The phone leans against the stack of Gordon's trust paperwork and the foundation's letter, and Aria sits cross-legged on the bare floorboards because the couch is still wearing its plastic and the radiator is hissing like it's got opinions. Sera's boxes are stacked in the corner with her handwriting on the flaps in three different colors of marker, and Dani is humming something tuneless in the kitchen, and the January light comes through the window thin and white and lands on Aria's hands, which she has not looked at directly since she woke up. She hits record. The little red dot blinks at her like it's waiting her out. "This is Aria Silverleaf," she says, and hears her own voice do the thing it does now — the low bell of it, the vowels that don't quite come from Indiana — and she keeps her eyes on the lens instead of the reflection in the dark screen, where a silver-haired beauty is watching back. "I'm here because you opened your wallets for a woman you'd never met. Some of you gave twenty dollars you couldn't spare. I know what that costs." Her voice cracks on *costs*, and outside the window a car door slams in the cold and she flinches, and on the screen her own hands have started to shake, and she keeps talking anyway, because stopping now would be the lie.

"I'm going to give it back a hundredfold," she says, and the next words are already lining up behind her teeth, the way they do when she's stopped deciding and started meaning it — hospitals, funeral homes, two days a week, a second first breath for somebody who's out of them. She doesn't get to finish. Dani's bare feet slap the floor and Pancake comes off the counter with a thud and a yowl, and Dani is in the doorway with her phone up and her face doing something complicated, half-laughing, half-something else. "Aria," she says, and turns the screen around, and it's the video, already posted, already climbing, the little red dot in the corner of *her* screen still blinking because Aria never hit stop. "You didn't say a word about the trust. Or the letter. You just said the part where you give it away." She sets the phone on the table between them, face-up, the comments ticking upward under it like a second pulse, and Aria looks at the number climbing and then at Dani's mouth, which is pressed flat the way it gets when she's holding a laugh and a worry in the same hand. "So," Dani says. "Do we tell them about the ninety thousand, or do we let them keep thinking you're broke and holy?"

Aria doesn't answer her. She reaches over and turns the phone back around, face-up on her own knees, and hits the record button fresh — the red dot blooms and the comments keep ticking underneath like water finding a crack. "Hello everyone," she says, to the lens, to the eighty-nine thousand strangers, to whoever is holding a phone in a checkout line. Dani's mouth opens and closes behind her, and Pancake's tail lashes once against the doorframe, and Aria keeps her eyes on the little dot because the reflection in the dark screen is a stranger who is going to say this right. "This is Aria Silverleaf. Or Aria Mithlass, if you prefer the Elvish." The radiator knocks twice, like punctuation. "I haven't spoken directly to you since I visited Soldier Field back in November. Congratulations, by the way, to the Packers for winning the division. The Bears will be back next season."

She hears Dani exhale through her nose — the laugh she's been holding — and doesn't look. "Anyway. Your generosity has given me a life, and I cannot thank you enough. With your financial assistance I have been able to completely legitimize my existence, which really isn't something someone should have to do, but it was something I had to do." Sera's boxes lean in the corner with their three-colored marker, and the foundation's letter sits under the phone like a dare she hasn't picked up yet. She takes the breath and holds it a beat. "Before I tell you about what I've been up to for the last month, let me start by pledging to donate back to the Crown Point Community Foundation no less than five times what was collected on my behalf, to use for the community. I don't know how long it'll take." Her jaw sets. "But I swear on my honor as an elf to get it done."

She reaches past the camera and taps stop. The dot dies. For a second the room is just the radiator and Pancake's tail and the thin white January light, and Aria sets the phone down on Gordon's paperwork and finally looks at Dani, whose face is doing the complicated thing again — the flat mouth, the eyebrows up. "Five times," Dani says. "You just swore five times ninety grand on a video with no cut."

