. The feeling hit closer to home than I care to admit.
"And now?" I ask.
She looks up. Her expression is still careful, but underneath it is something lighter. A thread of something tentative and cautious, the way sunlight looks when it's still deciding whether to come out.
"Now I feel different," she says. "Not fixed. I know that's not how it works. But different." She looks at her reflection in the balcony glass, the dark city behind her face. "Like something's been reset. Like I have the option of being something else, starting from scratch, and it doesn't feel impossible." She pauses. "I want to hold onto that feeling before it goes away."
I look at her for a long moment.
Then I look at the box.
"You understand it's not reversible," I say. "We haven't figured that part out yet."
"I know."
"And I can't control exactly what it does. Every dose goes somewhere I don't fully predict."
"I know that too."
"And the personality change-" I start.
"Quinn." Her voice is gentle, but it stops me. A small, careful smile settles on her face. The kind that’s hopeful and vulnerable. "I want that. It sounds better than what I have."
Loki opens one amber eye between us, yawns, and closes it again.
I sigh and pick up the box.
It warms immediately. Not the slow build of the first times, not the vindictive spike of this morning. Something easier. Like an engine that's already warm and turns over without protest. The connection opens with its familiar pull behind my sternum, and the box's mood, whatever I want to call it, reads as steady. Ready. Interested in this one in a way it hasn't been quite before. We are, for the first time, on the same page.
"You sure?" I ask. “You’re not drunk, are you?”
"Don't make it weird," she says with a nervous laugh. “I’m sober. Enough.”
“Alright, I’ll do it. I think it might be better to stand.”
In agreement, Kevin sets the glass of wine down and stands up. She undoes the ponytail and let her hair flow free. I follow her.
Without any fanfare, I touch the box to her arm.
The box reacts the moment contact is made.
Not with the possessive, building heat of Tim's transformation, not with the vindictive spike of this morning's ambush. Something different. A kind of warm, unhurried pleasure, like a cat settling into a patch of sunlight it has been waiting for all day. I feel it move through the connection before anything else happens, a shift in the box's mood so specific I almost laugh at the absurdity of being able to read it: surprise, the particular surprise of something that had expected resistance and found none. An open door where it anticipated a locked one.
If the box had a face, it would be smiling.
You wanted this, I think at it. The feeling sharpens, amused and unrepentant. Yes. Obviously.
Then the energy begins to move, and I stop thinking about the box's mood because the mechanics of it pull my full attention.
The energy flows outward from the box. Into Kevin. The current is warm and purposeful, moving with the confidence of something that knows exactly where it's going. It seems to fill Kevins entire body.
Before I can examine what it’s doing, a different energy returns.
From Kevin. Through the box. A different current entirely. Not the warm, directed flow going in, but something heavier, less structured. It moves back through the connection in the opposite direction, drawn out and absorbed, the way heat leaves a room through an open window. And, like an overflow, some of that energy reaches me. Just a trace. Enough that I couldn’t really feel it before. But it's enough to register as something distinct. Something I file away very carefully for later.
Kevin makes a small gasp and her eyes unfocus.
The transformation starts at her center of gravity and works outward, which I hadn't noticed with Tim or hadn't known to look for. Her spine straightens, not dramatically, just enough that she stands taller without deciding to, an invisible hand drawing her upright by a thread at the crown of her head. Her shoulders roll back in the same motion, and the soft, habitual inward curl of them, the posture of someone who has spent years not wanting to take up space, quietly releases.
Then the change finds her shape.
She had been soft before. Not unflatteringly, just the unremarkable softness of someone who has never had a particular reason to be otherwise, the roundness at the waist, the fullness at the face, the arms and thighs carrying an extra layer of comfortable, lived-in weight that never hurt anything. The box doesn't take it so much as it reconsiders it. The softness redistributes with the calm, unhurried authority of someone rearranging furniture in a room they've decided to redesign. The waist draws inward, not severely, but with real intention, a clean, gradual taper that continues down into hips that strengthen and set rather than simply widen. The thighs firm in the same motion, the flesh that had been loose now dense and deliberate, the kind of legs that look like they have somewhere to be. Her arms follow, the shoulders rounding into something capable, a quiet, functional strength gathering beneath the surface.
