The fitting room curtain hangs half-open, a gap of maybe three inches, and in that gap the mirror has been showing her everything she has spent the last hour not looking at directly. The dress is the problem. The dress is a smoky, iridescent purple that shifts from plum to ash depending on which way she turns, and it hangs off one shoulder the way the girl on the tag wore it, and under the fluorescent buzz of a hardware store fitting room it should look cheap. It doesn't. It looks like something a forest would grow if a forest grew clothes.

Her hand is on the curtain. It has been on the curtain for three minutes. She knows it's three minutes because the little clock on the wall above the returns desk has a second hand that ticks loud enough to hear through the metal wall, and she has counted one hundred and eighty of them while standing in a body she did not earn, looking at a woman she did not ask to be, and liking it.

That's the part. Not the ears — she rounded those off with Shape Shift an hour ago, spent five of her twenty-five spell points on a disguise that won't last past tomorrow night, which she did the math on twice and hated both times. Not the breasts, though they're there, unmistakable under the swoop of the neckline, heavier than a body this narrow has any right to carry and somehow balanced anyway. Not even the face, which is her face now, violet eyes and a mouth that keeps doing things she didn't tell it to do. It's that she has been standing in a clothing store fitting room for three minutes liking what she sees, and every one of those seconds has been a small, quiet betrayal of a guy named Jason Chance who used to exist.

She turns her hip an inch. The dress moves with her, the fabric sliding across skin that feels like it's been sanded and polished and lit from underneath, and the mirror does the thing it keeps doing, where it shows her a stranger who is also, somehow, exactly who she drew on a character sheet at two in the morning six years ago with a mechanical pencil and too much Mountain Dew.

"You okay in there?"

Mike's voice comes through the curtain like it's coming through a wall of water. She drops her hand off the curtain fast, like she got caught.

"Fine."

"You've been in there for ten minutes."

"It's been three."

"It's been eleven. I've been standing next to a display of sump pumps the whole time. I know a lot about sump pumps now. I didn't want to know about sump pumps."

She bites her lower lip, and the fang — no, not a fang, just a slightly sharper canine than Jason ever had — presses into it in a way that is new and specific and hers. The fitting room smells like new denim and cardboard and the faint chemical ghost of whatever they treat the carpet with. The metal walls are cool against her bare shoulder. Somewhere out in the store, a guy is arguing with his wife about the difference between two kinds of caulk, and his voice has the specific flatness of a man who has already lost.

"Five more minutes," she says.

"You said that eight minutes ago."

"Then five more from now."

A pause. She can picture him out there, arms crossed, dark hair pushed back off his forehead the way he does when he's thinking, broad shoulders blocking the aisle so nobody can get to the lightbulbs. He's been doing this since they walked in — standing between her and the world like a wall with a dry sense of humor. She doesn't know how to tell him it isn't working. The world keeps getting through anyway.

She looks at the mirror again. The ears are the thing she keeps checking, even though she knows they're rounded, because the Shape Shift is a spell, and spells in her experience — which is now roughly four hours of experience — have a way of doing exactly what they say and nothing more. Five points. Twenty-five minus five. The math sits in her chest like a stone. She has twenty points left and a disguise that expires in less than twenty-four hours, and Friday is three days away.

Three days. She does the arithmetic again, because she keeps hoping it'll come out different. It doesn't. She'll have to cast Shape Shift again Thursday night, and that's another five points, and then again Friday morning if the timing is bad, and then she's at ten points with three days of Sera and a whole life ahead of her and no way to get any of it back except —

Her brain slams the door on that thought so hard it rattles the frame. Nope. Not doing that. Not thinking about the other line on the sheet, the homebrew one, the one she wrote at 1 a.m. because she thought it was funny and because the campaign was getting horny and because nobody was ever supposed to actually play it.

"Aria."

Mike's voice is different now. Lower. The one he uses when he's about to say something real and he wants to make sure she's listening.

She pulls the curtain open a crack — just a crack, just enough to see him through the gap — and catches his eye in the mirror instead. He's standing there with his hands in his jacket pockets, and his face is doing the thing she's seen it do maybe three times in her whole life, the thing where he looks at her like she's a car that just started itself in the driveway and he's trying to figure out whether to be impressed or to call somebody.

"What," she says.

"Nothing." He looks away first. That's new. Mike never looks away first. "It's just — the dress is a lot."

"It was on sale."

"It was not on sale. I watched you pick it up and look at the tag and then pick it up anyway."

"It was mostly on sale."

"You don't have a job."

"I have a credit card."

"You have Jason's credit card. Which is going to be a whole thing when the statement —" He stops. He does the thing where he runs his hand through his hair and it stands up in five directions. "Okay. That's a problem for later. Come out here."

"Why."

"Because I want to see if you look like a person."

She stands there with her hand on the curtain and her heart doing something complicated in her chest, and the thing she wants to say is I don't know if I am one anymore, and the thing she actually says is, "You're going to be weird about it."

"I'm going to be normal about it."

"You've been weird about it all day."

"I've been supportive."

"You called me Jason four times in the car."

He doesn't have an answer for that. He looks at the floor, at the carpet with its pattern of gray diamonds, and something moves across his face that she can't read and doesn't try to. Then he looks back up.

"I'm working on it," he says. "Come out here."

She comes out.

The curtain scrapes along its rod, and she steps into the wider aisle of the fitting room, and the fluorescent light hits her full in the face, and Mike's expression does something she will think about later. It doesn't go wide. It doesn't go shocked. It goes quiet, the way a room goes quiet when someone turns off a fan you didn't know was running. He looks at her for four full seconds without saying anything, and she watches his eyes move — from her face to her shoulders to the way the dress falls — and then he does the thing that breaks her a little.

He nods. Slow. Once. Like a man confirming a diagnosis he already suspected.