Aria looks at her and agrees — but she doesn't say it, only nods, and the nod has a plan already folded inside it that Dani can't see yet, because the plan came together somewhere between the second hospital and the third funeral home and she's been waiting to say it out loud to the two of them first, over wine, not into a lens. She files it where she files things she owes them and reaches past the camera and taps record. The red dot blooms. Dani's eyebrows go all the way up and stay there. "Since that day in November," Aria says, "I have been able to visit three different hospitals each week, and each one in a different town — Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, on a rotation I kept in a notebook like a girl doing homework." The radiator ticks. "Each stop was a chance to help. I frankly wore myself out on a lot of days. Some nights I landed on a roof I wasn't supposed to be on and slept four hours and went again."

She stops and lets that sit, and the number is already behind her teeth, and she makes herself say it slow because it deserves slow. "All that work paid off. One hundred and twenty-six people who otherwise might not have made it out of the hospital are back with their families." The words land in the room and Dani has gone still with her phone half-raised, and Aria keeps her eyes on the dot. "Two days each week I went to funeral homes around the Midwest. Bringing someone back is a lot harder than keeping someone here, and it doesn't always work. On eight tries I was able to give six people back to their loved ones." Her jaw works once. "It isn't perfect, but it feels amazing to know it's possible at all."

She pauses again, and this time she does look up — at Dani, at the doorway, at the flat mouth and the eyebrows — and she's looking for approval, she knows she is, the way she used to look at Sera across a game table when she'd just done something clever and wanted somebody to tell her it landed. Dani sets the phone down on Gordon's paperwork and mouths something Aria can't read, and Pancake's tail lashes once against the doorframe, and the red dot keeps blinking, patient, waiting for her to decide what comes next.

She takes the breath and lifts her chin at the lens, and the red dot catches in her left eye like a coal. "Now here we are in 2027," she says, and the year comes out of her mouth strange and bright, because she has never said it before, has never been anyone who got to say it. "My first full year with you is just beginning, and I thought there was no better way to start it than by telling you that I love you all, and that I will keep trying to make the world a little bit brighter." The radiator knocks once. She lets the corner of her mouth go. "And maybe a little bit more violet." She winks — the left eye, the one with the dot in it — and her smile comes up all the way to her ears, and she reaches past the phone and taps stop. The dot dies. For half a second the room is only Pancake's tail and the thin white January light on the bare floorboards, and the smile is still on her face like it hasn't gotten the message that the camera's off.

"Aria." Dani's voice, flat and fast. "Aria, that was good, that was really good, but we should—" and Aria is already thumbing the browser open, already past the password field Sera set up three days ago with the domain she bought as a joke and then didn't return, and the page loads — violet on black, a single silver leaf in the corner, ARIA SILVERLEAF in letters that look like they were cut from moonlight. She drags the video file into the upload box before Dani finishes her sentence. "—maybe think about the part where you said five times ninety grand on the record, like, forever, on the internet, before we—" The progress bar fills. The little wheel spins. Dani's bare feet stop on the floorboards two feet behind her and Aria can feel her standing there, can feel the exact shape of the objection arriving. "Posted," Aria says, and turns the phone around so Dani can see the page refresh — the video sitting there under the silver leaf, the view counter already ticking, already climbing out of the single digits. Dani's mouth opens. Stays open. Pancake jumps onto the windowsill and sits with his back to them, which is Pancake's way of saying he saw it coming.

Dani's mouth is still open when the view counter rolls past forty and keeps going, and Aria watches it the way you watch a tide come in — no single wave worth naming, just the water getting higher. The comments start stacking under the video, a wall of them, and she catches two before they blur: she said five times, and VioletAngel.com, and then a third that says she's real, she's actually real, and Aria's chest does something she doesn't have a name for, warm and tight at once, like a hand closing around a lit coal. Pancake flicks an ear at the screen without turning around. Dani's bare foot presses down on the floorboard behind her, one creak, the sound she makes when she has decided to say the thing.

