The dream started in Sera's kitchen, which was wrong, because Aria had never slept in Sera's kitchen. She was standing at the table with the character sheet open and the spell points column running down the page like a dry well, every box empty, a flat zero at the bottom in Sera's handwriting. The overhead light was the color of old paper. Sera sat across from her with her wire-rims pushed up into her curls and her green eyes moving down the sheet the way they had in the real kitchen two nights ago, and Aria's hands were out, palms up, the way a person begs for something they cannot name.

"I need them back."

"I know."

"You wrote it. You wrote the whole thing. You know how it works."

Sera turned the sheet around so Aria could see her own handwriting at the bottom of the mechanic, the note that said no cheesing it, and she shook her head the way you shake your head at a kid who has asked for the impossible with total sincerity.

"I can't, Aria. I don't have any semen to give you."

"That's not—"

"Girls can't give you semen."

The words landed in her chest the way they had landed the first time she read the mechanic in the dark of Mike's living room, a cold flat thing that did not care how she felt about it. The kitchen light dimmed. Sera's face went soft and far away. And then the dream lost its floor and Aria was falling through the dark toward the sound of her own breath.

She woke with her hand already reaching for the phone on the nightstand.

The guest room held the day's trapped heat and the faint clean scent of laundry soap. Streetlight bled around the blinds and striped the rumpled sheets and her bare arm, and for a second she didn't know where she was, only that she was warm and the sheet was tangled around one leg and her phone was in her hand and the screen was lit with a text notification. Her ears were bare, pointed, catching the faint draft from the window — no shape shift, no disguise, nothing between her and the world.

Dani (bar): you make it inside okay?

Sent at 12:47. It was 3:12 now. She had slept through it by two and a half hours, and the fact that Dani had checked, that Dani had waited, that Dani had not sent a second text to press the point, sat in Aria's chest like a warm coal. Thursday. Dani had said Thursday, and it was Thursday now, and the day was already here. Dani was a woman, so Dani could not refill the spell points column, and Aria had known that since the first night, and she had been not thinking about it ever since.

She typed back with one thumb, the screen too bright, her eyes still gummed with sleep.

Aria: yeah. sorry. passed out the second I hit the pillow. thank you for the ride. and the other thing.

She stared at it for a second and then hit send before she could edit it into something cooler. Then she put the phone face-down on the nightstand and lay back and looked at the ceiling, which had a water stain shaped like the state of Florida, and she let herself remember the car.

The way Dani's mouth had tasted like the lime from her drink. The way her hand had found the inside of Aria's thigh through the dress and stopped there, waiting, and Aria had not said no, had said nothing at all, had just let her own hips answer for her. The way Dani had laughed, low, against her neck, and said okay then, like the whole thing had been a question Aria had finally answered. The way the windows had fogged and the leather had creaked and Aria had come with her forehead pressed to the headrest and one hand fisted in the seatbelt strap and Dani's fingers inside her, slow and certain, like she had all night.

She had not known her body could do that. She had known it in theory, in the abstract, the way you know a city exists because you have seen it on a map. She had not known the specific architecture of it, the way the whole thing built and broke and rebuilt, the way her own voice sounded when it came out of her throat like something being pulled, the way afterward her legs had shaken and Dani had looked at her with an expression that was half smug and half tender and said there she is.

Aria pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

The wanting had not changed. That was the thing. She had spent two days terrified that becoming Aria would rewrite the parts of her that mattered, that she would wake up and not recognize her own appetites, that Jason would be gone and some stranger would be wearing his life. But the wanting was the same. It had just found a new body to want with, and the new body was better at it, and that was its own kind of terrifying.

She reached over and turned on the lamp. The bulb was the one she had mended yesterday, the one that had been flickering, and it came on clean and steady, and she looked at the room she had been sleeping in for three nights now.

It was a guest room that had never been a guest room. Mike had cleared it out on Monday night, stuffed the boxes into the closet, made the bed with sheets that still had the fold creases in them, and told her it was hers as long as she needed it. There was a nightstand with a lamp and a coaster and no drink. There was a window with blinds that didn't quite close. There was a bag in the corner with the dress she had worn last night folded on top of it, and under the dress, the character sheet, still in its plastic sleeve, still carrying the whole of her life in a column of numbers.

She got up. The floor was cool. She was wearing one of Mike's old t-shirts and nothing else, and the shirt hung to mid-thigh and the air moved against the backs of her legs in a way that still felt like a message from a country she had only just been issued a passport to. She crossed to the bag and pulled out the sheet and sat down on the edge of the bed with it across her knees.

Twenty. The number was written in pencil in the spell points box, and she had erased and rewritten it twice, and it was still twenty. She had spent five on the Shape Shift that had rounded her ears and softened her face and made her look like a human cousin of herself, and the Shape Shift had run out before she ever got to the bar, and she had not put on a new one, and the five points were gone anyway. So she was at twenty, and the twenty was all she had, and when it was spent she would be down to cantrips and nothing else and the whole beautiful dangerous point of being Aria Silverleaf would be gone. And the only way to refill it was the mechanic on the back of the sheet, and the mechanic needed semen, and Dani was a woman, so Dani could not give her any. Her ears were pointed now, bare, real — she had not cast a new Shape Shift, and she was not going to.

She turned the sheet over. She knew what was on the back. She had known since the first night. But she looked anyway, because looking at it was a way of not thinking about it, and not thinking about it was the only thing she had been doing successfully for three days.

Succubic Restoration. Fifteen spell points restored per instance. All wounds healed. All sickness and disease cured. Hard cap forty-five. No cheesing it. She had read it a dozen times and it had never once seemed like something she could use, because the only person she had been with since Monday was Dani, and Dani was a woman, and women could not give her semen.

She closed the sheet and put it back in the bag and stood up and went to the door.

The hallway was dark. Mike's door was closed and the strip of light under it was off, which meant he had gone to bed, which meant it was late enough that she should probably be quiet. She went down the hall to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water from the tap and stood at the counter and drank it in the dark, the streetlight from the parking lot coming in through the window over the sink and laying a long pale rectangle across the linoleum.

The apartment was spotless. She had done that yesterday, before Sera, before the bar, before Dani. She had cleaned the whole thing with Prestidigitation in about twenty minutes, every surface, every dish, the grout in the bathroom, the inside of the microwave, and then she had mended the windshield of Mike's truck in the parking lot and come back inside and sat on the couch and stared at the wall for an hour because she did not know what else to do with her hands.

The apartment was spotless and it was not hers. The apartment was spotless and she was standing in it at three in the morning in her brother's t-shirt with a phone in her pocket holding a number under the name Dani (bar) and a character sheet in the other room that said the only way to refill her magic was to let someone come inside her, and Dani was a woman, and women could not give her semen, and she did not know what to do with any of it.

The phone buzzed against her thigh.

She pulled it out. Dani (bar): no problem. you're fun. you want to do it again sometime?

Aria read it twice. Then a third time. Then she set the glass down on the counter and typed back with both thumbs, standing in the dark of the kitchen, the streetlight on the floor, her bare feet cold on the linoleum.

Aria: yeah. I do.

She sent it. Then she added, because she could not help herself, because the truth was sitting in her chest and she was tired of holding it down:

Aria: I've never done that before. any of it. just so you know. you were the first.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Aria watched them like a person watching a weather report for a town they were about to move to.

Dani (bar): wait. seriously?

Aria: seriously.

Dani (bar): huh. you're a natural. lucky me.