"Yeah," he says. "You look like a person."

"That's it?"

"What do you want, a compliment?"

"I want you to stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're doing math."

He laughs — short, through his nose — and turns away, and starts walking toward the registers, and she has to follow him because there's nothing else to do, and following him means walking through the store in the dress, which means being looked at, which means —

The first person who looks at her is a woman in her fifties in the paint aisle, holding a color swatch up to the light. She glances up, sees Aria, and her hand stops moving. Just for a second. Then she goes back to the swatch, and her mouth does something small, and Aria walks past her with her chin up and her ears burning and her whole body aware of the way the dress moves against her thighs.

The second person is a teenager at the returns desk. He's maybe seventeen, with acne and a name tag that says BRANDON, and he looks at her for three full seconds with his mouth slightly open, and then he looks at Mike, and then he looks back at her, and his brain visibly fails to file the information.

"Find everything okay?" he says. His voice cracks on okay.

"Just the dress," Mike says, before she can answer. He puts the tag on the counter. "And the hat."

The hat is a wide-brimmed sun hat, straw-colored, floppy, the kind of thing a gardener wears. It is not a disguise. It is a joke with a brim. But it's what they could find in a hardware store in November, and when Mike sets it on her head in the checkout line, she catches her reflection in the security monitor mounted above the register and sees a woman in a purple dress and a straw hat, and the woman looks like she's about to rob a bank or join a cult or both.

"This is humiliating," she says.

"It's a hat."

"It's a humiliating hat."

"You picked it."

"You told me to pick something."

"I told you to pick something that covers your ears. That covers your ears."

She takes the hat off and holds it in both hands and looks at it, at the little frayed edge of the brim, and something in her chest does a slow turn. He's right. It covers her ears. It also makes her look ridiculous, and looking ridiculous is a kind of safety, and she hates that she understands that now.

Brandon swipes the card. The card says JASON CHANCE in raised silver letters, and Brandon looks at the card, and then looks at her, and then looks at Mike, and the question is right there on his face, and he doesn't ask it, and Mike doesn't explain, and the whole thing happens in complete silence except for the beep of the scanner and the distant argument about caulk, which is somehow still going.

"Bag?" Brandon says.

"Please," Mike says.

They walk out into the parking lot, and the November air hits her like a wall of glass, and she stops just outside the automatic doors and stands there breathing it in. Cold. Real. The sky is the color of wet slate. A cart rattles past them, pushed by an old man in a camouflage jacket who doesn't look at her at all, and that — the not looking — feels better than she expected. She stands there with the bag in one hand and the hat in the other and the dress moving in the wind, and she thinks: I am outside. I am a woman outside a hardware store in Indiana in November, and nobody is screaming, and the world is still going.

"You're doing it again," Mike says.

"Doing what."

"Standing still like you're waiting for something to happen."

"I am waiting for something to happen."

"What."

She doesn't answer. Because the answer is I don't know, and because the answer is also for you to look at me the way you looked at me in the fitting room again, and because the answer is a third thing she hasn't found the word for yet. She puts the hat on. She pulls the brim down. She starts walking toward the truck.

The truck is a silver F-150 with a dent in the rear bumper from a deer in 2022 and a crack in the windshield that Mike has been meaning to fix for a year. She climbs into the passenger seat and the seatbelt doesn't fit right — it crosses her chest wrong, sits too high, digs into her collarbone — and she spends a full thirty seconds adjusting it while Mike watches from the driver's seat with his hands on the wheel and the engine off.

"Seatbelt's wrong," she says.

"I noticed."

"It's because I'm —" She gestures at herself. At the chest. At the whole situation. "There's more of me in the way."

"There is."

"Stop agreeing with me."

"You want me to disagree with basic physics?"

She laughs, and it surprises her — a real laugh, short and bright, out of a throat that isn't Jason's throat, and she claps a hand over her own mouth the way she did in the quarry, the way she keeps doing, like her own joy is something that needs to be caught before it escapes. Mike starts the truck. The engine turns over with a sound she's heard a thousand times, and for a second everything is normal, and then she catches her own reflection in the cracked windshield and the second ends.

They drive. The hardware store slides away behind them, and the strip mall, and the gas station with the sign that says LOTTERY: $1.2 BILLION in red plastic letters, and then it's just the road, two lanes, gray fields on either side, the trees stripped down to their bones. She watches the fields go by and does the math again, because the math is the only thing she can control.

Twenty points. Twenty-four hours of ears. Thursday night, another five. Friday morning, maybe another five if the timing's bad. Fifteen left, or ten. Then a weekend with Sera, and Sera is sharp, Sera notices things, Sera designed the game — designed the class, the subclass, the whole homebrew mess — and if anyone on this planet is going to look at Aria Silverleaf and think huh, that's funny, that's exactly the character Jason was playing, it's her.

"Mike."

"Yeah."

"How much do you know about Sera?"

He glances at her. "What do you mean, how much do I know."

"Like — do you know her. Have you met her."

"I know she exists. I know you've been playing with her for two years. I know you talk to her more than you talk to me." He says it without bitterness, which is somehow worse. "I've never met her. She's in Seattle or something."

"Portland."

"Portland. Whatever." He changes lanes. "Why."

"Because she's coming here Friday."

"She's — wait." He takes his eyes off the road for a full second, which is a lot for Mike. "She's coming here. To Indiana."

"She has a work thing in Chicago and she's driving down after."

"And you agreed to this."

"I agreed to this before."

"Before what."

"Before I woke up in a forest as a —" She waves a hand at herself again. "This."

Mike is quiet for a mile. The truck eats the road. A semi passes them going the other way and the whole cab rocks with the wind of it, and Aria's pointed ears — rounded, but still, under the hat, still hers — twitch at the sound, and she hates that they do that, and she also, in a place she isn't looking at directly, loves that they do that.

