The clock on the nightstand read ten-thirty and Aria was still under Dani's arm, still warm, still full of the question she'd been circling since the words I want kids had landed in the room like a dropped plate. She turned her head on the pillow and said it flat, no runway, because runway would have made it a bigger thing than it was. "So — do I even have a period?" Dani's hand, which had been doing something slow and absent on Aria's stomach, stopped. Not froze. Stopped, the way a record stops when the needle lifts. Aria watched her face from the outside, the way she'd been watching every human face since day one, reading the weather.

"You've been a girl for, what, three weeks?" Dani said, and her eyebrows had gone up into her hairline, and there was a laugh buried in it somewhere but she wasn't spending it yet. "I don't know if I have one either. I've had mine for — no. Wait. That's not the same thing at all." She propped herself on an elbow and looked down at Aria with the expression of someone who had just realized the board game they were playing had a rulebook nobody had read. Aria sat up, and the sheet pooled in her lap, and she felt the shape of the question sitting in her chest like a stone she'd swallowed. Tolkien elves chose. Forgotten Realms elves just didn't get pregnant often. She didn't know which world she was from, and the not-knowing was the whole problem, because the not-knowing meant the body could do anything, and anything was a big word to hold at ten-thirty in the morning.

"Okay," Dani said, slowly, the way you'd talk someone off a ledge. "So we're doing this. Right now. Before coffee." She reached over the side of the bed and came back up with Aria's hand, turning it over in hers, and her thumb found the silver line across the palm — the.308's signature, healed shut but not gone. "We've got two hours before you fly to Soldier Field and tell sixty thousand people you're the only elf on Earth. So do you want to find out before, or after?"

Aria looked down at her own palm, at Dani's thumb resting on the scar, and the answer came up out of her before she'd finished assembling it, which was how she knew it was true. "Before." She pulled her hand back and pressed it flat against her own stomach, low, the way you'd check for a fever. "Because if I stand up in front of a stadium and there's a thing I don't know about my own body, that's the one thing they'll smell. Sixty thousand people, Dani. They'll smell it." She swung her legs off the bed, and the floor was cold, and Pancake lifted his head off the rug to watch her with the flat judgment of a creature who had already heard all of this and was unimpressed. "I can't read myself. There's no menu. But I can meditate — four hours, the whole column — and the last time I did, I could *feel* the dials. Every one of them. Heart rate, hearing, how fast I heal." She looked back at Dani over her shoulder, silver hair falling across her bare spine. "Maybe one of them says whether I can get pregnant. And if it does, I'd rather hear it from me than find out in nine months."

Dani sat up, the sheet sliding off her shoulder, and didn't reach for her. That was the thing Aria was learning to read in her — she didn't grab at the honest answer, she held it at arm's length and looked at it. "Four hours," she said. "I'm at work at two." She glanced at the clock, then back. "You want me to stay, or you want the room?"

Dani didn't push. She just nodded once, pulled the sheet up over her shoulder, and slid off the bed toward the bathroom, and Aria heard the shower kick on and the water slam against tile, and she sat there on the cold floor with Pancake watching her from the rug, and she thought: two hours. Not four. Four was the number she'd said out loud, the number that was true for a full recharge, but the clock on the nightstand said ten-thirty and Soldier Field was at noon and she had to fly to Chicago, which was a two-hour haul at the pace she could hold without shredding her own wings, and flying while meditating was the kind of thing she was pretty sure would end with her in a cornfield. So two hours. Half a column. Enough to feel the dials, maybe not enough to turn all of them. She folded her legs under her and closed her eyes and reached for the room inside her head the way she'd learned to — the long hallway with the numbered doors and the column of light at the end — and she felt the first thing almost immediately, which was that the hallway was shorter than it had been. She was already inside. She'd been living here for weeks and had just been calling it a body.