Dani (bar): you free this week? I want to take you somewhere with a bed. cars are for teenagers and I am not a teenager.

Aria laughed, out loud, in the dark kitchen, and then put her hand over her mouth because Mike was asleep down the hall. She typed back.

Aria: I have a thing friday. but before that? yeah. I'm free.

Dani (bar): thursday. I'll text you.

Aria: okay.

She put the phone down on the counter and stood there for a minute with her hands flat on the cool granite and her heart going a little faster than it needed to and the streetlight lying on the floor like something that had fallen out of the sky. Thursday. She had a date tonight. She had a date tonight and a game tomorrow and a brother asleep down the hall and a spell points column that was down to twenty and a mechanic on the back of her character sheet that she had been refusing to look at since the first night.

She looked at it now. Not the sheet, which was in the other room. The thing itself. The fact of it. The way it sat in her like a splinter she had decided not to pull because pulling it would mean admitting it was there.

She had spent three days telling herself she did not need to think about Succubic Restoration. She had twenty points. She had cantrips for free. She had no disguise left to hold and no plan to recast one. She had a few days' worth of magic left if she was careful, and being careful was a thing she could do, and the mechanic on the back of the sheet was a thing she could simply never touch, like a door in a house you decide not to open because you know what is behind it. And it was not as if she could touch it even if she wanted to. Dani was a woman. Women could not give her semen. The mechanic was written for a kind of encounter she did not have and could not have, and that was that.

But she had looked at it tonight. She had looked at it in the dream and she had looked at it on the bed and she was looking at it now, standing in the kitchen, and the thing about a door you decide not to open is that you have to keep deciding, every day, every hour, and the deciding gets heavier the longer you do it.

She picked up the phone and opened a new message to Sera.

She had not texted Sera since she left her apartment. Sera had texted her twice — get home safe, and then, an hour later, hey. you okay? — and Aria had read both and not answered, because she did not know what to say to a woman who had written the mechanic on the back of her sheet and then looked at her across a kitchen table with green eyes that knew more than she was saying.

She typed: hey. sorry. long night. I'm okay. still on for friday?

She sent it. Then she put the phone down and drank the rest of the water and rinsed the glass and set it in the rack and went back down the hall to the guest room and closed the door behind her and stood in the dark with her back against it.

Twenty points. The Shape Shift was already gone, spent and dropped before the bar, and she had not put on a new one, and she was not going to. Twenty points, and no more five-a-day to look human, and no more disguise to hide behind. Her ears were pointed, bare, real — she could let them show and deal with the consequences, or she could spend what she had and then have nothing but cantrips, nothing but the small free things, nothing but a beautiful elf girl with no magic and no way to get it back except the one thing she had been refusing to think about since the first night — and the one thing she had been refusing to think about was the one thing she could not do, because it needed semen, and Dani was a woman, and women could not give her semen.

She sat down on the bed. The sheet was still rumpled from her sleep and she pulled it up over her legs and sat with her back against the headboard and her knees drawn up and the phone in her hand, and she looked at the ceiling and the water stain shaped like Florida and she thought about Sera's kitchen.

Sera had not asked her to leave. Sera had made her grilled cheese and poured her tea and listened to the whole impossible thing and then said you should come to the game friday, like it was nothing, like she had not just been handed a person she thought was dead and told that person was now a woman with pointed ears and a character sheet that matched her exactly. Sera had looked at her with those green eyes and there had been something in them that Aria had not been able to name, some recognition, some calculation, some door opening behind the freckles and the wire-rims.

And then Aria had left, because she could not stand to be looked at like that for one more minute, and she had gone to a bar in Chicago and met a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a rosebud mouth and she had kissed her in a parking lot outside Rockford and let her fingers do things that Aria's own fingers had never done to anyone and she had come home with a number in her phone and a warmth in her body and the wanting still there, still the same, still hers.

The wanting was the same. That was the thing she kept coming back to. The wanting was the same and the body was new and the body was better at wanting and the body was going to run out of magic in eleven hours and the only way to refill it was to let someone come inside her, and the only person she wanted was a woman, and women could not give her semen, and so the mechanic on the back of the sheet was a door she could not open even if she decided to.

She looked at the phone. She looked at Dani's number. She looked at the text she had sent — yeah. I do. — and the one after that — you were the first — and she thought about tonight, and she thought about a bed, and she thought about the way Dani had said there she is, and she thought about the mechanic on the back of the sheet, and she thought about how easy it would be, how simple, if Dani were a man, if Dani could give her what the sheet wanted — but Dani was a woman, and women could not give her semen, and so the thing she was refusing to think about was also the thing she could not have, and the wanting sat in her chest with nowhere to go.

She set the phone down on the nightstand. She lay down. She pulled the sheet up to her chin and stared at the ceiling and the water stain and the stripe of streetlight through the blinds, and she did not sleep for a long time.

When she finally did, she dreamed again. Not of Sera's kitchen this time. Of the woods, the woods she had woken in on Monday, the cold ground and the dice scattered in the leaves and the character sheet in her hand with her own name on it, and in the dream she was standing at the edge of the quarry with the wind coming up off the water and her wings out, the Divine Soul Wings, huge and white and ethereal, and she was not afraid, and she was not alone, and she could not see who was standing beside her but she could feel them there, warm, patient, waiting for her to decide something.

She woke at seven to the sound of Mike in the kitchen, the clatter of a pan, the smell of coffee, and the phone on the nightstand lit with a single new message.

Sera: friday's good. come early. I want to talk to you before the others get here.

Aria sat up. The sheet was on the floor where she had dropped it, face-up, the spell points column showing twenty in pencil, the Shape Shift line crossed out and dead in the margin, and the mechanic on the back hidden by the floor and the angle of the light. She looked at the phone and the message and the word talk, which could mean anything, which could mean Sera had figured something out, which could mean the whole careful architecture of the last three days was about to come down.

She picked up the phone and typed back with one thumb.

Aria: what time?

The reply came fast. Almost too fast. Like Sera had been holding the phone.

Sera: five. I'll make dinner. it's just us. I have something to show you.

Aria looked at the words for a long moment. Just us. Something to show you. The Shape Shift was already gone, and she had not put on a new one, and she would walk through Sera's door with her own pointed ears and her own face and twenty points and nothing to hide behind, and she did not know what Sera wanted to show her, and she did not know what she wanted Sera to see. And tonight was Thursday, and Dani was waiting on an address.

She typed: okay. see you friday.

She sent it. Then she got up and pulled on the dress from last night and went out to the kitchen to face her brother and the coffee and whatever the day was going to be.

Mike was at the stove with his back to her, scrambling eggs in the cast-iron pan, his hair still wet from the shower and sticking up in the back the way it always did. He was wearing the same gray t-shirt he had been wearing yesterday and the day before, and he did not turn around when she came in, which meant he had heard her and was giving her a second to decide how the morning was going to go.

"Coffee's in the pot," he said.

"Thanks."

She poured a cup and leaned against the counter and watched him cook. The eggs were the color of a thing that had been done right. He had made toast too, and there was a jar of jam on the counter and a knife beside it, and the whole thing looked so ordinary that Aria felt the ordinary of it like a hand on her chest.

"You were out late," Mike said.

"Yeah."

"You want to talk about it?"

"Not really."