"Sera made that page three days ago," Dani says. "She made it as a joke. There's a leaf. It's a joke, Aria." Aria sets the phone face-down on Gordon's paperwork and turns, and Dani is standing with her arms crossed and her eyebrows doing the whole argument by themselves, and behind her the kitchen light catches the freckles on her nose the way it does in the morning, and Aria wants to kiss her and also wants to win. "It's not a joke anymore," Aria says. "It's a door. People were going to find me somewhere. Better they find me where I put the sign." Dani's mouth flattens, the holding-a-laugh-and-a-worry mouth, and Aria reaches past her and picks up the wine she never brought in from the car, sets it on the table between them like evidence. "And when Sera wakes up," she says, "she's going to be furious for about nine seconds, and then she's going to check the analytics." Dani's arms come uncrossed. "You're impossible," she says, and there's no argument left in it, only the shape of one, and the phone on the table buzzes — once, twice, a third time — the notifications already arriving faster than the screen can list them.

Sera has been officially moved in for four days — since the thirtieth — and the evidence is everywhere: her three-color marker handwriting on the flap of a box that still says KITCHEN (MISC), her good lamp now on the end table by the window, her coffee mug on the sill with the cold dregs gone to a skin. The couch still wears its plastic because nobody has had the nerve to peel it. Aria crosses the bare floorboards, and the floor is cold through her socks, and she leans over the arm of the couch and presses two fingers to Sera's shoulder, then her palm flat when two fingers don't do it. "Wake up," she says, and Sera makes the noise she makes, a groan folded into the cushion, one arm coming up to swat at the air. "Sera. I did a thing."

Sera's eyes come open in stages, green and unfocused, the glasses still on her face because she fell asleep in them again, one lens smudged. She sits up with her hair on the wrong side of her head and says, "You posted it," before Aria has said anything else — because she knows, the way she has always known, her voice still gravelly with sleep and already resigned. Aria sits down on the plastic with a sound like a grocery bag, and Dani comes around the counter with two mugs and sets one in front of each of them, and Aria puts both hands flat on the table and tells them that she has news for them, bigger news than the foundation’s GoFundMe, which was closed at Aria’s request just a few days after it was started.

Sera sets her mug down without drinking from it and folds her arms on the table, and she has that specific look she gets when a bug report turns out to be a feature — the eyebrows up, the mouth already halfway to a question. "You said bigger than the GoFundMe," she says. "The GoFundMe was ninety grand and a federal filing. So." She tilts her head. "What did you do."

Aria doesn't answer right away, because the answer is the thing she has been carrying alone since the third week, the thing she has been holding back the way you hold a coin under your tongue — and she wants to hand it over carefully, to both of them, not drop it. She reaches over and pulls the notebook out of the box by the leg of the table, the one with the hospital rotation in it, and flips past the pages of towns and dates to the back, where the columns are, where she has been sketching the shape of it in Elvish script that nobody else in the room can read. "I couldn't sleep for a while there," she says. "Not the elf rest. The other kind. So I started going into the hallway and reading myself, the way I did with the dial." She looks up at Sera, then at Dani, and the January light is on her hands again and she makes herself look at them this time. "I've been studying my own spells. Not using them. Studying them. Like homework. Greater Restoration heals congenital conditions — it can regrow a limb, it can rebuild tissue that never formed right in the first place. True Polymorph can make you anything, but it's a shell. It's a new body draped over the old one, and if it breaks, you snap back to what you were. I wanted something in between." She puts her palm flat on the open page, and under her hand the ink lifts slightly off the paper, the cantrip doing it before she's decided to, the letters rearranging themselves into a shape that reads like a title. "I made a new one. It isn't in the book. I built it out of Greater Restoration's guts and trimmed the parts that were too much." She says the name the way you introduce a child. "Alter Form."

Sera's hand goes flat on the table, fingers spread, and she stares at the Elvish on the page the way she stares at code she didn't write. "You made a spell," she says. Not a question. She pulls the notebook toward her with two fingers and turns it, and the ink under Aria's palm shivers and goes still. "You made a spell and you didn't tell us for three weeks."

