After a day tiring and dramatic as the previous, it is so easy to leave. I resist the urge to squash Dylan's finger with my heel on my way out but instead flick dust towards his body, watching his nose scrunch up in the darkness. Even this is petty. I revile myself for doing it, slap myself on the list, and his ears perk as well.

My body fills with fear like a glass fills with water.

Fortunately every other misfortunate still body in our camp stays so, including Kali's thick personage against the wet stalks of wheat, currently in the dark form of a massive black mountain lion. Her fur bristled against my back when she turned in her sleep, snarling.

Strange. I haven't the slightest idea what would compel her to do so.

Strange.

The road back to the city is long by human standards, but any other animal takes it in stride. I borrow Kali's form and pull the strings of the great cat forwards, letting its thick limbs lope across boundless fields and back to the city, which is patterned with white and dour yellow light.

In the closest mirror, I trace the mauve arc of my lips with a smooth cover of red. I'd seen the sticks humans used, but I needed only run a finger across the tender, wrinkled flesh and it obeyed. I press up the breast area, as I have seen humans do previously, and lengthen the hair just a touch, leaving most of my face the same. I feel raw, but it concerns me little tonight. I continue downtown, feeling my hair fly out behind me, feather-light. It is construct slipping over construct, hardly flesh, and it's hard for the thing beneath it to register every touch. Tonight I crave a closeness no one back there, in the crystal tower of self-imposed isolation, can provide, least of all my total isolation from the rest of them.

Old, dangerous sensation thrashes beneath the surface, something dangerous pleading to be given wings. I will not give myself over to anything so fanciful or dangerous. Instead, with nails long enough to tear flesh, I open a glass door on the downtown mall and enter the restaurant.

The man is there.

They are not always.

I sit beside him at the table, the two of us watching each other with eyes like ice. Slowly, I take off my own jacket, which is revolting in a way hard to put to words--as if I were peeling off a thin layer of my own flesh. In normal circumstance I would excuse myself to put my coat elsewhere and shift it off but tonight, bare, I am more given to honesty. My breath catches as I swallow, a pocket of air moving downwards through my system.

I am a bundle of poor ideas. All I need is to raise my voice and things will be fixed. "Are you well tonight?" I ask.

"Of course. It's nice to meet you..."

"Elisa." I offer. The last 'a' rests on the tongue, the kindest of lies. It is sugar I am offering a complete stranger, and his eyes close, savoring the shared sweetness.

"Well?" he says, flaring his menu. "I've come down here before. They've got some great appetizers. Devilled eggs are good for a starter."

I nod without the slightest clue what devilled means and view the wine menu. "I need a drink."

He laughs. The crackling of human voices when they are amused never ceases to confuse me. It sounds like he is wadding up a piece of paper, and I imagine strong hands flexing around the ball, crushing it like a spine. "Don't we all?"

How do I respond to this.

My heart skips a beat and we are saved by the waiter, who we exchange a quick greeting with and then order our drinks. I order the same as him after staring at the blurred lines on the menu, cursing myself not for the first time for not acquiring reading lessons. Angel. Alex. Mary.

Pick your poison.

Conversation with humans, when assuaged with charmspeak to fix the occasional accident, is not difficult. I speak, he answers. He speaks, I answer. I give vague answers about a family of four, a job as a 'journalist' (I don't know what this is but he asks what I write about and I respond that this is why I am here, because I am pursuing a 'story'), and I ask the usual questions. He goes on and on about his family, a recent hunting expedition in the woods, and I watch his chest and eyes interchangeably, considering reaching across and trying to feel something. Other couples have a look to their eyes I can not replicate, kin to the lights of the sun and stars outside. I am the opposite of glowing. I am a hole that no light can enter and exit.

The wine comes. The pale liquid, tinted the same color as the overhead chandeliers (cheap, tacky, I hate this town), beckons me, and I put my mouth to the lip and drown myself, lowering it when I have consumed half.

His reflection on the glass informs me this is the wrong decision.

The waiter lingers, smiling, and I order a steak because almost every restaurant has steaks. They are all awful. I despise steak. I feel my perception sharpen to a point as silence sits uneasily between us. "Say something," I speak, pouring force into it, and his eyes dull slightly.

"So, where are you from?" he asks as if not compelled, taking another sip of the wine.

"Around here. Born in a city a few miles off." I respond. It was a boring response, but a well practiced one.

"No, but... where are you really from?" he smiles, laughs again, and the paper ball crumples until it is little more than a pinprick in my mind, condensed out of being. "You don't look like you're from around here, that's all."
I lower my glass.

I had prepared for such situations in the past. There were quick diversions, charmspeak, other means of getting away... but I had not accounted for the fear.

"Here." I insist, forcing persuasion into every awful syllable. "I'm from here." Power gushes out of my mouth like water from a dam until I am nauseous, holding my mouth, and the man's eyes grow glassy. I forget what I did to compel him... did I drop something? Charmspeak? I must have done something to come to this moment.

"I see," he mumbles.

The silence resumes, the water going flat, but every eye on the restaurant is on me.

I mutter something under my breath, near incomprehensible, and shift my coat back on. My face is turning under me, growing younger, softer, and I dash into the bathroom. There is a window there, a pain of decorated, frosted glass, and I break it open. Someone outside responds to the noise and I take stronger wings, glass shards slicing up and down my body, and soar upwards into the kind night. He does not leave my mind the whole while, this stranger, the insistence of his words, and I am back on the ground in my barren body, shaking under my clothes. I run my hands across my face, feeling the slits where glass entered and those red rivers of blood teeming beneath the surface. My lashes flicker open and shut, my stomach still boiling with new, ugly resentment.

We were at a corner and he saw me, unglamoured, and told me I was beautiful.

This city is disgusting. I leave the dusty windows and poor lights behind, walking back in my own form, all the adrenaline passing until it is just me guiding the strings of the legs forwards, helping this girl--do I know her, truly--to wander back into the night. She is small and pathetic and anger burns through every scar but there is nothing I could possibly do to give voice to this.

When I return, I remind myself that I can not say a word about this tomorrow, nor the sliced scars that dot my face and exposed arms. They would know where I was if I rose my words. Red and Dylan brace themselves. Fear rises like a wave and falls with it, and my eyelids open and close again.

We will need to go tomorrow.

I hold to Kali, who has shifted back, and she opens one brilliant cerulean eye.

"I needed water," I lie, the wine sitting in my stomach.

Her nostrils flare. We lie so close that the night could mistake us for one.