A bell hidden somewhere in the wall rings, and the elevator doors slide silently open. Sylvia steps quickly into the empty elevator, and the others follow her—the woman who is mostly a leopard, the fat man with thick brown fur and eyes like a raven, the pretty teenage girl with stubby antlers and skin the color of ripe cranberries—all of them filing in, one by one, like the passengers of some lunatic Noah’s ark. Sylvia stands all the way at the rear, her back turned to them, and stares out through the transparent wall as the elevator falls and the first floor of the hotel swiftly rises up to meet her. It only stops once on the way down, at the fourth floor, and she doesn’t turn to see who or what gets on. It’s much too warm inside the elevator and the air smells like sweat and musk and someone’s lavender-scented perfume.
“Yes, of course,” the leopard says to the antlered girl with cranberry skin. “But this will be the first time I’ve ever seen her in person.” The leopard lisps and slurs when she speaks, human vocal cords struggling with a rough feline tongue, with a mouth that has been rebuilt for purposes other than talking.
“First time, I saw her at Berkeley,” the antlered girl replies.
“And then again at Chimera last year.”
“You were at Chimera last year?” someone asks, sounding surprised, and maybe even skeptical; Sylvia thinks it must be whoever got on at the fourth floor, because she hasn’t heard this sexless voice before. “I made it down for the last two days. You were there?”
“Yeah, I was there,” the girl says. “But you probably wouldn’t remember me. That was back before my dermals started to show.”
“And all the girls are growing antlers these days,” the leopard lisps, and everyone laughs, all of them except Sylvia. None of them sound precisely human anymore, and their strange, bestial laughter is almost enough to make Sylvia wish that she’d stayed home, almost enough to convince her that she’s in over her head, drowning, and maybe she isn’t ready for this, after all.
Another secret bell rings, and the doors slide open again, releasing them into the brightly lit lobby. First in, so last out, and Sylvia has to squeeze through the press of incoming bodies, the people who’d been waiting for the elevator. She says “Excuse me,” and “Pardon me,” and tries not to look anyone in the eye or notice the particulars of their chosen metamorphoses.
Fera is waiting for her, standing apart from the rest, standing with her long arms crossed; she smiles when she sees Sylvia, showing off her broad canines. There’s so little left of Fera that anyone would bother calling human, and the sight of her—the mismatched, improbable beauty of her—always leaves Sylvia lost and fumbling for words. Fera is one of the old-timers, an elder changeling, one of the twenty-five signatories on the original Provisional Proposition for Parahuman Secession.
“I was afraid you might have missed your flight,” she says, and Sylvia knows that what she really means is, I was afraid you’d chickened out. Fera’s voice is not so slurred or difficult to understand as the leopard’s. She’s had almost a decade to learn the mechanics of her new mandibular and lingual musculature, years to adapt to her altered tongue and palate.
“I just needed to unpack,” Sylvia tells her. “I can’t stand leaving my suitcases packed.”
“I have some friends in the bar who would like to meet you,” Fera purrs. “I’ve been telling them about your work.”
“Oh,” Sylvia whispers, because she hadn’t expected that and doesn’t know what else to say.
“Don’t worry, Syl. They know you’re still a neophyte. They’re not expecting a sphinx.”
Sylvia nods her head and glances back towards the elevator. The doors have closed again, and there’s only her reflection staring back at her. I look terrified, she thinks. I look like someone who wants to run.
“Did you forget something?” Fera asks, and takes a step towards Sylvia. The thick pads of her paws are silent on the carpet, but the many hundreds of long quills that sprout from her shoulders and back, from her arms and the sides of her face, rustle like dry autumn leaves.
“No,” Sylvia says, not at all sure whether or not she’s telling the truth.
“I know you’re nervous. It’s only natural.”
“But I feel like such a fool,” Sylvia replies, and then she laughs a laugh that has no humor in it at all, a sound almost as dry as the noise of Fera’s quills.
“Hey, you should have seen me, back in the day. I was a goddamn basket case,” and Fera takes both her hands, as Sylvia turns to face her again. “It’s a long road, and sometimes the first steps are the most difficult.”
Sylvia looks down at Fera’s hands, her nails grown to sharp, retractable claws, her skin showing black as an oil spill where it isn’t covered in short auburn fur. Though she still has thumbs, there are long dewclaws sprouting from her wrists. Sylvia knows how much those hands would scare most people, how they would horrify all the blanks still clinging to their illusions of inviolable, immutable humanity. But they make her feel safe, and she holds them tight and forces a smile for Fera.
“Well, we don’t want to keep your friends waiting,” Sylvia says. “It’s bad enough, me showing up wearing all these damned clothes. I don’t want them to think I’m rude in the bargain.” Fera laughs, a sound that’s really more like barking, and she kisses Sylvia lightly on her left cheek. “You just try to relax, mon enfant trouvé. And trust me. They’re absolutely gonna love—” but then someone interrupts her, another leopard, a pudgy boy cat clutching a tattered copy of The Children of Artemis, which Fera signs for him. And she listens patiently to the questions he asks, all of which could have been answered with a quick internet search. Sylvia pretends not to eavesdrop on an argument between one of the hotel staff and a woman with crocodile skin, and when the leopard boy finally stops talking, Fera leads Sylvia away from the crowded elevators towards one of the hotel’s bars.
And this is before—before the flight from Detroit to LAX, before the taxi ride to the hotel in Burbank. This is before the bad dreams she had on the plane, before the girl with cranberry skin, before the elevator’s controlled fall from the twenty-third floor of the Marriott. This is a night and an hour and a moment from a whole year before Fera Delacroix takes her hand and leads her out of the lobby to the bar where there are people waiting to meet her.
“What’s this?” her mother asks in the same sour, accusatory tone she’s wielded all of Sylvia’s life. And Sylvia, who’s just come home from work and has a migraine, stares at the scatter of magazines and pamphlets lying on the dining table in front of her, trying to make sense of the question and all the glossy, colorful paper. Trying to think through the pain and the sudden, sick fear coiled cold and tight in her gut.
“I asked you a question, Sylvia,” her mother says. “What are you doing with this crap?”
And Sylvia opens her mouth to reply, but her tongue doesn’t want to cooperate. Down on the street, she can hear the traffic, and the distant rumble of a skipjet somewhere far overhead, and the sleepy drone of the refrigerator from the next room.
“I want an answer,” her mother says and taps the cover of an issue of Genshift with her right index finger.
“Where did you get those?” Sylvia asks finally, but her voice seems farther away than the skipjet’s turbines. “You’ve been in my room again, haven’t you?”