"I wanted to be sure it worked before I said the name out loud." Aria takes the notebook back and closes it, and the pages settle with a sound like a small door. "It's not a new body. That's the point. Polymorph is a coat — you put it on, it looks like you, and the minute somebody hits it hard enough the coat comes off and you're standing there in the old skin again. Alter Form doesn't do that. It goes in and changes the actual tissue. Bone, cartilage, the shape of a jaw, the way a rib sits. Internal organs. The thing that makes you you at the cellular level." She looks at Dani, then at Sera, and makes herself say the next part plainly because it deserves plain. "Magical plastic surgery. But the base stays. You're still you. You're just — closer to the you that was already there."

Dani has stopped moving. Her mug sits in front of her going cold and she hasn't touched it, and she is looking at Aria with an expression Aria can't read, which for Dani is rare and therefore important. "Say that again," Dani says. "The part about who it's for."

"For people who don't fit their own bodies." Aria turns the closed notebook over in her hands. "Greater Restoration can rebuild tissue that never formed right or has been damaged or diseased — that's what it's for. But it only goes one direction: it fixes what's broken back to the baseline. It assumes the baseline is the right answer. For some people the baseline is the wrong answer. It was never the thing they were supposed to be." She sets the notebook down. "So I built the spell that asks a different question. Not *what's wrong with you* — *what do you want to be*."

Sera is the one who asks it, because Sera always asks the question in the room that nobody else wants to say out loud. "You've used it," she says. "On people. On real people, before you knew."

"A few times," Aria says. "Small things. I didn't want to practice on anybody who didn't ask." She looks at the notebook in her hands and then sets it down, and the January light is thin on the bare floor and she makes herself say the rest the way she rehearsed it in the hallway at four in the morning. "It started in Michigan, the second week. A woman in a car wreck — the whole front of the car had come apart around her, and she was awake when I got there, which is the worst version, because awake means she knew exactly how bad it was. I put my hands on her and started the healing, and she looked up at me with her face half gone and she said —" Aria's mouth does something that isn't quite a smile. "She said, *while you're in there, honey, could you fix the nose?*"

Dani snorts into her cold mug and Sera's eyebrows go all the way up, and Aria keeps going because if she stops she'll lose the thread. "She was fading. I don't know if she knew she was. But she was already getting healed, so I asked her what she meant, and she said her nose had been hooked since she was twelve and she'd hated every picture of herself for forty years, and if I was going to be in the neighborhood anyway —" Aria shrugs, one shoulder, and it's almost casual and it isn't at all. "So I did it. I went in and I asked the spell the second question, and I changed the bridge of her nose by about a quarter inch, and I stuck around after to see her face when she looked in the mirror." She picks up her mug and doesn't drink from it. "She cried for ten minutes. Happy crying. She kept saying *that's me, that's actually me.*"

The mug is still in her hands, cold, and she sets it down and looks at Sera, then Dani, and lets the corner of her mouth go because she has been sitting on this one for a week and it's finally time to open the jar. "Now," she says. "Comes the better news." She reaches past the notebook, past Gordon's paperwork, and pulls her phone around face-up on the table between the three of them. "As you know, pretty much everywhere I go gets media attention. And it seems somebody noticed the nose."

Sera's eyebrows come down and go back up in one motion, the bug-report face. "What nose."

"The woman in Michigan. The one who wanted the bridge fixed." Aria taps the phone twice. "Somebody found her before-and-after in a Facebook post and matched it to the Violet Angel, and from there it wasn't hard. Last week I got a call from a pair of Hollywood directors. Formerly brothers, now sisters. They said they knew I don't work on call or commission." She looks at Dani, who has set her cold mug down and is watching her with her chin on her fist. "They wanted to try anyway. Asked if I could do for them what science and medicine never could."

"And you said?" Dani says.