"Okay," Mike says finally. "So we need a story."

"We need a story."

"A good one."

"A great one."

"A great one." He taps the wheel with his thumb. "Because here's the thing. Sera knows Jason. She's known Jason for two years. She's going to notice that Jason isn't around. She's going to ask where he went. And if you show up as this —" he gestures at her, at the dress, at the hat, at the whole impossible package — "she's going to notice that you look like the character she helped you build, and then she's going to have questions, and we are not going to have answers."

"I know."

"Do you know? Because I feel like you don't know."

"I know."

"Then what's the story."

She looks out the window. The fields go on and on, brown and gray and dead, and somewhere out there past the tree line is the quarry, and past the quarry is the woods where she woke up this morning as somebody else. The woods are the only place the truth lives. Everywhere else is a story she has to invent.

"I'm Jason's cousin," she says. "From — I don't know. Vermont. I'm visiting. Jason had to leave town for a family thing and he asked me to house-sit and I'm staying at his place, and he said his friends might check in on me, and that's why I'm here when he's not."

Mike is quiet again.

"That's the story," she says.

"It's not a bad story."

"Thank you."

"It's a terrible story. It has a hundred holes in it. But it's a story." He pulls off the highway onto the county road that leads back toward his apartment. "The question is whether she buys it, and the question behind that question is whether you can hold it, because you have a tell."

"I don't have a tell."

"You bite your lip when you're lying. You always have. You did it in the fitting room when you told me you'd only been in there three minutes."

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Bites her lip. Catches herself and stops.

"See," Mike says.

"That's not — that's a new lip. I didn't have this lip yesterday. You can't hold me to a tell I haven't had time to learn."

"I'm holding you to it."

"You're a monster."

"I'm your brother."

The word lands in the cab and sits there. Brother. He said it without stopping, without the little hitch he's been doing all day, and Aria looks at him and he looks at the road and neither of them says anything about it, which is maybe the most honest thing that's happened since she woke up.

They pull into the apartment complex. It's the same complex Jason lived in until this morning, second floor, unit 2B, the one with the broken screen and the dead basil plant on the windowsill that Jason kept forgetting to water. Mike parks in the visitor spot and kills the engine and they sit there in the dark cab with the November evening coming down around them and the heater ticking as it cools.

"Here's the thing I keep coming back to," Mike says. He's looking straight ahead, through the windshield, at the dead basil plant on the windowsill. "You could have been anything. When you made that character. You could have made a guy. A soldier. A wizard with a beard. You made —" he gestures at her, vaguely, at the hat, at the dress, at the whole impossible shape of her "— this."

"I made a character."

"You made a girl."

"I made a sorceress. The gender was —" She stops. Because the truth is she doesn't remember the gender being a decision. She remembers sitting at her desk at two in the morning with the character sheet open and the cursor blinking in the Name field, and she remembers typing Aria Silverleaf without thinking, and she remembers the way it felt to type it, like a key turning in a lock she hadn't known was there.

"The gender was what," Mike says.

"The gender was —" She looks at her hands. They're her hands now, slender and pale, with nails that are somehow still clean after a day in a quarry. "The gender was not the point."

"Okay."

"It wasn't."

"I said okay."

"You said it in a way."

"I said it in a way." He opens his door. Cold air floods the cab. "Come on. I'll make dinner. You can tell me more about the story."

She doesn't move. She sits in the passenger seat with the hat in her lap and the bag by her feet and the seatbelt still digging into her collarbone, and she thinks about the mirror. Not the hardware store mirror — the one in the fitting room, with its smudged glass and its little row of hooks and its fluorescent hum. She thinks about standing there for three minutes liking what she saw, and she thinks about the fact that liking it wasn't a surprise. That's the thing. It wasn't a surprise. It felt like something she'd been waiting for without knowing she was waiting, and now it's here, and she has twenty spell points and three days and a best friend flying in from Portland who is going to look at her and see exactly what she is.

"Mike."

He stops with one foot on the pavement. "Yeah."

"What if I don't want to go back."

The words are out before she decides to say them, and they hang in the cold air of the cab, and Mike stands in the open door with the dome light on and his face half in shadow and doesn't say anything for a long time. A car goes by on the county road, headlights sweeping across the parking lot, across his face, across hers.

"Back to what," he says finally.

"Back to Jason."

He looks at her. The dome light is buzzing. Somewhere upstairs, someone is watching TV, and the sound of a laugh track drifts down through the floor of the cab, thin and canned and far away.

"You're asking the wrong guy," he says. "I don't know how to do that. I don't know if there's a way to do that. I don't know if there's a way back." He gets out of the truck. "What I know is you're my sibling and you're standing in my parking lot in a purple dress and a straw hat, and I'm not going to let you stand out here in the cold."

He closes the door. The dome light goes out. She sits in the dark for a second with her hand on her own collarbone, on the seatbelt that doesn't fit, and then she gets out of the truck and follows him up the stairs.

The apartment smells like the same apartment — stale coffee, laundry detergent, the faint ghost of the frozen pizza Mike eats three times a week. She stands in the doorway with the bag in her hand and looks at the room she woke up in this morning as somebody else. The couch with the dent in the cushion. The TV with the game controller still on the coffee table. The character sheet, still there, still on the kitchen counter where she left it, with its columns of numbers and its drawing of a silver-haired elf in the corner.

Mike goes to the kitchen and starts pulling things out of the fridge. She walks to the counter and picks up the sheet and holds it in both hands, and the paper feels the way paper always felt, and the drawing looks the way it always looked, and it's her. It's been her this whole time. She just never knew it was a photograph.

Her phone — Jason's phone, in her pocket, the one with eleven unread texts from Sera — buzzes again. She pulls it out. The screen lights up her face in the dark kitchen. Sera: okay you're officially dead to me. call me when you surface.

