Chapter 3: The Final Draft
The laughter in the lab was a physical thing. It punched the stagnant, chemical air, sharp and relentless. It bounced off the beakers, rattled the empty vials in their racks, and drowned out the persistent hum of the freezer.
Ben—no, the mind that had been Ben, now housed in this alien, compact form—stood on the cold linoleum. She’d woken to this finality. The internal rearrangements of the night had been the last whisper of a process that concluded with a silent, total exterior rewrite at dawn. She was five-foot-two. Her hair, once messy brown, was a thick, wavy cascade of deep auburn that hung past her shoulders and smelled inexplicably of vanilla. Her feet, previously size eleven, were now slender size fives swallowed by Marcus’s discarded socks. Her hands were delicate, fingers tapering to neat ovals of pale nail.
And her voice. Her voice was the final, cruel punchline.
“I don’t understand,” she’d said, the first words out of her new mouth, upon stumbling into the lab and seeing her reflection in the dark glass of a fume hood. The sound was high, clear, and possessed a vibrato that made every sentence end in a faint, squeaking lift. “What is this?”
That’s when Lena lost it. A snort escaped her, then a giggle, then a full, shoulder-shaking eruption of laughter. She clutched the edge of the counter, her knuckles white. “Oh, god. Say that again.”
“Lena, stop it,” the squeaky voice pleaded, which only made it worse.
Marcus, who had been staring in shell-shocked silence, his usual bravado evaporated, finally broke. A choked sound escaped him, then a guffaw. He doubled over, slapping his thigh, tears streaming down his face. “You sound like a cartoon mouse!” he wheezed, struggling for breath. “A helium-filled, very confused cartoon mouse!”
“A very sexy cartoon mouse,” Lena added, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, her scientific detachment incinerated by sheer, absurdist glee. “The contours are objectively staggering. But the audio is… it’s a mismatch. It’s hilarious.”
Heat, savage and humiliating, flooded Bree’s face. Her new skin, paler and finer, betrayed every emotion with a vivid, blotchy blush. Shame tightened her throat, but fury was a cleaner fuel. “It’s not funny,” she tried to snarl, but the squeak robbed it of all menace. It came out as a petulant chirp.
This sent Marcus into another paroxysm. He stumbled to a stool and collapsed onto it, groaning. “I’m sorry, dude—shit, I mean—I’m sorry. It’s just… the voice.”
“We need to document this phase,” Lena said, gasping for composure. She reached for her measuring tape, her digital recorder. The mirth was receding, but a bright, manic light remained in her eyes. “Vocal register shift is a profound data point. Height. Full anthropometrics. Stand against the wall.”
The next twenty minutes were a meticulous dissection of her finished form. Lena called out numbers to a still-chuckling Marcus, who noted them with a shaking hand.
“Height: sixty-two inches even.”
“Foot length: twenty-three centimeters.”
“Bust: thirty-six inches.”
“Waist: twenty-four.”
“Hips: thirty-eight and a half.”
Each number was a nail in a coffin. Lena wrapped the tape around Bree’s skull, across her brow. “Cranial circumference is reduced. Suture lines feel… seamless. The bone itself has refined.”
She made Bree stand on the medical scale. The number was a full forty pounds lighter than Ben’s swim-team weight. The body was a feather; the soul inside felt like lead.
Then came the voice recording. Lena held the small digital recorder close to Bree’s mouth. “Recite something. The alphabet. A paragraph from a book. Anything.”
Bree looked at the spine of a textbook on the counter. Principles of Organic Chemistry. In her old voice, she could have recited the periodic table with sarcastic flair. She opened her mouth. “The covalent bond is characterized by the sharing of electron pairs between atoms…”
The tinny, high-pitched, squeaky rendition of the dense text played back from the recorder. Lena and Marcus listened, their faces straining with the effort not to laugh again. It was ridiculous. It was a mockery of knowledge, of identity.
“Play it again,” Marcus grinned, but the grin was strained at the edges, fraying into something like panic.
Lena did. The squeaky voice filled the lab once more. “Electron pairs between atoms…”
Bree couldn’t move. She was trapped in this tiny, soft, red-haired doll with a mouse’s voice. The laughter had hollowed her out. The clinical measuring had sketched the dimensions of her prison. She stared at her reflection in the fume hood glass: a strange, pretty girl with wide, horrified eyes.
The laughter died abruptly. The silence that followed was heavier.