He turned around then. He had the pan in one hand and the spatula in the other and his brown eyes went over her once, quick, the way they had gone over her on Monday night when she had shown up at his door as a woman and he had stood there in the doorway for a full ten seconds without saying anything. He had the same look now. Not suspicious. Not afraid. Just reading.

"Okay," he said. "Eat something."

She ate something. They sat at the little table by the window and ate eggs and toast and drank coffee and did not talk about the bar or the car or the woman or the mechanic on the back of the sheet. Mike told her about a bug he had been chasing at work, a memory leak that had taken him three days to find, and Aria listened and asked the right questions and felt the shape of her old self in the conversation, the part of her that had always been able to talk to Mike about anything, the part that had not changed.

After breakfast she did the dishes with Prestidigitation, because she could, because it was free, because it was the one thing about being Aria that felt unambiguously good. The plates lifted off the table and the crumbs swept themselves into the sink and the water ran hot and then cold and then not at all, and the whole kitchen was clean in ninety seconds, and Mike watched from the doorway with his arms crossed and an expression that was somewhere between awe and the look you give a dog that has learned to open doors.

"That's still weird," he said.

"It's useful."

"It's weird and useful."

"Yes."

He shook his head and went to get dressed and Aria stood in the clean kitchen with her coffee and looked out the window at the parking lot and the truck with the mended windshield and the strip of grass between the building and the road, and she thought about Friday, and about five o'clock, and about what Sera wanted to show her.

She thought about the mechanic on the back of the sheet, which she had not looked at since the kitchen, which she had been not looking at for three days, which she was going to have to look at eventually, because the Shape Shift was already gone and she was down to twenty points and tonight was Thursday and the game was tomorrow night and she did not know how many more days of magic she had in her. And the only way to refill it was the mechanic, and the mechanic needed semen, and Dani was a woman, and women could not give her semen, and so the twenty points were all the magic she was ever going to have. Her ears were pointed, bare, real — no disguise left to soften any of it.

She went to the guest room and pulled the sheet out of the bag and sat on the bed with it across her knees. Twenty points. No Shape Shift left to count down. The mechanic on the back, waiting, patient, the way it had been waiting since the first night.

She turned it over. She read it again. Every time she swallows semen or is anally or vaginally inseminated she will have 15 spell points restored, all wounds healed, and any sickness or disease cured. Hard cap forty-five. No cheesing it.

She sat with it for a long time. The streetlight was off now and the morning sun was coming in through the blinds and laying a different stripe across the sheets, warm this time, gold, and she could hear Mike in the bathroom running the faucet and the whole apartment was ordinary and clean and hers, for now, and the thing on the back of the sheet was the only way to keep it that way, and she had already done it once, in a car, with a woman whose number was in her phone — and Dani was a woman, and women could not give her semen, and so the only way to keep it was a way she could not take.

She put the sheet back in the bag. She stood up. She went to the bathroom mirror and looked at herself — the pointed ears, the elven face, no disguise left to soften any of it, the violet eyes that had never been hidden at all — and she touched her jaw and her cheek and the point of her ear, and she thought: tonight. Tonight with Dani, and tomorrow night with Sera. Two nights until I have to decide what I am going to be when Sera opens the door.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She went and got it.

Dani (bar): tonight still good? I found a place. it has a bed. and a door that locks. and a shower big enough for two.

Aria looked at the message. She looked at the bag with the sheet in it. She looked at the morning light on the floor and the clean kitchen beyond the door and the shape of her own hands, which were not Jason's hands, which were Aria's hands, which had done things last night that Jason's hands had never done and would never do.

She typed back.

Aria: tonight's good. text me the address.

She sent it. Then she set the phone down and went to find her brother and the day and whatever came next.

She found him in the living room, lacing up his boots with one foot up on the coffee table like the whole apartment was still his and not the two of them sharing it like a pair of cats who'd agreed to a truce.

"Hey," she said. "I've got news."

Mike looked up. He had that particular expression he got when he was braced for something, the one that made him look like he was already three steps into a conversation he hadn't been invited to. "Okay."

"I made a date. Last night. At the bar." She said it the way she'd said things to him their whole lives, flat and direct, like it was no big deal, because if she made it a big deal he would make it a bigger one. "With a girl."

Mike finished the lace and stood up. He didn't say anything for a second, and Aria watched his face do the thing it did, the quick recalibration, the way he filed the information in a drawer that didn't have a label yet. "A date."

"Yeah."

"With a girl."

"A cute one." She crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe and let herself smile, just a little, because the smile was real and she was tired of pretending it wasn't. "I still like girls, Mike. That didn't change. I know the rest of it's a lot, but that part's the same."

He nodded slowly. He was doing the math in his head, she could see it, the way he always did, turning the problem over until he found the edge he could grip. "So the whole—" he gestured vaguely at her, at all of her, "—that didn't, what, rewrite your brain?"

"Apparently not." She pushed off the doorframe and went to the kitchen for another cup of coffee, and he followed her, because he always followed her when there was something to talk about. "I was worried about that. That I'd wake up and not want the things I used to want. But I do. I want the same stuff. It's just—" she poured, she added cream, she thought about how to say it, "—the equipment's different. The wanting's the same."

Mike leaned against the counter with his arms crossed. "And you're okay with that."

"I'm better than okay with it." She took a drink and looked at him over the rim of the mug. "You want the honest version or the version where I pretend I'm having a crisis?"

"Hit me with the honest version."

"I've been Jason for twenty-four years. I don't miss him." She said it plainly, because it was true, and because Mike was the only person on the planet she could say it to. "I thought I would. I thought I'd wake up every morning and feel him missing, like a tooth. But I don't. I feel like I put on a coat I'd been wearing my whole life and took it off and realized I'd been hot the entire time and just never noticed."

Mike was quiet. Then he said, "That's a hell of a thing to say about your own life."

"It's a hell of a thing to live."

He uncrossed his arms and rubbed the back of his neck, the way he did when he was deciding whether to say something. He decided. "You know I don't care, right? About the girl thing. I mean, I knew that before. You were never subtle about it."

"I was incredibly subtle."

"You had a poster of that one actress on your wall for six years."

"That was artistic appreciation."

"It was a bikini poster."

"Artistic appreciation of a bikini." She grinned at him, and he shook his head and laughed, the real laugh, the one that came out of his chest, and for a second the whole apartment felt like it had before Monday, like the two of them were just brothers in a kitchen, and Aria let herself have it, because she didn't know how many more of those there'd be.

"So what's the deal with the game mechanics, then?" Mike asked, because he was a software engineer and he couldn't leave a system alone. "The thing on the back of the sheet. The one that—"

"Dani's a woman, Mike."

"Right."

"So it doesn't apply." She set the mug down and looked at him. "Which is fine. I don't need it. I've got twenty points and a bunch of free tricks and I can figure the rest out. I'm not going to let a spreadsheet tell me who I'm allowed to want."

Mike looked at her for a long moment. "You know that's the most Jason thing you've said all week."

"What is?"

"Digging your heels in about something you want and calling it a principle."

"It's not a principle. It's boobs." She picked the mug back up. "I'm not giving up boobs for a game mechanic. That's the line. That's where I draw it."

Mike laughed again, and this time it was longer, and Aria laughed with him, and the sound of the two of them in the clean kitchen with the morning light coming in was the closest thing to normal she'd felt since she woke up in the woods with dice in her hair.

"Okay," Mike said, wiping his eyes. "Okay. So you've got a date. When?"

"Tonight. She's picking the place. Somewhere with a bed, apparently."

"A bed."