She looks at it for a long time. Then she types, with her thumbs, in the body of a woman who has never sent a text in her life:

Can't call tonight. Something came up. I'll explain Friday. Bring your dice.

She hits send before she can think about it. The little bubble pops up. Then the three dots. Then — nothing. Sera doesn't reply. The three dots go away. The screen dims. Aria stands in the kitchen with the character sheet in one hand and the phone in the other and the dress slipping off one shoulder, and she watches her own reflection in the dark window over the sink — silver hair, straw hat, violet eyes, a stranger who is also herself — and she does not look away.

Behind her, Mike opens a can of something and the sound is loud in the quiet room. "So," he says. "Vermont."

"Vermont," she says.

"You've never been to Vermont."

"I've been to Vermont."

"You went to Vermont once. On a ski trip. In high school. You broke your wrist."

"That's more than most people know about Vermont."

He laughs, and the laugh is real, and for a second the kitchen is just a kitchen and the night is just a night. Then he sets the can down and looks at her across the counter, and his face goes serious again, and she knows what's coming before he says it.

"Twenty points," he says.

"Twenty."

"And you need five for Thursday and five for Friday."

"Probably."

"And then you're at ten."

"Then I'm at ten."

He looks at the character sheet in her hand. At the little line at the bottom, the one she wrote at one in the morning six years ago, the homebrew one, the joke one. He doesn't say anything about it. But he looks at it, and she knows he's read it, because he read the whole sheet this morning while she was in the shower trying to figure out how a body works. He read the whole thing. Including that line.

"We'll figure it out," he says.

"Yeah," she says.

Neither of them believes it. The phone sits on the counter between them, dark and silent, and out in the parking lot the streetlight flickers once, twice, and then holds steady, and somewhere past the tree line the woods where she woke up this morning are still there, dark and patient, waiting for her to come back.

She takes the sheet to the couch. Sits down. The cushion does the thing it always did — gives at the left edge where Jason spent six years losing the shape of it — and the wrongness of that, of a body she's never had fitting into a dent she made with a body she doesn't have anymore, is somehow the most normal thing that's happened all day.

Mike is at the stove. Cans, a pot, the click of the burner. She watches him work and does not help, because the last time she tried to open a can she put her thumb through the metal. The sheet is on her knees and she reads it the way you read a page from your own diary after a long time — every number familiar, every number also a small accusation.

Twenty points. Five for Thursday. Five for Friday. The arithmetic doesn't care how she feels about it.

She reaches the bottom of the page. Succubic Restoration. Her own handwriting, six-years-ago handwriting, the letters pressed too hard because the pen was dying and she was too lazy to get a new one. She reads the line. She reads it again. Then she folds the sheet in half, and in half again, and tucks it under her thigh like she's hiding a bad report card.

Nope.

She's not going to think about it. She's going to think about something else. Anything else. The apartment is full of anything elses — the dead basil on the windowsill, the dent in the couch, the laundry basket by the bathroom door that's been overflowing since Tuesday. She looks around the room and the room looks back at her with all its small failures, and something in her chest clicks over like a switch, and she knows what she's going to do.

"Mike."

"Mm."

"Where's your toolbox."

He looks up from the pot. "Why."

"I'm going to fix things."

"You're going to —" He sets the spoon down. "Fix things."

"Mending. It's a cantrip. Zero points. I can repair broken stuff." She stands up, and the dress does its thing, and she ignores the dress, and she gestures at the room. "The apartment is full of broken stuff. I'm going to fix all of it."

"That's your plan."

"That's my plan."

"To take your mind off —"

"To fix things," she says, too fast, "around the apartment, because I live here now, and because the place is a mess, and because it's useful, and because I want to."

Mike looks at her for a second longer than she'd like. Then he goes back to the pot. "Toolbox is in the closet by the front door. Bottom shelf. The latch sticks."

"I'll manage."

"The latch sticks because the hinge is bent."

"Then I'll fix the hinge."

She finds the toolbox. The latch does stick, and she does fix the hinge — it takes her four seconds, her fingertips pressed to the cold metal while something warm moves down her arm and out through her hands, and then the little bent pin is straight and the latch catches clean. She stands in the closet doorway with the toolbox in one hand and a feeling in her chest she hasn't had since the quarry, since the rock went up and stayed up, and she lets herself have it for exactly as long as it takes to walk back to the living room.

She starts with the obvious things.

The lamp on the side table has been dead for two months. She opens it up and finds the cord chewed near the base — mouse, probably, or the vacuum, or the time Jason tripped over it in the dark — and she lays her hand on the frayed copper and the wire knits itself back together under her palm, sleeve of insulation closing over the splice like skin over a cut. She screws the bulb back in. The lamp comes on. Warm yellow light, steady, no flicker. She stares at it for a while.

"Still works," Mike says from the kitchen.

"Yeah."

"You look surprised."

"I keep being surprised." She turns the lamp off, then on, then off. "It's the same feeling as the rock. Like the world is agreeing with me about something."

"That's a hell of a thing to get used to."

"I'm not getting used to it. I'm just —" She turns the lamp on and leaves it on. "I'm just doing it."

The mug next. The one with the chipped rim, the one Jason knocked off the counter last month and never threw away because it was the good mug, the one from the gas station in Bloomington with the faded logo. She sets the chip against the body of the mug and presses, and the ceramic flows back into itself, and the seam is gone, and the mug holds water again when she fills it at the sink. She drinks from it. The rim is smooth. It tastes like nothing, which is the best thing it could taste like.

The bathroom door. The hinge has been squealing since spring. She mends it without opening the toolbox, one palm flat on the wood, and the squeal stops mid-note and doesn't come back.

