Perfect Assimilation: Evolution of a Shapeshifting Slime!

The miniature hexagon turned slowly in the air above Ayla’s pillow. It was the size of a closed fist now, scaled down from the monument that had hung above the testing platform that morning.

The aura around it had not lightened. It remained the same heavy, storm-sky color, performing the same patient rotation with the same low hum that the room’s lights could not entirely drown out.

Ayla lay on her back and watched it turn. The bed was smaller than the one in the Hayashi estate, though the sheets were thicker.

The window across the room looked out over the eastern training yards; somewhere in the dark, a unit was running a night drill, the rhythm of their boots reaching her through the glass as a distant, even thud.

She had not slept. Only after she had eaten until her belly protruded had her grandfather allowed her to stop.

He had watched the meal with the same patience a man might watch a fortification rise, and he had not lowered his gaze from her plate until he confirmed that the platters were empty.

Ayla had liked the taste of every dish, but none of them had quenched the hunger underneath the food.

The hunger underneath was for brains.

It had grown worse over the last week. The cooked meals filled her stomach without filling the part of her that had been built around devouring.

That part of her had begun, in the last two days, to make small adjustments to her behavior that she only noticed afterward: a glance held a beat too long at the back of an officer’s neck; a pause at a doorway when an unaccompanied technician walked past; a stir of warmth on her tongue when Maren had bent over the dinner table to fill her cup.

The body knew what it wanted, even when the rational mind kept it on a leash. The leash was getting thinner.

Ayla turned her head and looked at the wall. If she let herself slip much further, the disguise she had spent a week building would tear in front of the wrong person—and the wrong person, in this complex, was every person in it.

Even the slowest orderly here was Bronze. Her grandfather was Diamond. If she got caught, she would die.

The thought was not the catastrophe it once would have been. She had Death Looper now. Death was a return, not an end.

She would simply step back to her last anchor and try again, with the lesson of the failure folded into her catalogue.

The solution sat clean in her head: eat now. Eat someone who would not be missed in the next hour. Kill herself and return to the moment before that person died.

By doing that, her hunger would be solved, and she could walk into the breakthrough room in the morning with her appetite controlled and her disguise intact.

She drew the miniature hexagon down toward her chest with a thought. The hexagon resisted for a moment, then it sank into her sternum and disappeared, leaving only the faintest residual hum at the base of her throat.

The core would integrate during the breakthrough. For now, it sat in her, ready.

That was when the door opened.

The soft light from the corridor fell across the floor. A figure stepped through. Both the figure and Ayla froze in place.

"Brother?"

Kenji stood in the doorway with one hand still on the frame. His hair had been combed for bed. The dark strands at his forehead had begun to fall the way they always fell when he tilted his head down. His hazel eyes were on her face.

He had ignored her for seven days.

The realization arrived in her chest with a feeling she had not expected. Her eyes stung. She felt the warmth of a tear move down her cheek before she had even decided to produce it. She did not care whether her brother spoke to her or not.

She was simply offended because he had ignored her. The only person who knew what she was—the only partner she had inside this household of strangers—had stopped speaking to her without warning, and she resented his betrayal.

That was all.

Also, he had said on the gravel of the courtyard the morning of the Outers that she would never become human because she was a monster.

As if she had ever wanted to become human. Humans were nothing special. She had eaten their brains and not one had been remarkable.

She would rather be a goblin. A goblin at least had the decency to commit to its own appetite.

Hmph.

She turned her head toward the wall and ignored him completely. Kenji walked to the bed. He sat on the edge of it, then slowly lay down beside her on top of the covers. His hands rested on his stomach. His eyes looked up at the ceiling. She did not glance at him.

"Ayla."

"I am busy."

"Ayla."

"I do not understand humans. I am a monster."

"Ayla."

She turned sharply, ready to say something else cutting, and his face was a breath away from hers. She froze. His eyes held her. The hazel was darker at this distance than it had ever been across a corridor.

The hair at his forehead had come loose. His mouth was set in the way it set when he had decided to say a sentence he had been carrying for a long time and had finally given himself permission to deliver.

"I am sorry."

Two words.

Ayla’s mood instantly improved. Every complaint she had disappeared into nothingness.

"Granted."

She turned her body fully toward him and pressed herself into the curve of his shoulder before she had finished saying the word. Her arms went around his ribs. Her cheek settled against the side of his neck.

The cologne Sarah had bought him last winter clung to the fabric of his sleeping shirt, and underneath the cologne was the ordinary smell of her brother.

For some reason, Ayla loved this smell.

Kenji froze.

He had spent the last seven days with his face turned away from her, and the seven days had not been about her. They had been about him.

He had ridden home from the Outer Walls with the decision of the four Outers in his ears and the small, cold realization in his chest that without his trait riding him forward, he would have made the same decision.

He would have quit. He would have taken the badge and the office and the long, quiet life next to his mother and father, and he would have been content with the smallness of it.

The trait had refused to let him quit.

He had spent a week being angry, and the anger had not been at her. It had been at the version of himself that had needed a death loop to stay on the path.

He had finally decided tonight that punishing her for his own cowardice was cowardice on top of cowardice.

He had come to apologize, but he never expected it would be as simple as this. For a moment, Kenji had no idea what to do.

His sister was hugging him. His sister, who loved to eat brains, was rubbing her face against his cheek like a cat that had been left out in the rain.

His lips twitched. He could already guess.

"You are hungry, right?"

The question was not a question. He knew the answer. He could feel the small tremor in her arms where they wrapped around his ribs.

He could feel the slight, deliberate slowing of her breath that she had begun to use in the last two days when she was holding back something the rational mind wanted to keep restrained.

He knew that she was hungry enough that she might have already decided to find someone to eat.

And he knew with absolute certainty that this someone was not him.

A week ago, she would have killed him without asking. She would have eaten his brain the way she had eaten the brain of every prey she had encountered.

But now, he was not prey to her.

Something in his chest eased by a small, careful degree. The heaviness he had carried until now disappeared.

Ayla lifted her face to his. Her eyes were bright. Her lips were pressed together. She nodded once.

A small smile lifted the corner of his mouth.

"Eat me."

It was the only word he had time for. She moved her mouth to his ear, and the cold, familiar tickle slipped through his ear canal. His consciousness folded into the dark before his face had finished registering the smile.

[You have been slain.]

[Ayla rejected your regression request.]

Above the bed in the room that had gone quiet, the small girl with silver hair lifted her face from her brother’s shoulder and licked the corner of her mouth clean.

Her dimples appeared, one in each cheek. The hunger settled. When that happened, her eyelids became heavy as she fell asleep over his chest.

Kenji took a sharp intake of breath as he pulled the bed covers over them. They had to fully rest for tomorrow.