Two hours was a lie she told the clock. The hallway was shorter, yes, but the doors had moved too — she counted them the way she'd counted them the first time, and there were more of them now, or fewer, or the same ones wearing different numbers, and she understood with the flat certainty of a thing already known that the room had been rearranging itself while she was busy being a person. She went down the hall instead of up it. That was the trick she'd learned at Carol Miller's kitchen table and hadn't named until now: the dials weren't at the end of the hallway, they were in the walls, humming, and if she pressed her palm flat against the plaster she could feel each one turn under the skin of her hand like the knobs on a stove.

She found the one that mattered before she found the others. It sat low in the wall, near the floor, the way a breaker panel sits in a basement, and when she put her hand on it the whole hallway went quiet the way a room goes quiet when someone finally says the thing. It wasn't a yes. It wasn't a no. It was a dial with a setting she could read and not yet turn, and the reading said: possible, contingent, not now — the body knew what it was for and hadn't decided whether it was for that, and the not-deciding felt less like a curse than she'd expected and more like a door left unlocked on purpose. She held her palm there a while. The shower was still running on the other side of the world. Then she pulled her hand back and went looking for the column of light, because the column was the part she actually needed, and on the way she found something she hadn't expected: a door she hadn't opened, unnumbered, with a smell coming through it like bread.

The door wasn't locked. That was the first thing — no handle, no hinge, just a seam in the plaster that gave when she leaned on it, and the smell came through in a wave, warm and yeast-sweet and wrong for a hallway with no kitchen in it. She stepped through and the room inside was small, low-ceilinged, the kind of room you'd find behind a bakery at four in the morning, and it was empty except for a wooden table and a single loaf on a board, still steaming, the crust crackling as it cooled. She stood in the doorway and understood, with the flat clarity of the hallway, that this was not a memory and not a metaphor. This was the inventory. The body knew what it was for — and what it was for was this: the door was unlocked because the body had already decided, sometime in the last three weeks, that it wanted to be the kind of thing that could fill a house. The dial near the floor hadn't said *no*. It had said *later*, and *later* was a setting you could live with, because *later* meant there was a version of the future where she wasn't just allowed this — she was built for it. She reached out and tore a corner off the loaf, and it was warm in her hand, and she ate it standing up in a room inside her own head, and it tasted like every Sunday morning she'd ever slept through as Jason.

She came out of it the way you come out of cold water — all at once, gasping, the hallway folding shut behind her eyes. The bedroom was exactly where she'd left it: Dani's clock at twelve past twelve, Pancake still on the rug with his tail tucked over his nose, and Aria's own hands braced flat on the floor, which was cold and real and not a wall inside her head. She sat back on her heels and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, and her wrist smelled like bread, which was impossible, which was fine. Two hours. The column sat in her chest half-full and humming, forty-five points' worth of room with maybe twenty in it, and every dial she'd touched was still turned to the same setting: *later*. She laughed once, out loud, short — a laugh with no audience — because she'd gone in there braced for a *no* and come out holding a *when*, and the difference between those two words was the whole rest of her life.

Dani came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped to her chest and her hair dripping, and she stopped in the doorway the way she always did when she was deciding whether to ask. Aria looked up at her from the floor and said it before Dani could find the question. "Not a no." She got her feet under her and stood, and her knees cracked — three weeks in this body and it still cracked like Jason's — and she crossed the room and took the towel out of Dani's hands and dropped it on the floor. "There's a version of me that can have kids. The body hasn't picked yet. But it's — the door's unlocked, Dani. That's what it said. *Later*, not *never*." She put both palms flat on Dani's chest, over the sternum, and felt the heartbeat under the heel of her hand going faster than Dani's face was admitting to. "Which means I don't need the pills and I don't need the paper and I don't need to stand in front of sixty thousand people at noon with a lie in my mouth about what I am. Raw's what I've got. Raw's what I'm built for." She leaned in and said the next part against Dani's jaw, low, so it wasn't a speech, it was just true. "You want to test that before I go, or you want to hold it for tonight?"