The window over the sink — the one that doesn't latch, that's been letting in cold air since October. She runs her thumb along the frame and the wood comes back to true and the latch catches and the draft stops and the kitchen gets half a degree warmer, and she stands there with her hand on the glass and watches her own reflection in it, silver hair, straw hat, and she doesn't look away this time either.

The chair at the kitchen table with the wobble. The drawer that sticks. The bathroom faucet that drips. The zipper on Mike's jacket, the one that's been split since last winter, which she mends while he's still eating, and he looks down at his own chest like someone just handed him back a piece of his life.

"Okay," he says. "That one was actually useful."

"They were all useful."

"The mug was not useful."

"The mug was extremely useful."

"You don't drink coffee."

"I might start."

He snorts. She keeps going.

She mends the screen door on the balcony. She mends the antenna on the little radio in the kitchen, the one Jason kept for the weather reports during tornado season. She mends a picture frame on the shelf, the glass cracked from the corner, the photograph inside of two boys on a dock with their feet in the water — Mike at maybe twelve, Jason at eight, both of them squinting into the sun — and she holds the frame in both hands for a while after the glass has gone whole, looking at the small kid with the buzz cut and the gap-toothed grin, and the kid looks back at her and doesn't say anything, because he can't. Because he's not here anymore. Because he's standing in the kitchen in a purple dress.

She puts the frame back on the shelf. Face down. Then she turns it back up, because that's worse, because hiding it is worse, and she walks away from it before she can decide how she feels about either choice.

The toolbox is still in her hand. She opens it on the coffee table and looks at what's inside — screwdrivers, a hammer, a tape measure, a roll of duct tape that's been used down to the cardboard tube, a set of Allen wrenches in a little red pouch. She doesn't need any of it. She hasn't needed any of it all night. But she likes having it there, the weight of it, the specific clatter it makes when she sets it down.

Mike finishes eating. He rinses his bowl and leaves it in the sink and comes to stand in the living room doorway with his arms crossed, watching her work the room like a person watching a Roomba learn a new floor plan.

"How many did you do," he says.

"I don't know. Twelve? Fourteen?"

"You've been at it for an hour."

"It's zero points." She picks up a screwdriver she doesn't need and puts it down again. "That's the whole thing. It's free. I can do it as much as I want."

"So you're going to fix the whole apartment."

"I already fixed the whole apartment."

"What about the crack in the ceiling."

She looks up. There's a hairline crack running from the corner of the ceiling to the light fixture, the kind of thing you stop seeing after a month. She considers it. "That's drywall. That's not really broken, that's just — settling."

"Sounds like an excuse."

"It's a structural assessment."

"Sounds like an excuse."

She flips him off with a hand that's never done that before, and the gesture comes out wrong somehow — too graceful, the middle finger looking almost elegant — and Mike laughs, actually laughs, and the sound of it fills the room, and for a second the apartment is just an apartment again.

Then she runs out of things.

She stands in the middle of the living room with the toolbox at her feet and looks around and there's nothing left that's broken, nothing left that needs her, and the quiet comes back in and sits down next to her on the couch. She can feel it. The shape of the evening without anything in it. Twenty points. Three days. A line at the bottom of a sheet she folded under her thigh.

She picks up the toolbox. She walks to the door. She puts on her shoes — Jason's shoes, still by the door, still too big for her now, and she has to lace them tight to keep them on — and she grabs the hat off the hook and she's out the door before Mike can ask.

"Where are you —"

"The truck."

"What about the truck."

"The windshield."

She hears him get up from the chair. She's already on the landing, already halfway down the stairs, the cold air coming up through the open breezeway and finding every inch of her that the dress doesn't cover. The parking lot is dark except for the streetlight and the little red glow of somebody's taillights pulling out onto the county road. Her breath comes out in a cloud. She crosses the asphalt with the toolbox banging against her thigh and the hat pulled down, and she stops at the front of the truck and looks at the crack.

It runs from the bottom corner of the passenger side up and across, a long silver spider, twelve inches, maybe thirteen, the one Mike's been meaning to fix for a year. She's seen it a hundred times from the inside. From the outside, in the dark, with the streetlight catching the edges, it looks like something alive.

She sets the toolbox down on the hood. She puts both hands flat on the cold glass, on either side of the crack, and she closes her eyes.

The spell goes through her like a slow wave. Not the snap of the lamp cord, not the quick knit of the mug — this one takes time, and she can feel it take time, the glass flowing back toward itself under her palms, the long crack closing from both ends toward the middle, the stress lines around the impact point smoothing out, the chip at the edge of the glass filling back in. She counts in her head. One. Two. Three. The wave rolls through her hands and out, and the crack is shorter, and shorter, and then it's gone, and the windshield is whole, and she opens her eyes and there's nothing there but a clean sheet of glass with the streetlight in it and her own reflection looking back.

She pulls her hands off the glass. They're warm. The whole cab of the truck is warm, radiating heat like she left a heater running inside it, and she stands there in the cold parking lot with her palms tingling and her breath fogging up the glass she just healed.

"Huh," she says, out loud, to nobody.

The stairs creak behind her. Mike comes down with his jacket half on and stops at the bottom, looking at the truck, looking at the windshield, looking at her standing in front of it with her hands still up like she's just finished a magic trick.

"You fixed my windshield," he says.

"It was broken."

"It's been broken for a year."

"Then it's about time."

He walks over and puts his hand on the glass, on the spot where the crack was, and runs his fingers across it. Nothing. Smooth. He takes his hand back and looks at her, and there's something in his face she can't read — not surprise, exactly, not gratitude, something underneath both of those, something that looks a lot like the thing she felt in the fitting room when she couldn't stop looking at herself.

"That's a thirteen-inch crack," he says.

"I know."

"How long did that take."

"Twenty seconds. Maybe a little more."