"I said I don't know. But that I could look into it." Aria turns the phone over, screen down, because the number is coming and she wants to be looking at their faces when it lands. "They told me they'd pay three million dollars for the effort. Thirty million if it works." The radiator knocks twice into the silence. "I haven't answered them yet. I told them to call back today, after I did some soul searching." She lets that sit one beat. "I don't think they realized I was being literal."

Sera's mouth is open. Dani's fist has come off her chin and her hand is flat on the table, and neither of them says anything for the length of two radiator ticks, and Aria watches them both do the arithmetic — three million, thirty million, the two women on the other end of a phone line who think they're negotiating with an eccentric and not a woman who intends to go into her own hallway tonight and read a spell off the inside of her own ribs to find out whether she can give them what they want. Dani finds her voice first. "Thirty million," she says, slow, like she's testing whether the number is real. "Aria. That's the foundation times three hundred."

"Three hundred times what the foundation ever raised for me," Aria says, and her own voice sounds strange saying it, the way a number does when you've been turning it over alone in the dark and it has stopped being arithmetic and started being a room you could walk into. She watches Dani's hand stay flat on the table and Sera's mouth finally close, and she keeps talking because the quiet is doing something to her ribs that she doesn't want it to do. "I sat on it for four days. I didn't call them back. I went to the hospitals on the rotation like it was any other week, and I kept the phone in my coat pocket, and every time it buzzed I told myself I was still deciding."

Sera leans back and folds her arms, and the bug-report face is gone, replaced by the one she gets when a spec is real and the numbers don't lie. "They said three million for the effort. Not for the result. That's a retainer, Aria. That's somebody who knows they're asking for a miracle and is willing to pay for the attempt alone." She tilts her head, and her eyes go narrow and green behind the smudged lens. "Formerly brothers. Now sisters. That's not a casting call. That's two people who spent their whole lives in a body that was wrong and watched the doctors shrug." She uncrosses her arms and puts both palms on the table. "They called you because you're the only surgeon in the world who works on the soul side of the skin."

"That's what I keep landing on," Aria says, and she turns the phone back over, screen up, and the notifications from the video are still stacking in the corner like a second conversation she isn't in yet. She sets it face-down again, deliberately, the way she'd close a book. "I told them to call back today. After I did some soul searching. And I meant it the way I said it — I went into the hallway this morning before you were up and studiedvto find out whether Alter Form can do what they're asking, or whether I'm about to promise two women a body I can't actually build." She looks at Dani, then Sera, and lets the corner of her mouth go again, because the next part is the part she has been holding like the coin under her tongue.

She doesn't say anything for a second. She just looks at them — Sera with her arms folded and her mouth still half-open from the question, Dani with her hand flat and her chin tipped, both of them waiting for her to flinch, and Aria lets the pause go long enough that the radiator knocks twice before she answers.

"It can." The smile comes up slow and it doesn't stop at her mouth — it gets into her eyes and stays there, and she watches it land on Sera first, then Dani, watches the two of them do the math in the same half-second and come up with the same number. Sera's arms come uncrossed. Dani's hand curls into a fist on the tabletop and she lets it out as a knock against the wood, once, hard enough to rattle the cold mug, and then she's up out of her chair and around the table and her arms are around Aria's neck and her face is pressed into the side of Aria's throat, and Aria can feel her mouth moving there, no sound coming out, just the shape of words she hasn't finished building yet. "Thirty million," Dani says finally, into her skin, muffled and furious and delighted. "Thirty million dollars and you sat on it for four days."

"I sat on it for four days," Aria agrees, and her hands come up to Dani's back, one flat between her shoulder blades, and over Dani's shoulder she finds Sera still in her chair, still not moving, and Sera is looking at her the way she looked at the notebook — like a spec that just got real. Aria holds her eyes and says the rest to both of them at once. "I told them I'd call back today. After soul searching. It's past eleven." She tips her head toward the phone lying face-down on Gordon's paperwork, and the notifications are still ticking under it, a small steady tapping like rain on a window that isn't open, and somewhere in the stack of them is a number she hasn't dialed yet, and the two of them are going to make her dial it, she can see that already.