Her chest remains, but sits differently now. Lifted. Pronounced on her thinner frame. Earning its place in the architecture of her rather than simply being there by default.
Below the hem of the professional skirt, her calves have gained a definition they hadn't had. She shifts her weight slightly, and even that small movement reads differently than it did five minutes ago. Like her body has developed an opinion about how it moves.
Her face goes last, which is where the box seems to spend the most of what it has left.
The roundness at her jaw and cheeks doesn't disappear exactly. It refines, the baby softness of it lifting and tightening into something with more structure beneath it, higher and more defined, the kind of cheekbones you don't notice individually but collectively make a face easy to look at for a long time. Her nose, which had been unremarkable, settles into something small and neat. Her eyes widen a fraction, or perhaps it's the brow above them that lifts, or the way her lashes thicken and darken just enough to make the eyes themselves seem larger, warmer, more present. Her lips gain a subtle fullness at the center, the bow of the upper lip deepening into something that looks like it belongs on a face people want to keep looking at.
Then the hair.
It had been flat, brown, and chin-length when she'd walked into the restaurant this morning. Now it moves as if it's been reconsidering itself since the beginning. The volume arrives first, each strand thickening imperceptibly until the whole of it lifts away from her scalp and falls with a body and weight that it simply hadn't had before. The length follows, growing in a slow, incremental cascade past her jaw, past her collarbone, settling between her shoulder blades in loose, natural waves that catch the apartment light with a deepness the original color hadn't contained. Not dramatically different. Just more. The specific more of something finally being what it was supposed to be.
The box goes ice cold in my palm.
Kevin blinks. Once, slowly, the way people do when the world has taken a moment to rearrange itself and they're waiting for it to stop.
Her hands drift upward without any apparent instruction from her conscious mind. Her fingers press lightly against her jaw, tracing the new line of it. Then her collarbone. Then she lifts a strand of hair and looks at it, turning it in the light as though inspecting it for authenticity. She releases it and watches it fall.
She breathes in. Breathes out.
"Oh," she says. She looks at me, a look of wonder crossing her face with a smile tugging at her lips.
A simple look. But her eyes are warm in a way that wasn't there an hour ago, and the smile is the unguarded kind, the one that happens before a person remembers they're being watched. A smile like my first crush back in high school when things were simple.
Blushing, I scold myself and look away to focus on the box in my hand; apparently, I hadn’t learned enough from Tim’s transformation.
Kevin shifts on her feet, testing the new distribution of herself, the way her weight settles differently, the way her posture holds without effort. She presses her palms flat against her thighs and feels the changed shape of them. She steps over to look at the mirror, turning her face in every direction, unwilling to miss a single detail.
I study the box in my hand, still running the shape of that energy through my mind, trying to hold the outline of it long enough to understand what it was. It’s doing something to me, but I’m still not sure what.
Suddenly, the front door opens. Tim comes through it carrying a rabbit.
It is a small, white rabbit with grey patches at the ears and across the nose, the compact, self-possessed variety of rabbit that sits with a certain dignity and regards everything with the mild authority of something that has never been startled in its life. Tim holds it the way someone holds a rabbit who has been briefed on how to hold the animal but is not comfortable yet. It sits in the crook of her arm and surveys the apartment with calm, unremarkable amber eyes.
"Mrs. Chen on the fourth floor," Tim announces, by way of explanation. "She has a pet bunny that gave birth a little while ago and is trying to sell the babies. She was more than willing to sell her to me." She looks around the room, realizing something is different. She takes in Kevin, who is still touching her own face at the mirror. She takes in the cold box in my palm. She takes in Loki, who has opened both eyes and is staring at the rabbit with an alertness that is all animal and no ambiguity. The small mammal is suddenly learning about the gaze of a predator.
"Did I miss something?" Tim asks.
"Kevin asked me to use it on her," I say.
Tim's gaze travels to Kevin. Kevin lowers her hands from her face, straightens, and tucks a wave of new hair behind her ear with an automatic grace that hadn't been there this morning.
"It felt right," Kevin says simply.
Tim looks at her for a long moment with the considering expression of someone taking a reading. Kevin smiles nervously. Not the bright, unguarded one she pulls out for restaurant managers. Something quieter. Genuine.
"Okay," Tim nods. "I can respect that. You look good."