He nods slowly. He's doing math too, she can see it, the same math she did in the kitchen — the size of the thing, the time it took, the way it scales. He doesn't say any of it out loud. He just looks at the windshield and then at her and then at the windshield again.

"Okay," he says. "That's a real one."

"A real what."

"A real spell. That's not a cantrip to fix a mug. That's —" He gestures at the glass. "That took something."

"It didn't take anything. It's still zero. I checked."

"It took twenty seconds."

"So?"

"So nothing's free." He says it flat, the way he says things he actually means. "If it costs time, it costs something. You just don't know what yet."

She looks at the windshield. It's whole. It's the only whole thing on the whole truck — the bumper still dented from the deer, the paint still scratched, the tires still worn — and she made one part of it perfect, and the rest of it is still exactly as broken as it was this morning.

"I'll keep it in mind," she says.

"Do."

She picks up the toolbox. They walk back up the stairs together, and Mike holds the door, and the apartment is warm when they get inside, warmer than it was, and she realizes the kitchen window latch is still holding and the draft is still gone and she did that, she did all of it, the whole apartment is a little better because she spent an hour in it with her hands out.

She sits down on the couch. She puts the toolbox on the floor by her feet. Mike sits down in the chair across from her and turns on the TV, low, some basketball game from a decade ago, and neither of them watches it, and the room is quiet except for the crowd noise and the tick of the heater and the little buzz of the lamp she fixed.

She thinks about the windshield. Thirteen inches, twenty seconds. She thinks about the crack in the ceiling she called structural. She thinks about how she told Mike she couldn't use Shape Shift again — she did tell him that, in the kitchen, before dinner, when the arithmetic was still fresh — and how she meant it, and how she still means it, and how the hat is going to have to be enough.

It's going to be enough. It has to be. The hat covers her ears. The ears are the only thing anyone would look at twice. Everything else about her is just a woman in a purple dress, and women in purple dresses walk around every day, and nobody stops them, and nobody asks them to explain themselves. She can do this. She can be a person with a hat.

Twenty points. Three days. Friday.

The phone buzzes on the coffee table. She doesn't look at it. She knows who it is. She knows the three dots are probably there, or not there, or there again, and she knows she's going to have to deal with it, and she's not going to deal with it tonight.

She pulls the folded sheet out from under her thigh. She looks at the bottom line, the homebrew one, the joke one, and she reads it one more time in the light of the lamp she mended, and then she folds it back up and slides it under the couch cushion, into the dent, where Jason used to keep things he didn't want to look at.

"Mike."

"Yeah."

"Thank you for the hat."

He doesn't look away from the TV. "You picked the hat."

"I know." She leans back into the cushion. "Thank you anyway."

The TV crowd noise rolls on, some 2014 playoff game neither of them cares about, and Aria watches the little pixelated players run their routes without seeing any of it. Her hands are restless in her lap. They've been restless since the windshield. She turns the folded sheet over in her head — the cantrips, the little ones, the ones that don't cost anything — and she keeps coming back to the same blank spot. She's used four of them tonight. Mending, twice. That was it, really. The lamp and the mug and the glass. Four castings and she's barely scratched the list.

There's one she hasn't touched since the woods.

She sits up. "Okay."

Mike doesn't look over. "Okay what."

"Prestidigitation."

"Bless you."

"It's a cantrip. It cleans things." She's already on her feet, already scanning the room like it's a level she hasn't explored. "Soiled clothing, soiled people, small rooms. That's the sheet. I want to see what that actually means."

Mike finally turns his head. "You want to clean something."

"I want to know how much I can clean. There's a difference."

He watches her cross to the kitchen and doesn't say anything, which is his way of saying go ahead, I'm watching.

She starts small, because small is what she can trust. The coffee mug from dinner is still in the sink with a ring of cold coffee dried brown around the inside, and she picks it up and holds it and thinks the word and the ring lifts off the ceramic in a fine gray film that dissolves into nothing before it hits the air. The mug is clean. Cleaner than the dishwasher gets it. She turns it over in the light and there's not a water spot, not a smear, not a single thing on it but the shine of the glaze.

"Huh," she says again.

She looks at the sink itself. There's a grease sheen across the basin from whatever Mike cooked two nights ago, and she puts her hand out flat over it and pushes, and the sheen pulls together into a little gray bead of nothing and vanishes. The stainless comes up bright. The drain smells like a drain for one more second and then it doesn't.

She's grinning before she catches herself. She catches herself. She puts the grin away and looks at Mike like she wasn't just grinning, and Mike looks back at her with one eyebrow up and says nothing.

"It's efficient," she says.

"It's a sponge that isn't a sponge."

"It's better than a sponge. A sponge leaves the sponge behind. This doesn't."

She's moving now, the way she moved in the fitting room when the dress kept working — one test, then another, then another, each one handed to her by the last. She goes to the bathroom and looks at the tub and the tub has the ring, the gray ring that's been there since before Mike moved in, and she crouches down and puts her hand on the porcelain and the ring is gone. She stands up and the mirror over the sink is spotted with toothpaste, and she wipes her palm across the air in front of it and the spots come off the glass in a single breath, and now the mirror is just the mirror, just her in it, the hat gone, the ears out, the violet eyes looking back at her with a face that's still not quite a face she knows.

She looks at herself a beat too long. Then she goes back to the kitchen.

The stovetop. The burner grates, the baked-on carbon on the front left one, the one Mike has clearly given up on. She lays her hand over it and the black crust lifts and flakes and disappears and the grate comes up gray and clean, and she does the other three, and then the hood above it, and then the backsplash, and then she's standing in the middle of the kitchen with her hands out like she's conducting an orchestra and the whole room smells like nothing at all.

"You're going to do the whole apartment," Mike says.

"I'm going to do the whole apartment."

"It's ten forty."