The phone is still buzzing against Gordon's paperwork when Aria picks it up, and the number in the notification stack isn't the directors — it's a school district in Ohio asking if she does assemblies, and under it a woman from a clinic in Vermont who runs a support group and wants to know if the angel takes referrals, and under that a mother in Texas with a picture of a twelve-year-old who has been binding with duct tape because the waitlist is nineteen months long. Aria reads three of them and sets the phone down face-first again. The radiator knocks. Dani's arms are still around her neck, and Sera has finally stood up from the chair, and neither of them has said the number out loud a second time because they don't have to. Aria looks at the two of them — Dani in her socks with her hair still sleep-flattened on one side, Sera with the smudged lens and the three-color marker on her fingers — and asks the question she has been turning over in the hallway since four this morning, the one that isn't about the directors at all.

"So is it ethical to charge a fee for magical gender-affirming care?" She pulls back enough to see Dani's face, and Sera's, and she keeps her voice level because she wants the answer to be an answer and not a reassurance. "I want to do good for the world. Charging feels — gross. Like I'm selling the thing that already got given to me for free. But here we are, three girls in an apartment in Crown Point, and both of your lives are on hold because I blew them up." She tips her chin at Sera's boxes in the corner, at the good lamp, at the couch still wearing its plastic because nobody's had the nerve. "Sera quit her job. Dani's been driving me to courthouses instead of going to her own shifts. It would be nice to have some financial security before I start handing out free miracles to a hundred and twenty-six people a month."

Sera answers first, and she doesn't answer the way Aria expected — she doesn't say yes it's ethical or no it isn't. She picks up her cold mug and drinks from it anyway, and sets it back down, and looks at Aria over the rim the whole time. "You want to know if it's ethical to charge," she says. "You don't want to know if it's ethical to charge. You already know the answer to that one. You want us to say it out loud so you don't have to be the one who says it." She wipes the smudged lens of her glasses on her shirt, which makes it worse. "So I'll say it. Take the thirty million. Take the three million if they flake. You're the only person on the planet who can do the thing, and the thing costs you something every time you do it, and nobody in this room is going to pretend the rent stops existing because you feel weird about it."

Dani's arms are still around Aria's neck and she hasn't let go, and she says it into Aria's hair instead of at her face, which is how Dani says the things that actually matter. "The mom in Texas is going to be there whether you charge or not," she says. "That's the part you keep skipping. There's a twelve-year-old in Texas either way. The question isn't whether you charge — it's who pays, and the answer is the people who can." She finally pulls back and looks at Aria, and her eyebrows are doing the thing where they're not quite an argument. "You charge the directors. You don't charge the kid." Aria opens her mouth and Dani points at her, one finger, like a stop sign. "I know you're about to say something noble. Don't. I'm not asking you to be a nonprofit, I'm asking you to be a business with a sliding scale, which is a thing girls like us have been doing since forever because it's the only way any of it stays standing."

"A sliding scale," Aria says, and hears the two words come out flat and testing, like she's holding up a coin to see if it's real. "You want me to put a price on the miracle." She turns the phone over in her hands — face-down, face-up, face-down again — and the notifications keep ticking under her thumb, the Texas mother and the Ohio school district and the Vermont clinic all stacked in there like patients in a waiting room with no door. "I can do a sliding scale," she says, and it doesn't sound like defeat, which surprises her. "I can do it the way dentists do it. The way the sliding-scale clinic off Hohman does it — you pay what your situation can bear, and if your situation can't bear anything, then somebody else's situation already covered you." She sets the phone on Gordon's paperwork and finally looks up. "The directors pay the full freight. The kid in Texas pays nothing. And the woman who can afford a nose job because she's got the money and the vanity and the insurance that won't cover it — she pays the top of the scale and doesn't even notice."