Then she holds up the rabbit with both hands, presenting it to the room like evidence.
"So," she says. "Who wants to find out what this thing does to a girl?"
Tim sets the rabbit on the coffee table.
The rabbit sits exactly where she is placed, nose twitching at a frequency that suggests deep and continuous processing of the situation. She surveys the apartment with her amber eyes, cataloguing it in the efficient, unhurried way of small animals that have survived long enough to develop a methodology. Her ears rotate once toward Loki.
Loki, who has not moved from the couch cushion, is staring at the rabbit with a focus so absolute it has become its own kind of silence. Every other muscle in her body has gone completely still. Her tail, which has been expressing itself freely all afternoon, has stopped moving entirely. Her amber eyes are wide and locked.
"Okay," I say, eying Loki. "We should probably do this quickly."
"Loki," Tim says, in a warning tone. Loki does not acknowledge this.
The rabbit's nose twitches faster.
I pick up the box. The connection opens with its familiar pull, warm and immediate, and I feel the box register the rabbit the way it registered Loki: that contemplative pause, the reluctant interest of something presented with an unusual problem. But there is something underneath the interest this time. A faint, preliminary irritation. A professional clearing their throat before delivering a verdict.
I touch the box to the rabbit's back before Loki can reach a decision.
The energy moves. And immediately, something is wrong with the ratio.
The current flows out into the rabbit, and I feel the box's reaction to it the way you feel someone's expression change in the dark: not seen, but sensed completely. The flow goes to the target. The return comes back. And what comes back is almost nothing. Less than the clothes. Considerably less than Tim or Kevin. A threadbare trickle that barely makes it through the connection before it dissipates, like trying to fill a reservoir through a pinhole while the whole thing evaporates. I receive absolutely nothing. The box absorbs what little there is and the feeling that comes through the connection is not anger, not the theatrical petulance of the clothing experiments. It is something flatter and more pointed. The specific, weary disappointment of someone who has been handed a task so far beneath their investment that they cannot even generate the energy to be properly offended by it.
I file that away. Females return less energy. Another card to keep up my sleeve for when I need it. Leverage.
The rabbit goes still beneath my hand. Then the fur begins to move.
It starts along the spine, the same place it started with Loki, a ripple moving outward through the dense white coat, individual hairs lengthening and lightening simultaneously, the grey patches at the ears and nose remaining, anchored, as everything else revises around them. The coat thins along the body first, retreating from the skin in a slow, even tide, leaving behind something pale and smooth that catches the light differently, warmer and less uniform than the white beneath the fur had been.
The body lengthens underneath it.
Not with the gradual, structural deliberateness of Tim or Kevin. Faster. More economical. Like the box is aware of how little it's getting back and has decided to spend efficiently. The small, dense frame of the rabbit extends upward and outward in a single continuous motion, limbs stretching and reorganizing with the specific sound of something finding its correct proportion, joints resettling, the compact architecture of a small prey animal rebuilding itself into something designed to stand upright. The haunches, which had been folded beneath her, unfold and lengthen into legs: curved, smooth, and strong through the thigh in the way of something that still knows how to run from things.
She ends up on her knees on the coffee table.
Her hands brace against the glass in front of her, small and delicate, the fingers slightly longer than you'd expect, with an unconscious precision to how they spread for balance. Her arms are slender, and her shoulders are narrow and slightly rounded, giving her a compact, tucked quality even upright. Her frame is small, genuinely small, the kind of small that makes the air around her seem larger, and light in a way that reads as perpetual readiness rather than fragility.
The fur that retreated from her body gathers at the crown of her head. It thickens rapidly, softening from the dense, short coat into something fine and voluminous, white at the roots with the grey of the patches bleeding through in irregular, natural-looking streaks toward the ends. It falls past her jaw, past her shoulders, and keeps going, settling at the middle of her back in a straight, heavy curtain that moves with her breathing. A fringe of it falls across her forehead, barely clearing her eyes.
The eyes.
They are large. Genuinely, disproportionately large in the way of the rabbit they came from, set wide in a small face with the kind of open, immediate expressiveness that communicates everything before the mouth has a chance to make a decision. They are amber, the same amber as before, but warm now, and lit from somewhere inside in a way that reads as feeling rather than animal instinct. Her nose is small and slightly upturned, and it is still moving, the faintest, most involuntary twitch, continuous and unconscious. Her lips are parted around quick, shallow breaths, pink and soft, the lower one slightly fuller.