"It's ten forty and I have unlimited uses."

He settles back in the chair. He's got the remote in one hand and he's not using it. He's just watching her, the way he watched her at the quarry, that same look — half brother, half guy taking notes for a bug report he's never going to file.

She does the couch. The cushions come up a shade lighter than they were, the gray nap of them lifting and brightening under her palms, and the smell that comes off them — stale air, old sweat, the ghost of a dog that died before either of them was born — goes with it. She does the armchair. She does the rug, kneeling on it, running her hands along the pile until the whole thing is one even color again. She does the drapes. She does the windowsill, the dead flies and the dust and the little black grit that collects in the tracks, and the sill comes up white.

She does the front door. The whole door, inside and out, the scuffs and the fingerprints and the tape residue from some long-ago note, and when she's done it's just a door, a clean door, and she stands in the little entryway breathing hard and looking at it.

She isn't breathing hard from effort. She's breathing hard because she's been moving. There's a difference and she notices the difference and files it. Nothing she's done has cost her anything. She's checked, the way you check a pocket for a wallet, that same pat-down of the inside of her own head, and the well is still full, still bottomless, still whatever it was when she woke up in the leaves.

"It's free," she says.

"What's free."

"All of them. The little ones. I've done —" she counts on her fingers, "— the mug, the sink, the tub, the mirror, the stove, four burners, the hood, the backsplash, the couch, the chair, the rug, the drapes, the sill, the door. That's like twenty things. I feel exactly the same as I did before I started."

Mike sets the remote down. "So the cantrips don't cost."

"The cantrips don't cost."

"But the windshield did."

"The windshield took time." She crosses back into the living room and sits down on the newly-clean couch and the cushion gives under her in a way that feels different, lighter, like it's holding less of the world. "That's the thing. The mending spell isn't one spell. It's a whole bunch of little ones. You're not fixing thirteen inches of glass. You're fixing every inch of it, one after another, as fast as you can push them out. So the size of the thing is the number of castings. And the castings are free. So the only thing it costs is the time it takes to line them up."

Mike is quiet for a second. He does the math in his head the way he does everything, fast and without moving his face. "Then you could fix anything. Given enough time."

"Given enough time."

"A car. A house."

"Maybe." She pulls her knees up under her, which is a thing she's noticed she does now, the way the dress rides and the way her body folds into it, and she doesn't think about it, she just does it. "I don't know what the ceiling is. I don't know if there is one. That's what I keep hitting. Every time I test something it just — works, and I don't know where the edge is, and I can't find the edge, and that's the part that scares me."

"You're not scared."

"I'm a little scared."

"You're cleaning my apartment at eleven at night because you can't sit still."

She looks at him. He looks back. Neither of them says the thing, which is that he's right, and she knows he's right, and she's known he's right since she sat down on the couch and started counting things to fix.

She gets up and does the hallway. She does the light switches, every one, the grimy little plates that come up white under her thumb. She does the doorframes. She does the baseboards, which is a thing she would never in a million years have done as Jason, and she's doing it now on her hands and knees in a dress, and the dress stays clean, and that's the other thing, that's the thing she keeps circling — she's been crawling around a dirty apartment for twenty minutes and the fabric is still exactly the color it was when she took it off the rack.

She stops in the middle of the hallway.

"Mike."

"Yeah."

"The dress is clean."

"I can see the dress."

"No, I mean — I've been on the floor. I've been in the sink. I've had my hands on grease and dust and dead bugs and the dress is —" She looks down at herself. The smoky purple, the swooping neckline, the one shoulder bare, the whole thing hanging off her exactly the way it hung in the fitting room, not a wrinkle, not a smudge, not a single thread out of place. "I did that. When I cleaned everything I cleaned myself too. That's what 'soiled people' means. I'm cleaning myself every time I cast it."

Mike rubs his jaw. "So you don't need a shower."

"I don't need a shower." She says it slowly, testing it. "I don't need a shower. That's — okay. That's a lot. That's a whole thing."

She finishes the hallway. She does the bathroom door and the closet door and the little strip of wall where Mike's shoulder has worn a shine into the paint over years of walking past it, and the shine goes away, and the wall is flat and even and new. She does the bathroom again, the toilet, the floor tiles, the grout, which comes up from gray to white line by line and takes her a minute because there's a lot of grout and she's pushing each little stretch of it through by hand. She does the shower curtain, both sides, the pink mildew that's been creeping up from the hem since summer, and the whole thing goes clear and clean and smells like the inside of a new plastic bag.

She stands in the doorway and looks at the bathroom and it's the cleanest bathroom she has ever seen in her life. It's clean the way a hospital is clean. It's clean the way nothing in the real world is clean, because the real world always leaves a little behind, and this didn't leave anything behind.

She checks the well again. Full.

She goes back to the living room and sits down hard and puts her head back on the cushion and stares at the ceiling, at the spot where the crack was, the spot that's still faintly lighter than the paint around it, the one thing in the whole apartment she hasn't touched because she told him it was structural and she meant it.

Mike's still in the chair. The game's still on. He's not watching it. He's watching her.

"You're stalling," he says.

"I'm testing."

"You've tested. You tested for an hour. The apartment's clean. The apartment's never been clean. You did the grout, Aria. Nobody does the grout unless they're stalling."

She keeps her eyes on the ceiling. He's right and she knows he's right and there's no version of this where she gets to pretend he isn't. She's been running around his apartment casting spells on things that don't need spells because every time she stops moving, the thing she's actually supposed to be doing is sitting there on the coffee table buzzing at her, and she's been walking past it for an hour.

The phone is on the coffee table. Face down. It's been face down since dinner.

"How many," she says.

"How many what."

"How many times has it gone off."

Mike looks at the phone. He looks back at her. "Eleven texts. Two calls. One voicemail."