"A bed and a door that locks and a shower big enough for two." Aria said it deadpan and watched her brother's face go through four distinct expressions in under a second. "She's very thorough."

"I hate this."

"You love this."

"I hate this so much." He was already walking out of the kitchen, shaking his head, and Aria heard him mutter "shower big enough for two" under his breath like a man filing a complaint with a universe that had stopped taking his calls. She finished her coffee and put the mug in the sink and stood there for a second with her hands on the rim of the counter, looking out the window at the parking lot and the strip of grass and the trees past the road.

She needed money.

The realization arrived the way most of her realizations did, quietly, from the side, while she was looking at something else. She had a date tonight and a game tomorrow and a body that ate food and wore clothes and needed a place to sleep, and she had exactly zero dollars to her name, because Jason Chance's bank account was attached to Jason Chance's face and Jason Chance's driver's license and Jason Chance's everything, and she was not Jason Chance anymore. She could not walk into a bank and withdraw her own money. She could not use the credit card, because the credit card had his name on it and she had already pushed that particular piece of luck about as far as it would go at the hardware store. She was, as far as the economy was concerned, a person who did not exist.

She stood in the kitchen for a while and thought about it, and then she went and got dressed.

She put on the dress from last night, because it was the only thing she owned that fit her, and she pulled the knit cap down over her ears and checked the mirror and decided the cap looked stupid but not as stupid as pointed ears in central Indiana on a Thursday morning. The cap pressed the points of her ears flat against her skull, and she could feel them there, real and bare, no shape shift to hide them. Then she went out the door and down the stairs and into the day.

Blue Castle in the morning was a small town doing small-town things. The main drag had a hardware store and a diner and a gas station and a church with a sign out front that said GOD LOVES YOU JUST THE WAY YOU ARE in plastic letters, and Aria walked past it and felt the sentence land somewhere behind her ribs, and kept walking. There were a couple of cars in the lot at the diner. There was a woman walking a dog. There was a man on a ladder cleaning out a gutter, and he looked down at her as she passed and then looked again, and Aria kept her eyes forward and her shoulders back and walked like she had somewhere to be, which she did, technically, though she wasn't sure where.

She walked past the hardware store. Brandon would be inside, behind the register, and she did not want to find out whether he'd put together the name on the credit card with the woman in the purple dress. She walked past the diner and looked in the window and saw a waitress wiping down a table and a cook in the back and a chalkboard menu that said today's special: meatloaf, and she thought about the twenty dollars in her pocket, which was actually zero dollars, which was actually nothing, and she kept walking.

She needed money. She needed a job, or a hustle, or something. She had the most valuable skill set on the planet and no way to sell it, because the moment she walked into an office and said hi, I can conjure fire from nothing and mend any broken thing with a word and lift six hundred pounds over my head, she was going to end up in a lab somewhere with electrodes on her head and a government man asking her questions she didn't have answers to. The magic was the problem, not the solution. The magic was the thing she had to hide, and the thing she had to hide was the only thing she had that was worth anything.

She walked to the end of the main drag and stood at the corner by the gas station and looked back down the street, and she thought about the mending.

Mending was free. Mending was a cantrip, unlimited, no cost, and it fixed broken things. Small things, instantly; bigger things with time. She had mended Mike's windshield in the parking lot in about three minutes, and the windshield had been cracked from a rock off a truck on I-65 for two years and Mike had been meaning to get it fixed and never had, and she had fixed it in three minutes with her hand on the glass and a word in her mouth.

People paid for that. People paid a lot for that. A cracked phone screen, a broken lamp, a torn jacket, a busted pipe, a chair with a snapped leg — the world was full of broken things and the people who owned them were full of the quiet resignation of knowing it would cost more to fix than to replace. If there was a woman in town who could fix anything, no questions asked, cash only, for a third of what the shop would charge—

She stopped at the corner and looked at the church sign again. GOD LOVES YOU JUST THE WAY YOU ARE.

She thought about it. She thought about a card taped to a laundromat bulletin board, or a post on one of the local Facebook groups from a woman with no photo and no last name, offering repairs. She thought about the fact that she could not have a bank account, could not have a license, could not have a lease, could not have any of the paper scaffolding that made a person legible to the machinery of the world. She thought about the fact that every dollar she made would have to be cash, and every customer would have to be someone who didn't ask too many questions, and every job would be a small risk that someone would look too close at the woman with the cap and the violet eyes and the hands that could put a broken thing back together.

She thought about the quarry. About the rocks she had lifted. About the quarter mile she had run in twenty-one seconds. About the fact that she could outrun a car and outlift a forklift and there was no legitimate use for any of it that didn't end with someone in a suit asking to see her birth certificate.

She walked on.

The town thinned out past the gas station, and the road went past a trailer park and a field and a stand of trees, and Aria walked along the shoulder with the sun on the back of her neck and the cap pulled down and her hands in her pockets, and she thought about money the way you think about a toothache, in circles, from every angle, always arriving back at the same ache.

She could do odd jobs. Yard work, hauling, moving furniture. Her body could do it — God, her body could do it, she could carry a fridge up a flight of stairs without breathing hard — but odd jobs paid odd-job money, and odd-job money meant she was still sleeping in Mike's guest room in three months, still borrowing his t-shirts, still a guest in a life that wasn't hers. She wanted to pay him back. She wanted to buy her own clothes and her own food and her own goddamn bed. She wanted to stop being a problem he had to solve.

She could sell the magic. The real magic, the spells that cost points. Healing, if she could figure out how to use it without ending up on the news. But healing was a spell that cost points, and points were the thing she was running out of, and the only way to refill them was the mechanic she had been refusing to think about, and the mechanic needed something Dani couldn't give her, and so the whole thing folded back on itself like a snake eating its tail.

She stopped at the edge of the field and looked out at the trees. The wind moved through them and she heard it the way she always heard things now, too clearly, every leaf a separate sound, and she closed her eyes for a second and let it wash over her. She was standing on the shoulder of a county road in Indiana in a dress she'd bought with her brother's credit card, with pointed ears under a knit cap and twenty spell points and no money and no plan, and she felt, for the first time since Monday, the full weight of how completely and irreversibly her life had been taken apart.

And then she felt the other thing, the thing that came right after the weight, the thing that had been there since the first morning in the woods. The thing that said: you have magic. Real magic. The kind of thing that people have dreamed about and written about and killed each other over for as long as there have been people. You have wings you haven't even tried yet. You have a body that doesn't get sick and barely ages and can do things no human being on this planet can do. You are the only one of your kind, and you are alive, and you are standing on a road in Indiana with the wind in your hair, and you have no idea how lucky you are.

She opened her eyes.

She thought about the wings. Divine Soul Wings. She had not summoned them since the quarry. She had not even tried. They were the one thing on her sheet that was purely, unambiguously hers, not a spell, not a point cost, just a part of her, like her ears, like her eyes. She could call them up right now, standing in this field, and they would come. She knew it the way she knew her own name. She could call them and they would unfold out of her back and catch the wind and she could fly, actually fly, a hundred miles an hour over the cornfields, and no one would see her because there was no one out here to see her, and for a little while she would not be a woman with no money and no plan and no past. She would be Aria Silverleaf, and she would be free.

She almost did it. She stood there with the wind moving the tall grass and the road empty in both directions and her hands at her sides, and she felt the wings waiting, just under the surface, like a held breath.

Then a truck came over the rise and she let them go.