Sera sets her mug down and reaches across the table for the notebook, and Aria lets her have it. Sera flips to the back, to the Elvish, and runs a finger under the columns the way she reads code — left to right, looking for the bug. "So the top of the scale has to be steep enough that the people at the bottom don't feel it," she says, half to herself. "Which means the directors aren't paying for one procedure. They're paying for the next fifty." She looks up. "You need a number, a real one, not a vibe. And you need somebody who isn't you to hold the money, because the second you start keeping cash in a shoebox under your bed I'm going to lose my mind."

Dani has let go of Aria's neck and is standing back with her arms crossed, and she says it plainly, the way she says everything that matters. "And you need a name for it. Not a nonprofit, not a charity case. Something you can hand to a mother in Texas without her feeling like she's begging." She looks at the phone on Gordon's paperwork, at the notifications still ticking under it. "You want my vote? Call the directors back. Take the retainer. And then you and I sit down with a spreadsheet and figure out what the kid in Texas gets for free, because I've got four days of PTO and nothing better to do." Aria looks at the two of them — Sera with her finger still in the notebook, Dani with her chin up — and for the first time since four this morning, the hallway in her chest goes quiet.

"No." Aria's hand comes down flat on the table, and the sound it makes is louder than it should be. "The girl in Texas is absolutely free. Not sliding scale, not pay-what-you-can, not a form her mother has to fill out and feel like shit about. She's hurting herself. She's binding with duct tape because her waitlist is nineteen months long, and she's a minor, and she doesn't have a dollar of her own to her name." She looks at Dani, then at Sera, and her voice doesn't rise but it doesn't soften either. "When it comes to kids, I don't take a cent. Ever. That's the one line in the whole thing that isn't negotiable, and I'm telling you both now so neither of you has to guess later."

Dani's arms are still crossed but her chin has come down a degree, and Sera has stopped flipping through the notebook. Aria reaches past her cold mug and turns the phone face-up, thumb hovering over the notification stack, and the three names at the top of it are the ones she has been not-dialing since four this morning. "But I'll call the directors," she says, and something in her face changes — not the smile, not quite, but the thing underneath it that knows a good hand when she's holding one. "You've probably heard of them. They made The Matrix."

Sera's mouth drops open, actually open, the smudged lens forgotten on her face. Dani's crossed arms come apart and her hand goes flat on the table next to Aria's, close enough to touch, and she says, "You're telling me the Wachowskis want you to give them a body." Aria picks up the phone, and the notification for the Texas mother slides under her thumb and out of sight, and she holds the screen up between the three of them with the call button glowing green under her thumb like the red dot she just turned off. "I'm telling you," she says, "that in about ten seconds I'm going to find out."

Aria's thumb comes down on the green button and the call opens with a small electric click, and she lifts the phone to her ear for exactly one breath before she sets it flat on Gordon's paperwork, face-up, speaker on, the dial tone bleeding into the quiet of the room. Sera's hand goes still on the notebook. Dani's foot stops mid-creak on the floorboard. The first ring stretches long enough that Aria can hear the radiator tick twice and Pancake's tail brush the windowsill, and she keeps her eyes on the screen — a white circle, a number she doesn't recognize, a city code that belongs to a coast she's never stood on — and doesn't let herself look at either of them, because if she looks she'll start explaining, and there's nothing left to explain. The second ring. Dani's hand finds Aria's knee under the table and stays there, warm and flat, and the third ring starts and Aria's jaw tightens and she thinks, absurdly, of the woman in Michigan with the quarter-inch bridge of her nose, and how she said *while you're in there, honey.*

The ring cuts off. There's a rustle on the other end — fabric, a chair, someone shifting a phone from one ear to the other — and then a voice, older than Aria expected and unguarded, a woman's voice with a smoker's grain in it, and it says one word with the whole room listening:

"Hello?"

Aria's mouth is dry and she doesn't fix it. She looks up — at Sera, at Dani, at the two faces that have been holding her up since four this morning — and then down at the little white circle on the screen, and she says it the way she signed it in violet ink on Gordon's form, plain and hers:

"This is Aria Silverleaf."