"You counted."

"You weren't going to."

She sits up. She reaches for the phone and she picks it up and she turns it over and the screen comes on and there they are, the whole stack, Sera's name at the top of every one, the timestamps running from six o'clock to nine minutes ago, and she doesn't read them. She can't. If she reads them she'll answer them and if she answers them she'll have to be Jason and she can't be Jason, Jason is gone, Jason is this, and this is a woman with pointed ears under a hat who just spent an hour cleaning a bachelor apartment because she couldn't think of anything else to do with her hands.

"I have to tell her something," she says.

"You have to tell her something."

"I can't be Jason. Jason doesn't exist. If I call her as Jason I have to lie about everything, and she's —" She stops. She doesn't have the word for what Sera is. Friend is too small. She's the person who built the world. She's the person who wrote the class and the race and the spells and the little homebrew line at the bottom of the sheet that Aria still can't look at directly. Every good thing about this body, Sera made it. Sera drew it. Sera's the reason there's a body at all. "She's going to know something's wrong the second I open my mouth. She always knows."

Mike doesn't argue. He just waits, the way he's been waiting all night, letting her get there on her own.

She opens the messages. She doesn't read them. She scrolls past them, all eleven, the previews blurring past her eyes, and she opens a new message and she puts her thumbs on the keyboard and she sits there with the cursor blinking and nothing in her head.

Then she types: hey. it's jason's — and deletes it.

Then: hey sera it's me, different phone and deletes it.

Then: i know i've been dark all day. i'm okay. something came up. can we — and she stops, because something came up is the flattest lie in the language, and she deletes it too.

She sets the phone down on her knee and looks at Mike. "Friday's four days."

"Three days. It's Tuesday night."

"Three days. Three days of her texting me and me not answering and her deciding I'm dead or I hate her or I'm ghosting her, and then I show up at game night as a stranger and she's got all that in her head, and it's going to be —" She shakes her head. "It's going to be wrong. It's going to come in wrong. She's going to look at me and see a stranger and feel the whole three days of silence underneath it and it's going to be wrong before I even say anything."

"So don't wait three days."

She looks at him.

"You said it yourself," he says. "She always knows. So get in front of it. You don't have to tell her the truth. You just have to not be a mystery when you walk in the door."

Aria looks down at the phone. The screen's gone dark. She wakes it up and the cursor's still there, still blinking, still waiting for her to be somebody.

She types: hey. this is going to sound weird and i'm sorry. i'm a friend of jason's. his brother mike can vouch for me. jason asked me to reach out to you. can we talk before friday? i'd rather do it before the group.

She reads it twice. It's not a lie, exactly. It's just not the truth yet.

She hits send.

For a second nothing happens. The little gray bubble sits there with the message in it and the three dots don't appear and the room is dead quiet except for the crowd noise and the heater and somewhere down the block a car door slamming.

Then the dots come up.

They sit there. They sit there a long time — longer than a person needs to type who is this — and Aria watches them the way you watch a pot, the way you watch a light in a window across the street at two in the morning, and she can feel her own pulse in her throat even though she's checked the well and it's full and she knows she isn't tired and she knows nothing she's done tonight has cost her a single thing.

The dots stop. The message comes in.

ok. tomorrow?

Aria lets out a breath she didn't know she was holding.

"She said tomorrow," she says.

"Tomorrow's Wednesday."

"I know what day tomorrow is." She's already typing, already answering, tomorrow works, i'll text you a place, and her thumbs are moving faster than her head, and she sends it before she can take it back, and then she sits there with the phone in both hands and the whole thing is suddenly, terribly real. Tomorrow. Not Friday. Tomorrow, in a coffee shop somewhere, with a stranger's face and a stranger's name, and Sera across the table with her curls and her glasses and her green eyes that are going to look at Aria and look for Jason and not find him.

Mike gets up out of the chair. He goes to the kitchen and comes back with two glasses of water and sets one down in front of her and takes his seat again and picks the remote back up and turns the volume down to almost nothing.

"You want me to come with you," he says. Not a question.

"No." She picks up the water. "If you're there she's going to look at you and think you're covering for something. Which you are. But she can't think that."

"She's going to look at you and think you're covering for something anyway."

"Yeah." Aria drinks. The water's cold and it goes down clean and she realizes she hasn't eaten since the burger and she isn't hungry, she's something else, something that's sitting high in her chest and won't come down. "But at least it'll be me she's looking at."

She pulls the sheet out from under the cushion. She unfolds it and looks at the bottom line one more time, the homebrew one, the joke one, and she reads it and folds it and slides it back under the cushion into the dent, and this time she doesn't think about the windshield or the ceiling or the well. This time she thinks about a table for two and a coffee she won't drink and a woman with wild auburn hair who is going to look up when the door opens and see an elf in a hat and have no idea that the elf is the person she's been waiting all day to hear from.

"Mike."

"Yeah."

"What if she doesn't believe me."

He doesn't answer right away. The game plays on, silent, a decade-old score scrolling across the bottom of the screen. He takes a drink of his water and sets the glass down and looks at her, and his face is the same face he had at the quarry, the one that says he's already run every branch of this and doesn't like any of the outputs.

"Then she doesn't believe you," he says. "And you're still standing there. And she still has to decide what to do about it."

Aria nods. She sets the phone face up on the cushion beside her, so she can see it, so it can see her, and the last message glows there in the dark of the living room — ok. tomorrow? — and she leaves it there and doesn't answer it again, because it's already answered, and the answer is yes, and yes is the thing that's going to happen, and there is nothing left to test in this apartment to hold it off.

She reaches over and turns off the lamp she mended, and the room goes dark except for the TV and the phone, and the little glow of the screen lights her hands and the folded cushion and the clean white sill and the whole quiet apartment she spent an hour making new.