She walked back into town. The sun was higher now and the town was busier, a few more cars on the street, a few more people on the sidewalks, and Aria kept her head down and her cap low and walked past the diner and the hardware store and the church, and she thought about the wings the whole way, the way they had felt waiting, the way it had been to almost let them out.

She was so deep in it that she almost walked past the laundromat without seeing the sign.

It was taped to the inside of the glass, a piece of printer paper in a plastic sleeve, the kind of thing that had been up so long the tape had gone yellow. help wanted, it said in Comic Sans. part time. flexible hours. ask for marla.

Aria stopped. She looked at the sign for a long moment, and then she looked past it, through the glass, at the woman behind the counter folding towels, a woman in her fifties with gray hair in a ponytail and reading glasses on a chain and the kind of face that had seen everything and been impressed by none of it.

She thought about the money. She thought about the cap. She thought about the ears under the cap, pointed and real, and the fact that the woman behind the counter was going to look at her and see a tall pretty girl in a dress that didn't fit the season, and she was going to have to decide, right now, standing on the sidewalk, whether to walk in and ask for a job and risk the whole thing, or to keep walking and keep being a guest in her brother's life.

She thought about the mechanic on the sheet. She thought about the twenty points. She thought about Dani's text and the bed and the door that locked.

She went in.

Marla didn't look up when the bell over the door chimed. She had a towel in her hands and she was folding it the way you fold something you've folded ten thousand times, corner to corner, smoothing the seam with her thumb, and she set it on the stack and reached for the next one before she said anything at all.

"We're not hiring," she said.

Aria stood just inside the door with the cap pulled low over her pointed ears and the dress doing its best impression of something that belonged on a person in a laundromat at ten in the morning.

"The sign says you are."

"The sign's been up since April." Marla still hadn't looked at her. Fold, smooth, stack. "I keep meaning to take it down. It's taped to the inside of the glass, so it's a whole thing."

"April was nearly seven months ago."

"Time flies when nobody wants the job." The towel went onto the pile and Marla finally looked up, and Aria watched her take the whole of it in — the dress, the hat, the face — in about a second and a half, the way people did when they'd spent fifty years being unimpressed and were good at it. "You're not from around here."

"Vermont."

"Mm." Marla pulled her reading glasses down off the chain and put them on and looked at Aria again, closer, and Aria felt the specific discomfort of being looked at by someone who had already decided she was lying and didn't care enough to say so. "What do you want."

"The job."

"I said we're not hiring."

"I heard you." Aria took a step in. The floor was linoleum, worn pale in a path from the door to the counter, and the whole room smelled like hot cotton and detergent and the particular dry heat of machines that ran all day. There were eight washers along one wall and eight dryers along the other and a folding table in the middle and a rolling cart of lost socks by the back. "I don't want the job."

Marla's eyebrows went up, just slightly, the first crack in the face.

"I want to work," Aria said. "For myself. Not for you. I want to use your building."

There was a pause. One of the dryers thumped — an unbalanced load, someone's jeans going around and around — and Marla took her glasses off and let them drop back down the chain and crossed her arms.

"You want to use my building."

"Your folding table. Your outlets. Your customer traffic." Aria put her hands in her pockets because she didn't know what else to do with them. "You've got a sign on the glass that says you need help and a town full of people with broken things. I can fix the broken things."

"You're a repairman."

"Something like that."

"What do you fix."

"Anything small." Aria looked around the room while she said it, because it was easier to say it to the room. "Lamps. Phone screens. Jackets with the zipper blown out. Hinges. Glasses. Anything that's broken and fits on a table."

Marla looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked past her, at the door, at the empty sidewalk, and then back.

"I've had three people in here this week," she said. "One of them was my daughter. So I'm going to need you to be a little more specific than 'anything small,' because I don't have the patience this morning to find out I've let a con artist set up shop in my laundromat."

Aria pulled the cap off the rolling cart — a sock, actually, a single orphaned grey sock, and she held it up.

"This is torn at the toe." She turned it over. "Somebody's been meaning to throw it out for a month."

"That's the lost sock cart. Those are all getting thrown out."

"Sure." Aria laid the sock flat on the folding table and put two fingers on the tear, and she said the word under her breath — not really a word, more a shape in the back of her throat, the shape that had been there since Monday and had never once failed her — and the grey thread knitted itself back together under her fingers, small and quick, the loose frayed ends curling in and closing like a wound deciding it was done.

Marla didn't move.

Aria held up the sock. Whole. Grey and boring and whole.

"Okay," Marla said, after a while. Her arms were still crossed. Her face hadn't changed. But her voice had gone quieter, and the quiet was the tell, the way a person goes quiet when the ground they were standing on turns out to be a little less solid than they thought. "Do that again."

"The sock or something else?"

"Something else." Marla reached under the counter and came up with a coffee mug — a heavy diner mug, white with a green stripe, and a clean crack running down one side from the rim to the base, the kind of crack that made a mug a pencil cup and never a mug again. She set it on the counter and pushed it across. "That was my mother's. Cracked it on the faucet in ninety-eight. I've been using it for pens for twenty-six years."

Aria picked it up. The crack was old and stained dark along the seam, coffee in the glaze, and she turned it in her hands and found the two edges and pressed her fingers to the seam and said the shape again, and this one took a little longer, maybe four or five seconds, because the crack was deep and the mug was thick, and she felt the magic run down into the ceramic and pull the two halves back into each other like the cup remembering it used to be one piece.

She set it down on the counter. The crack was gone. Not hidden — gone, the glaze unbroken, the green stripe running clean around the rim.

Marla picked it up. She turned it over. She ran her thumb down the side where the crack had been, twice, three times, and then she held it up to the light from the window and turned it slowly, and there was nothing to find.

"Huh," she said.

She set the mug down and looked at Aria for a long time, and Aria made herself stand still under it, because this was the part where it either worked or didn't and there was nothing to do but wait.

"You're not from Vermont," Marla said.

"No."

"You're not going to tell me where you're from."

"No."

"You're not going to tell me how you do it."

"No."

Marla nodded slowly, like a person checking off a list they'd already written. Then she reached under the counter again and pulled out a small metal box — a cash box, dented, with a key taped to the lid — and set it on the counter next to the mug.

"I don't want to know," she said. "I'm sixty-one years old. I've got a mortgage and a hip that's going and a daughter who thinks I should sell this place and move to Florida. I don't have room in my life for whatever this is. But I've got a room full of machines and a town full of people with broken crap, and if you want to sit at my folding table and fix it, I want a cut."

"How much."

"What are you charging."

Aria looked at the mug. She looked at the sock cart. She thought about the math she'd been doing in her head since she walked past the diner — the twenty dollars that was zero dollars, the guest room, the borrowed t-shirts, the fact that every dollar she spent was a dollar Mike had earned and she hadn't.

"Six dollars a piece," she said.

Marla's eyebrows went up again. "Six dollars."

"Six dollars per item. Whatever it is. Phone screen, jacket, lamp, mug. Six dollars, fixed, done."

"That's nothing. That's not a business, that's a lemonade stand."

"That's the point." Aria leaned a hip against the counter. "People don't bring their broken stuff to a repair shop because the repair shop wants forty dollars to look at it and eighty to fix it and it's easier to buy a new one. People bring their broken stuff to a table in a laundromat because six dollars is six dollars and their grandmother's lamp is their grandmother's lamp and they can't throw it out and they can't afford to fix it. Six dollars gets them through the door. Six dollars gets me a customer."