Dani didn't answer with a word. She reached past Aria, picked the towel back up off the floor, and folded it — once, twice, edges lined up, the way she did everything when she was buying time — then set it on the edge of the bed and looked at Aria with her mouth already half-open on something she was deciding not to say, and then said it anyway. "Raw's a big word for a girl who's three weeks old." She said it without heat, without a laugh buried in it. "You went in there and read a dial and came out with a maybe, and now you're standing here telling me the door's unlocked like that's the same thing as a yes. It's not. And I'm the one who's got the working parts in this equation, so I get to have an opinion."

She took Aria's face in both hands — cold palms, still damp from the shower — and held it the way you'd hold something you were afraid of dropping. "Here's what I think. I think you're scared of the stadium and you're about to turn that into a reason to do something irreversible with me, because I'm the one thing in this house that doesn't have sixty thousand people watching. And I'm not going to be that. Not today." Her thumb moved across Aria's cheekbone, once. "I want the kids. I said it and I meant it. But I want them on a Tuesday in some year that doesn't have a countdown attached, not on the morning you've got a flight to catch and a speech to give. So — no. Not before." She let go, stepped back, and picked up her jeans off the chair. "Not because I don't want you. Because I want you after."

Aria stood there with her palms still open at her sides and the cold floor coming up through her heels, and the thing rising in her chest wasn't anger, it was the strange clean ache of being told no by somebody who wasn't leaving — which was a flavor of rejection she'd never had before and had no name for. She looked at the clock. Twelve twenty. She looked at her own hands, then at Dani pulling a shirt over her head with her back turned, and she said the only true thing she had left. "Okay." Then she crossed to the chair by the window, picked up the coat, and started getting dressed for Chicago.

The coat hit the floor before it finished leaving her hand. Aria stood bare in the middle of Dani's bedroom with her palms turned up and her eyes half-closed, and she stopped getting dressed the way you stop reaching for a light switch when you remember you can see in the dark.

She started at the shoulders. Prestidigitation moved first, the way it always did — the old faithful, the cantrip that could clean a shirt or chill a beer or, apparently, spin raw nothing into thread. She felt the silk arrive against her skin before she saw it, cool and weightless and impossibly fine, and when she opened her eyes the white had already climbed down her arms in two long panels that fell past her wrists and hung there, loose, waiting. Gold found the seams on its own, thin bright lines tracing the edges like someone had run a heated pen along every fold — a high collar that opened into a deep V, the fabric gathering under her breasts and spilling down past her hips in a fall of pleats that moved when she breathed. The cut was not modest. The cut was a decision. The robe bared the long line of her sternum and the pale tops of her breasts and the whole architecture of her waist, and it flowed when she turned, and it was the single most beautiful thing she had ever made with her hands.

She held out her arms and the sandals came up off the floor to meet her — thin gold straps, no thicker than a bracelet, soles like a rumor. She stepped into them and they were warm, and they fit the arch of her foot like they'd been measured, and when she pressed her heel down the floor stopped being cold. She'd have to test that on gravel later. She had a feeling gravel would also stop being cold.

The armband was the last piece, and she built it slow because she wanted to watch. A serpent coiled twice around her right upper arm, gold, its head resting against the curve of her bicep with one flat obsidian eye, and when she flexed the muscle the whole thing tightened like it knew. Then the cape — violet, deep as a bruise, and when she threw it over her shoulders and let it fall the inner lining caught the bedroom light and threw it back in oil-slick greens and pinks, iridescent, alive. She fastened it at the throat with nothing but a thought.

She turned to the window and let the wings come.

They didn't tear through silk the way she'd braced for. They came from between her shoulder blades the way breath comes — a pressure, a give, and then white light unfolding in two long arcs behind her, feathers that weren't feathers, more like the memory of feathers rendered in something that hummed. The cape lifted with them, caught on the updraft, and the iridescent lining threw greens and pinks across the ceiling in slow turns. Aria stood in the middle of Dani's bedroom with her arms out and her wings half-spread and the whole room lit violet at the edges, and she watched herself in the black glass of the window — a girl in white silk and gold, a serpent on her arm, wings the color of moonlight, standing where a forty-dollar coat had been lying on the floor two minutes ago.