Her ears remain exactly where they are, mounted at the top of her head in the grey-patched, upright, slightly trembling configuration of a rabbit that has recently been startled. They are large and mobile and swivel independently, and at the moment, they are aimed squarely at Loki with the unwavering directional focus of a threat assessment system that has not yet decided what to do with its findings.
At the base of her spine, just above where the coffee table meets the back of her knees, a small cotton tail remains. White and round and trembling slightly.
She is, owing to the box's economical approach to the task, entirely unclothed.
The box goes ice cold.
She blinks. Her ears swivel. Her nose twitches.
Then Loki moves.
She doesn't announce it. There is no preliminary crouch, no tail-lashing, no theatrical preparation. One moment, Loki is on the couch cushion. The next, she is on the coffee table, and the new bunny-girl launches herself off it with a shriek that is high and wordless and entirely instinctive, clearing the table in a single panicked leap and landing on the rug in a stumble that her legs do not fully know how to handle yet. She scrambles upright and bolts.
What follows is not dignified for anyone involved.
She moves fast. Faster than her unfamiliar legs should allow, the rabbit's instinct overrides the new body's inexperience with itself and finds the path anyway. She vaults over the arm of the couch. She skids on the kitchen tile. She upends a decorative basket near the entryway and sends its contents across the floor. Loki pursues her with the silent, single-minded efficiency of something running a very old program that does not have an override function.
"Loki!" Tim is already moving. "Loki, no!"
Kevin pulls her feet up onto the couch as the chase circuits past her. The glass table cracks as Loki jumps on top of it. In fact, many things break. The couch will never be the same.
I grab for Loki twice and get air both times. The third time I manage to catch her around the middle, and she expresses her opinion of this through three of my fingers and an extremely personal sound. I hold on anyway, walking her firmly toward the bathroom with the grim determination of someone who has lost the moral high ground and is just trying to limit the damage.
"Sorry," I tell Loki. Then, she scratches my face. All sympathy evaporates. I manage to cling on to her as she thrashes about. I toss her into the bathroom unceremoniously and slam the door shut. From inside, a single, reproachful thump against the base of the door. Then, silence. I sigh in relief, grateful she can’t open the door. I gingerly touch my face. No blood.
I turn around.
The apartment has been subtly rearranged. Two throw pillows are on the floor. The decorative basket is on its side. A small ceramic figure that had been on the bookshelf is now inexplicably on the floor in many pieces.
The new bunny-girl is under the cracked coffee table.
She has drawn her knees to her chest and wrapped both arms around them, her hair fallen forward around her face, her ears pressed flat against the back of her head in the specific configuration of something that has decided the best immediate option is to become as small as possible and wait for the world to reconsider its position. Her cotton tail is pressed tight. Her nose is moving very fast.
Tim lowers herself to the floor in front of the coffee table. She sits cross-legged and dips her head slightly, putting herself at eye level. Her voice, when she uses it, is the same one she used with Loki on the couch. Low and even, offering nothing threatening.
"Hey," Tim says. "It's okay. She's in the bathroom. She can't get to you."
The amber eyes find her from under the curtain of white and grey hair. They are very large, very uncertain, and extremely present.
A long moment passes.
Then, slowly, the ears lift. Not all the way. Halfway. The posture of someone deciding, tentatively, that the immediate emergency may have been downgraded.
"There you go," Tim says. "You're okay."
Kevin has quietly retrieved a throw blanket from the couch and passes it down to Tim without being asked, which I think is the most competent thing anyone has done in this apartment all day. Tim holds it out, folded, at the edge of the coffee table. The bunny-girl looks at it. Looks at Tim. Her nose twitches.
After another moment, she takes it and burrows deep into the blanket. She remains under the table.
"We should name her," Kevin says quietly, from the couch.
I look at the coffee table. Two amber eyes blink at me from the blanket burrito in the shadows beneath it. The ears are still at half-mast. The nose hasn't stopped moving since the transformation. Not much to work with, aesthetically speaking.
"Snowball," I say, with complete confidence.