Marla looked at her for a second.

"And what do I get."

"You get the traffic." Aria nodded at the door. "People come in to get their jacket fixed, they see the machines, they've got a load at home, they come back. You get a laundromat that's busier than the one across town. And you get five dollars a garment."

"Five dollars a garment."

"Every item I fix, you get five. I get one."

Marla laughed — a short, dry sound, more air than humor — and shook her head. "Kid, that's backwards. That's the worst deal I've ever heard. You're doing the work and I'm getting the money."

"Yeah," Aria said. "But I can do a lot of work."

She let it sit there. The dryer thumped. Somewhere down the block a car went by.

"How much work," Marla said.

Aria picked up the sock cart and pulled it over to the folding table and tipped the whole thing out onto the tabletop — a small mountain of orphaned socks, forty or fifty of them, all the single survivors of a thousand loads, and she spread them out flat and put her hands on the pile and started.

The first one took two seconds. The second took two. The third took three, because the hole was bigger, and then her hands found the rhythm and she stopped counting and just moved down the pile, finger to seam to seam, the shape in her throat coming faster and easier each time, the magic running out of her and into the cotton like water finding a slope. A hole closed. A heel unravelled itself back into yarn. A toe knitted shut. She worked down the row and the pile shrank and the mended socks stacked up beside her, and she was not even breathing hard, because this was the easiest thing in the world, this was the cantrip she'd used to fix a windshield and a lamp and a cracked phone and it cost her nothing, it cost her exactly nothing, and she could do it all day.

She did the whole cart in under four minutes. Fifty-one socks, mended, folded, stacked.

She looked up.

Marla had not moved. She was standing behind the counter with the coffee mug in one hand and her reading glasses on her face, and she was looking at the stack of socks the way a person looks at a thing they can't fit into any of the boxes they have.

"That's fifty-one socks," Aria said. "At six dollars a garment, that's three hundred and six dollars for you and fifty-one for me. Except the socks are yours, so really it's just three hundred and six for you and I did it for free, because I needed to show you."

"You did all of them."

"In four minutes."

"I can do more than socks." Aria picked the mug back up off the counter and held it out. "I can do jackets. I can do lamps. I can do a phone screen in about ten seconds and a chair leg in two and a broken window in a minute. I can do anything that's broken and fits on that table. And I can do a hundred of them an hour."

She set the mug down.

"A hundred garments an hour," she said. "At five dollars a garment to you, that's five hundred dollars. An hour. And I walk out with a hundred."

Marla was quiet for a long time. The dryer stopped thumping. In the silence the room was just machines and the hum of the fluorescent light over the counter and the faint smell of hot lint.

"A hundred an hour," Marla said finally. "That's more than I make in a day."

"That's the deal."

"And you're fine with it."

"I'm fine with it." Aria shrugged. "You're the one with the building and the sign and the insurance and the name on the lease. I'm the one who can't walk into a bank. You take the money, I take the money, nobody asks anybody anything, and the town gets its lamps fixed for six dollars."

Marla set the mug down and looked at Aria the way she'd looked at the sock — like a thing she couldn't fit into a box — and then she reached under the counter and slid the cash box across, and pulled a pen out of the cup, and wrote something on the side of a receipt pad in small square handwriting.

"Rules," she said, and turned the pad around.

Aria read it upside down. Cash only. No refunds. Don't touch the machines. Don't tell me how you do it. If somebody official comes in, you're my niece from Ohio and you're just visiting.

"Niece from Ohio," Aria said.

"Niece from Ohio." Marla ripped the receipt off the pad and held it out. "Sign it."

Aria took the pen and signed. She signed Aria, just Aria, the way she'd signed nothing in her life, and the pen was cheap and the paper was thin and it was the first thing she had ever signed with her own name, and she felt the small weight of it settle in her hand.

"When do I start," she said.

"Now." Marla took the receipt back and folded it and put it in the cash box and shut the lid. "There's a woman coming in at noon with a lamp her husband broke and a jacket with a zipper she's been meaning to fix since spring. I told her I'd ask around. I didn't know I'd have an answer." She looked at Aria over the glasses. "You got a phone? I need a number to call when people ask."

"I'm getting one."

"Get one." Marla picked the mug back up and turned it in her hand again, looking for the crack, finding nothing, and something in her face had gone soft at the edges, just a little, just enough. "And kid."

"Yeah."

"The hat." Marla nodded at it. "You look like a fool."

Aria put a hand up and touched the brim of the knit cap and felt the two points of her ears under it, tucked and hidden and waiting, and she thought about the shape shift and the points and the fact that she had no disguise left to hold, no five points to spend on looking human, and she'd have to walk out of here with her ears bare and pointed and real.

"I get cold," she said.

Marla looked at her for one more second, and then she turned away and picked up the next towel off the pile, and Aria understood the conversation was over, and she stood there in the middle of the laundromat in a dress that didn't fit the season with a stack of fifty-one mended socks on the table in front of her and a receipt in a cash box with her first name on it, and she had a job.

She had a job and a date tonight and a game tomorrow and a mechanic on her sheet she was still refusing to think about, and she had a hundred dollars an hour waiting for her as soon as somebody walked in with something broken, and she stood there for a second and let it land.

Then the bell over the door chimed and a man came in with a laundry basket on his hip, and he stopped in the doorway and looked at Aria — the dress, the cap, the stack of socks — and then at Marla, and then back at Aria, and said, "Is she the one who fixes stuff?"

"She's my niece from Ohio," Marla said, without looking up. "What's broke?"

The man set the basket down on the folding table and pulled a lamp out of it — brass, old, the kind of lamp that had a base shaped like a woman holding a bowl, and the bowl was cracked clean through and the cord was frayed and the switch was gone.

"It was my mother's," he said. "Can she fix it?"

Aria looked at the lamp. She looked at Marla. Marla looked back at her, and one eyebrow went up, just slightly, the way it had gone up when Aria said a dollar a garment, and Aria understood she was being asked a question and the question was well?

"Yeah," Aria said. She pulled the lamp across the table and turned it in her hands. "It's six dollars."

The man blinked. "Six dollars."

"Six dollars." She put her fingers on the cracked bowl and felt the shape of the break, and the magic came up easy and warm, and she started to work, and she did not look at Marla, and Marla did not look at her, and the two of them stood there in the laundromat in the heat of the afternoon with the machines humming and the man watching with his mouth a little open, and Aria thought, as the crack in the brass closed under her fingers like a seam deciding it was finished:

Five dollars to Marla. One to me. A hundred garments an hour. I'm going to be rich by Friday.

Marla reached under the counter and came up with an empty pickle jar, wiped it once on her apron, and set it on the folding table beside the lamp with a strip of masking tape stuck to the glass. She wrote on the tape in small square letters, the same handwriting as the receipt pad, and turned the jar so Aria could read it: TIPS FOR THE NIECE.

"Six dollars," Marla said. "You're giving away a miracle for the price of a sandwich. People are going to want to give you more than that, and I'm not going to stand here and watch you turn it down because you don't know how to take a compliment." She tapped the jar. "Anything they put in here is yours. I don't take a cut of tips. That's the one thing in this building that's yours and not mine."

Aria looked at the jar. The man with the lamp was already digging in his pocket, and he came up with a five and dropped it in, and the bill stood up against the glass like a flag on a pole.

"That's more than the lamp," Aria said.

"The lamp was my mother's," the man said. "Six dollars was a crime."