Dani's shower had stopped. The bathroom door cracked open and Dani stood there with a towel around her hair and nothing else, and Aria watched her face go through it — the blink, the step back, the hand coming up to the doorframe like the frame was the only thing keeping the floor level. "You built that," Dani said. Not a question. "Out of nothing. In my bedroom. While I was in the shower."

"The sandals were the hard part," Aria said, and turned so the wings caught the window light, and let Dani look, because Dani looking was the whole point of building it. "That's what I'm wearing to Soldier Field. Not a costume. Not a dress I found. This. Me. Nothing I can take off and be Jason again underneath."

Dani came across the room slowly, towel still bunched at her throat, and stopped an arm's length away with her head tilted like she was reading a shelf label. Her eyes went down the front of the robe and didn't come back up for a while. "Okay," she said, and then, quieter, mostly to herself, "holy shit." Her gaze had stalled on the deep V, on the pale tops of Aria's breasts where the silk gathered and spilled — the way the fabric held them and let them go at the same time. She lifted one hand, stopped it in the air an inch from the collar, and let it drop. "That's not fair. You built that and you've got — those. In it. I'm at work in two hours and I'm supposed to think about anything else."

She crouched instead, which put her eye level with the sandals, and turned Aria's ankle with two fingers to look at the sole — thin as a rumor, gold straps no thicker than a bracelet, warm where they met the skin. "If those are comfortable," Dani said, "you need a patent. Not a spell — a patent. I'm serious. Walk across the floor." She watched Aria take three steps and then reached out and pressed a thumb into the arch of the sandal, testing it like a tire. "That's not leather. That's not anything. You made shoes out of nothing and they fit better than the ones I paid for." She stood up, and her attention caught on the serpent coiled twice around Aria's right arm, gold, head resting against the bicep with one flat obsidian eye. Dani leaned in, close enough that Aria could feel the shower-warmth coming off her. "And that," she said, "is straight out of Skyrim. Don't tell me it isn't. That's the armband you loot off a dead thane. You know exactly what you did."

Aria flexed, and the serpent tightened like it knew, and she turned her arm so the gold caught the window light, and she didn't say anything, because Dani's face was saying enough — the small step back, the laugh that was mostly air, the way she reached for the towel on the floor and then forgot what she'd picked it up for. Out past the window, somewhere over the rooftops, a plane was climbing north toward Chicago, and the clock on the nightstand said twelve twenty-four, and Aria's wings shifted with the draft from the window, iridescent greens and pinks sliding across the ceiling in slow turns.

She crossed the room and kissed her — not the deep one, not yet, just enough to taste the mint of Dani's toothpaste and the shower-warmth still coming off her skin, and while she was doing it her hand slid down between them and found Dani's cock where it hung soft and half-interested against her thigh, and she gave it a quick two-fingered tickle, up the underside, the way you'd tweak a cat's chin.

Dani made a sound into her mouth that was half laugh and half outrage. "You—" But Aria was already gone, silk and gold and cape whipping past the foot of the bed, out the bedroom door, through the little living room where Pancake lifted his head off his paws in slow, profound judgment, and out onto the balcony rail in a single motion, and then she was over it, and the air took her.

The wings caught on the second beat — that first drop, that sick lurch of the stomach, and then the white light spreading wide behind her and the whole city tilting up as she climbed. She heard Dani's voice somewhere behind and below, a single word she couldn't make out through the wind, and Aria banked east toward the lake, the violet cape snapping, the gold serpent cold against her arm, and the clock on the nightstand back in that bedroom said twelve twenty-six and the sun on the water was a long white blade and she was, for the first time since the woods, exactly the thing she'd built.