The pillow hits me in the face before I finish the second syllable. A second one arrives immediately after, from a different angle, which suggests coordination. I lower them to find Tim and Kevin wearing identical expressions of flat disapproval.
"She's a person," Tim says. "She cannot have a pet name."
"I had a bunny named Snowball when I was eight," I say, with what remains of my dignity. "It was a tribute."
"It was a disaster," Kevin says.
I set the pillows aside and look back at the coffee table. The amber eyes have not moved. They are watching me with the wide, unblinking attention of something that is cataloguing information and has not yet decided what to do with it. One ear swivels slightly in my direction, as if taking a reading.
Something about it makes me soften, in a way I'd rather not examine too closely. She didn't ask for any of this. None of them did.
"Mandy," I say. It comes out quieter than I intended.
Tim tilts her head. Tries it to herself first, barely audible. Then, toward the table: "Mandy."
The ears lift. Just slightly. Not all the way. But enough.
"I like it," Tim says.
Kevin nods. "It suits her."
We all look at the coffee table. Two amber eyes blink once, slowly, from the depths of the blanket.
We take that as a yes.
It takes the better part of twenty minutes for Mandy to come out from under the coffee table, and she does it by degrees. First her feet appear, then her knees, then the rest of her, wrapped in the throw blanket like a very cautious, very alert burrito. She climbs onto the couch between Tim and Kevin with the deliberate, testing care of someone who hasn't fully committed to trusting the furniture yet, and tucks herself into the corner of it with her feet pulled up and her ears still monitoring the bathroom door at regular intervals.
At that moment, Tim decided Mandy needed clothes.
The exact mechanics of how Tim dresses Mandy in under forty-five seconds are difficult to reconstruct afterward. There is a stack of fabric. There is Tim's particular brand of gentle, unstoppable intention. There is a brief period during which Mandy's ears are not visible. And then it's done, and Mandy is sitting in a baggy pink t-shirt and white shorts. Her hair is tied neatly through the back, and an expression on her face that suggests she has just experienced something she didn't consent to but cannot specifically argue with.
Her ears are at a complicated angle.
Tim sits back with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has solved a problem efficiently and sees no need to discuss it further.
I make a private note never to be on the receiving end of Tim's helpfulness when she's decided something needs doing.
Tim refilled everyone’s wine; we’re incredibly lucky it didn’t spill all over the place in the chaos. Someone has relocated the decorative basket. Loki, from behind the bathroom door, has issued one additional thump and then gone silent, which feels pointed.
Tim places a bowl of water in front of Mandy. She hesitantly sniffs it and lightly licks the water. We count that as a win.
I sit in the chair across from them and look at the three of them on the couch. Tim, who moves through her new life with an ease she still hasn't fully accounted for. Mandy, who is listening to everything in the apartment at once and processing it with enormous amber eyes. And Kevin, who is sitting with a quiet, particular stillness. Not the stillness of shock, or the stillness of someone trying not to cry. The stillness of someone who has been thinking.
She meets my eyes across the coffee table.
"Quinn," she says.
"Yeah." I sense deja vu.
She turns her glass in her hands. The slow, familiar rotation. She glances at Tim, who gives a small nod, which tells me they have already been doing something with their eyes that I missed.
"I want you to use the box on me again," Kevin says.
I look at her.
"You just had a dose an hour ago," I say.
"I know." Her voice is steady. Not impulsive. Considered. "But I felt it. What it does. The reset." She looks down at herself, at the professional skirt and the blouse, the new lines of a figure that didn't exist this morning, the hair falling in waves over her shoulder. "It doesn't feel finished yet." She looks back up. "Like I'm on the right road but I've only gone a few miles."
"Kevin-"
"I'm not panicking," she says. "I'm not asking because I'm scared or because I feel like I have to. I'm asking because I want to." A pause. The careful, earned kind. "I haven't wanted something in a very long time. That feels important enough to follow."
The apartment is quiet. Mandy's ears pivot toward me, attending.
I pull out the box and hold it in my hand
The box sits there, cold and silent and still faintly disgruntled from the Mandy situation. But underneath the residual sulking, I can feel it at the edge of my awareness the way you feel a change in air pressure before a storm. Attentive. Already interested. Already knowing what I'm about to decide before I've decided it.
I feel like I hear the box laugh like a devil who successfully tempted a pure and innocent soul.