Aria made thirty-one dollars in tips before noon.

She knew the number because she counted it twice, once with her fingers and once with her eyes, the bills laid out flat on the folding table beside the pickle jar while the man with the lamp stood there watching her do it, his mouth still a little open, like he'd walked into a magic show and couldn't decide whether to clap or call the police. Thirty-one dollars. She'd never made thirty-one dollars in an hour in her life, not even close, not even delivering pizzas on a Friday night with the good tips.

"You want a receipt?" she said.

"No." He picked the lamp up off the table and turned it in his hands, and the brass caught the fluorescent light and threw it back, whole, unbroken, the woman's bowl smooth as new. "I want to know how you did it."

"Trade secret."

"There's no trade." He looked at her, and there was something in his face that wasn't wonder anymore, something quieter and more careful. "There's no trade that does this. I'm not an idiot."

"You're not," Aria said. "And I'm not going to tell you. Six dollars to Marla, thirty-one to the jar, and you walk out of here with your mother's lamp and a story nobody's going to believe." She shrugged. "That's the best deal in Blue Castle today. Take it."

He took it. He put the lamp in his basket and walked out into the parking lot, and through the window Aria watched him stop by his car and turn the lamp over one more time in the daylight, looking for the crack, finding nothing, and then he got in and drove away, and that was the first one.

The second one came in at twelve-forty with a jacket and a zipper that had been stuck since spring, and Aria mended the zipper in four seconds and the woman paid her six dollars and put two more in the jar and told Marla her niece from Ohio was a saint.

"I know," Marla said, and didn't look up from the towels.

By three o'clock the jar was full enough that Aria had to push the bills down with her thumb to make room, and the folding table had become a kind of counter she hadn't planned, a place where people set their broken things down and stepped back and watched her work. A blender with a cracked base. A pair of reading glasses with a snapped temple. A child's stuffed rabbit with its ear torn half off — that one took her nine seconds and the kid watched her do it with both hands pressed over her mouth, and when Aria handed the rabbit back the kid said thank you so quietly that Aria had to bend down to hear it, and then the kid's mother put a ten in the jar and Aria had to look at the floor for a second because her eyes had gone hot and she wasn't going to do that in front of anybody.

She learned things about the job that nobody had told her.

She learned that the magic didn't care how tired she was — the cantrips pulled from somewhere that wasn't her muscles, somewhere that didn't get sore, and by the fifth hour she could mend a jacket in two seconds flat while carrying on a conversation, while eating half a sandwich Marla slid across the counter without a word, while watching the door. She learned that the bigger the break the longer it took, that a hairline crack in a coffee cup was instant but a lamp bowl the size of two fists took her eleven seconds, and that the seconds mattered, that people watched the seconds, that the seconds were the part that made them lean in.

She learned that Marla had a system. The pickle jar on the left of the folding table, the cash box under the counter, the receipt pad with its small square rules, and every customer who came in got the same sentence — she's my niece from Ohio, what's broke — delivered in the same flat voice, and every customer believed it because Marla said it like it was a fact about the weather.

She learned that she liked it.

That was the thing she kept coming back to, standing there in the heat of the afternoon with the machines thumping and the fluorescent hum and the smell of hot lint and clean cotton. She liked it. She liked the weight of a broken thing in her hands and the way it went whole under her fingers. She liked the look on people's faces when the crack closed. She liked the jar filling up. She liked being the person in the room who could fix it, and she had never been that person before, not once, not as Jason, not ever — Jason had been the guy who broke things and hid them and hoped nobody noticed.

"You're smiling," Marla said.

"I'm not."

"You are." Marla folded a towel and set it on the pile. "It's unsettling. You look like you're about to rob me."

"I'm thinking about money."

"That's what I said."

At four-thirty a man came in with a phone, a cracked screen spiderwebbed across the whole face, and he set it down on the table and said I heard there's a girl in here who fixes things and Aria looked at the phone and looked at Marla and Marla looked back at her, and the eyebrow went up, and Aria picked the phone up.

"Ten seconds," she said. "Six dollars."

"Deal."

She put her fingers on the glass and felt the cracks, and the magic came up warm and slow, the way it did with glass, and she counted in her head — one, two, three — and the spiderweb pulled itself together from the edges in, the lines running backward like a film played in reverse, and at nine seconds it was whole, smooth, unmarked, and she handed it back and the man stared at it and then at her and then at Marla and said, "How."

"Niece from Ohio," Marla said.

He paid. He put six in the box and five in the jar and walked out shaking his head, and Aria watched him go and thought about the phone in her own pocket — the one Mike had given her, the one with Dani's number in it — and the fact that she could fix a stranger's cracked screen in nine seconds but she still didn't know how to text a girl.

She texted Dani at five.

She did it behind the counter while Marla was in the back room with the dryer, and she typed the message four times and deleted it four times, and the fifth version was: hey. it's aria. still want to get dinner tonight? and she looked at it for a second and then she hit send before she could talk herself out of it, and then she put the phone face-down on the counter and stared at the wall and waited.

The reply came in under a minute.

hey elf. yeah. 7? i know a place. send you the address. wear the ears.

Aria read it twice. Wear the ears. She put her hand up and touched the knit cap, and under it her ears were pointed and real, no shape shift to round them, no disguise to hide them, and she thought about what it would mean to walk into a restaurant as Aria with pointed ears in a world that didn't have elves, and she thought about Dani's face in the car and the way Dani had looked at her ears and known, and something in her chest went warm and nervous at the same time.

ok, she typed. 7. send it.

Then she put the phone away and went back to work, and the rest of the afternoon went by like water through a screen.

A woman with a broken necklace. A man with a cracked phone case. A kid with a bike chain that had snapped clean through — that one took her two minutes, the longest yet, and she felt the shape of it in her hands like a puzzle and the magic took its time and the kid watched her the whole way with his mouth open, and when the chain came back together he said whoa and his mother put a twenty in the jar and Aria had to count the jar again at six o'clock because she couldn't believe the number.

Four hundred and forty dollars.

She counted it three times. Four hundred and forty dollars in tips, plus the six-dollar fees, and Marla had taken her cut and never once asked how, and the jar on the folding table was so full she had to stack the bills in rolls, and Aria stood there with the rolls in her hands and the machines humming and the light going long and orange through the front window, and she thought, this is real. This is a real job. This is a real day. I did a real thing and I have real money and nobody in this building knows what I am.

"You're done at seven," Marla said. She was at the counter with the cash box open, counting the day's take, and she didn't look up. "I close at eight. You want to come back tomorrow, come back at ten. The sign says help wanted, but you're not help. You're the whole show." She closed the box and looked up. "Don't make me regret saying that."

"I won't."

"You will." Marla slid a folded bill across the counter — two fifty dollar bills, crisp, new. "That's your cut of the fees. The jar's yours. Don't argue."

Aria took the hundred dollars. That made a total of $540. She folded the bills up and put them in the pocket of the dress, and she stood there for a second in the laundromat she'd walked into that morning with nothing but a mended sock and a story, and she had a job and a date and a hundred dollars an hour waiting for her as soon as people learned the sign was real, and she felt the shape of it in her chest, the small bright weight of a thing going right.

"Marla," she said.

"Hm."

"Thank you."

Marla looked at her for a long second, and something in her face moved, just a little, just at the edges, the way it had moved over the mug. Then she turned away and picked up the next towel.

"Get out of here," she said. "You've got somewhere to be."

Aria got out of there.

She walked home in the long light with the jar money in her pocket and the dress warm on her shoulders and the knit cap damp at the brim, and the town went by around her the way it had gone by that morning, ordinary and American and full of people who had no idea there was an elf walking down their street. A car went by with the windows down and a song she half-recognized leaking out of it. A kid on a bike. A dog on a leash. The bank, the church, the gas station with the sign that said ICE · PROPANE · FIREWOOD in letters that had been rearranged by somebody with a sense of humor into ROPANE · ICE · WOODFIRE and never fixed.

She stopped at the gas station and bought a phone charger with her own money, and the clerk looked at her the way everybody looked at her, a half-second too long, cataloguing the dress and the cap and the face, and Aria paid and left and didn't care.

At Mike's building she went up the stairs and let herself in, and Mike was at the kitchen table with his laptop open and a mug of coffee gone cold beside it, and he looked up when she came in and his eyebrows did the thing they did, the you look different than when you left thing.

"You're back late," he said.

"I got a job."

"You got a —" He stopped. He closed the laptop. "You got a job."

"At the laundromat. Mending things. Six dollars a garment, tips in a jar, cash only, no names." She pulled the rolls of bills out of her pocket and set them on the table, and Mike looked at them, and then at her, and then back at the bills, and his mouth opened and closed.

"That's —" he said.

"Four hundred and forty in tips. Plus the fees. Marla takes five, I take one, and I did about a hundred items today." She sat down across from him and started unrolling the bills. "I can do a hundred an hour, Mike, if there are enough customers. I did the math. If I work six hours a day, that's six hundred dollars a day, and I don't pay taxes and I don't need a bank and nobody asks me anything."

Mike was quiet for a second. He picked up his cold coffee and put it down again without drinking it.

"You're serious," he said.

"I'm serious.”

"You walked into a laundromat and got a job mending things and made four hundred and forty dollars in tips."

"And a hundred from Marla."

"And a hundred from Marla." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Okay. Okay, this is — this is actually good. This is the first thing since Monday that's actually good." He looked at her over his fingers. "You've got a job. You've got money. You've got a —" He stopped. "You've got somewhere to be tonight, don't you. You've got the face on."

Aria looked at him.

"You've got the face on," Mike said. "The one you get when you're about to do something you haven't told me about."

"I have a date."

"A date."

"With Dani. The woman from the bar."

Mike set his hands flat on the table and looked at her for a long moment, and Aria looked back, and neither of them said anything, and in the silence the fridge hummed and a car went by outside and the light through the blinds went the color of the last of the afternoon.

"Okay," Mike said finally. "Okay. You're going to tell me about her, or you're going to tell me nothing, and I'm going to sit here either way, because you're an adult and you're my —" He stopped. He looked at the bills on the table. "You're my sister. And you're going on a date. And I'm going to sit here and eat leftover pasta and be normal about it."

"You're not going to be normal about it."

"No," Mike said. "I'm not. But I'm going to try." He stood up and picked up his mug and walked to the sink. "Seven o'clock?"

"Seven."

"Then you've got an hour and a half." He turned the tap on and rinsed the mug and set it upside down on the rack. "Go get ready. I'll be here."

Aria went to the guest room.

She closed the door behind her and stood in the middle of the small room with the bed and the dresser and the window with the blinds, and she took the knit cap off and let her ears free, and they came up out of the fabric and stood up straight and pointed and real, and she felt the air on them, the small cool draft from the window, and she stood there for a second and let herself feel it — the whole day, the whole long day, the socks and the lamp and the phone and the jar, the money in her pocket, the job, the name on the receipt, the man with his mother's lamp turning it over in the parking lot in the daylight looking for the crack.

She took the dress off and hung it on the back of the chair.

She stood in front of the dresser mirror in the borrowed shirt and the borrowed shorts and looked at herself — the ivory skin, the silver-blond hair spilling down past her waist, the violet eyes, the pointed ears, the body that was hers now, that she'd been wearing for five days and still didn't entirely believe — and she turned a little, side to side, watching the way the light moved on her skin, and she thought about the shape shift and the points and the fact that she had twenty left and no disguise to hold, and she thought, I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out tomorrow.

Tonight I'm going on a date.

She opened the closet and looked at the clothes they'd bought — the dress from the hardware store, the one she'd worn to Sera's; a pair of jeans that fit better than she'd expected; a soft gray sweater that was the only thing in the closet that was actually warm; and the smoky purple dress, the iridescent one, the one that hung off one shoulder and had made the woman in the store look at her twice. She looked at it for a long time.

She took it down.

She put it on and stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself the way she'd looked at the lamp in the man's hands — turning it, checking the seams, looking for the flaw — and the dress hung off her shoulder the way it had in the store, the fabric catching the last of the light and going from purple to green to purple again, and the neckline swooped low and the skirt fell just above her knees and the whole thing fit her like it had been made for her, which it hadn't, which it couldn't have been, which was the whole point.

She did her hair with prestidigitation because she didn't have a brush, and the cantrip pulled the tangles out and left it clean and shining and falling down her back in a way that made her look, for once, like the character on the sheet.

She looked at her ears in the mirror.

Dani had said wear the ears. Dani had seen them in the car and hadn't flinched, had touched them, had known they were real, and Aria stood there in the purple dress with her hair down and her ears up, pointed and bare, no shape shift to round them, and thought about walking out of this apartment and down the street and into a restaurant as the thing she actually was, and her stomach turned over, and she put her hand flat on the dresser and breathed.

She checked the time. Six-forty.

She picked up the phone and looked at the address Dani had sent — a place called The Copper Kettle, twenty minutes away on foot, a little restaurant on the edge of town with a patio and string lights, according to the pictures — and she stood there with the phone in her hand and the dress on and the ears up and did the math, and the math said twenty minutes, and she had twenty minutes.

She looked out the window. The sky was going the color of the inside of a peach, and the street below was quiet, and the trees on the corner were dark against it, and above them the first stars were coming out, faint and far, and Aria stood at the window in the purple dress with her hair down and her pointed ears catching the light, and she thought about the wings.

She could do it. She knew she could do it. The wings were the one thing on the sheet that wasn't a spell, the one thing that was just hers, and she'd felt them the first day in the woods, the pull at her back, the promise of them, the way they wanted to come out. She could step out onto the fire escape and let them come and be at The Copper Kettle in four minutes, five at most, the wind in her hair and the town going by underneath her like a map, and she could land in the parking lot like a thing out of a story and walk in with her ears up and her hair wild and Dani would look at her and —

And every person in Blue Castle with a phone would have a video of the winged woman over the rooftops before she touched the ground.

She looked at the window for a long time.

"Not tonight," she said, out loud, to the room, and it came out quieter than she'd meant it to, and she picked up her shoes.

She put them on and turned off the light and stood in the dark for a second with her hand on the doorknob, and outside the window the street was still and the sky was peach and somewhere across town there was a restaurant with string lights and a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a smile that promised more, and Aria Silverleaf stood there in a borrowed room in her own body with her own money in her pocket and her own name on a receipt in a cash box in a laundromat with a pickle jar that said TIPS FOR THE NIECE, and she took a breath and opened the door, and went down the stairs, and stepped out into the evening, and started walking.

Twenty minutes. She could do twenty minutes.

But God, she thought, as the door closed behind her and the warm air hit her face and the street stretched out ahead of her with the sky going dark above it — she wished she could fly.