Marcus’s smile vanished. He looked from the reflected girl to the floor. “Shit, Ben. I’m… that was shitty of us. It’s just… it’s a lot.”
“It is ‘a lot,’” Lena agreed, her voice cooling, returning to its analytical register. She set the recorder down. “The transformation appears complete. The biological alchemy has reached its end state. You are, for all intents and purposes, female. The voice suggests a refinement of the larynx and vocal cords. The height loss indicates not just cartilage compression but likely spinal column adjustment. The fact that you are alive, healthy, and neurologically continuous is…”
“A miracle?” Bree’s squeak was acid.
“An impossibility,” Lena corrected softly. “But it is our impossibility now.” She folded her arms, leaning against the cluttered desk. “The question is no longer ‘what is happening?’ It is ‘what now?’ You cannot be Ben Agnew. Not like this. The world has a specific, rigid filing system for people. Ben’s file is closed.”
The finality of the statement hung in the metallic air. Bree’s—she had to pick a name, god—her eyes stung. She had no tears left. They’d been burned away by shame.
“So what?” Marcus said, standing up, his broad frame suddenly imposing with purpose. “We figure it out. We find that creepy bastard at the bookstore. We make him reverse it.”
“And say what?” Bree’s squeaky voice was barely a whisper. “You sold me a cursed book? He’ll just laugh us out of the shop. Or worse.”
“Then we learn to live with it,” Marcus said, but the words rang hollow even to him. He looked at her, really looked, and his face did a complicated dance of grief, confusion, and a dawning, awkward recognition. “We’ll get you new ID. Something. You can… be someone else. A cousin. A transfer student.”
“I don’t want to be someone else!” The cry was a sharp, piercing squeak that made them both wince. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the soft, heavy curves of her own breasts, the narrow span of her own waist her hands could almost encircle. “I want to be me. I want my body back. I want my voice back.”
Lena was watching her, that hungry curiosity returning. “The body is adaptative. The mind… is resilient. But it is also a record. You have twenty years of life as Ben. That will conflict with every new social interaction, every glance in the mirror, every physical expectation.” She paused. “You touched yourself last night. After the final change.”
Bree flinched as if slapped. She hadn’t told anyone.
“Your heart rate and respiration when you entered this morning indicated recent, intense autonomic arousal,” Lena said, utterly without judgment. “It’s a data point. The new physiology works. It responds. The brain will, eventually, rewire to match the body’s inputs. Neuroplasticity. You will, given time, begin to think of it as your own.”
“Stop.” The word was flat, dead.
“I’m not trying to be cruel. I’m preparing you. The laughter was… an involuntary stress response. This,” she gestured at Bree’s entire form, “is the real work. You need a name. You need a story. And you need to decide, right now, if you are going to fight this, or learn to inhabit it.”
The flickering fluorescent bulb overhead buzzed like an insect. The smell of old pennies and burnt coffee was suffocating.
“Bree,” she heard herself say. The squeaky voice shaped the word, made it light, fragile. “Just… Bree.”
Marcus nodded slowly. “Okay. Bree. Okay.”
Lena offered the faintest hint of a smile, not of amusement, but of acknowledgment. “Bree. Then that’s Subject B’s designation. The first step is learning to use that voice without wanting to claw your throat out. The second is going back to the source.” She pushed off the desk. “The bookstore. We go together. Not to accuse. To observe. To understand what we’re really dealing with.”
Bree looked at her hands, so small in her lap. She thought of the feeling of completion that had washed over her in the night, the terrifying, organic rightness of the final change. She thought of the laughter, and the measuring tape, and the recorded squeak that was now her sole possession in the world.
Fight or inhabit.
She looked up at Marcus, his loyal, bewildered face. She looked at Lena, her poised, clinical curiosity. She had no weapons, no leverage, not even a voice that could command a room.
All she had was the impossible fact of herself.
“We go tonight,” Bree said, and the squeak, this time, held the faintest, sharpest edge of something that was not acceptance, but a decision to move. It was a start.
It was a start. The three of them moved through the evening campus like ghosts, shadows stretching long under the sodium-vapor lights. Bree walked between Marcus and Lena, her small steps a frantic tap-tap-tap to keep pace with their strides. She wore a borrowed coat of Lena’s, the shoulders swimming on her, the fabric whispering against the new sensitivity of her neck. Every passing student group was a potential minefield. Their laughter, deep and masculine, or light and feminine, scraped against her nerves. She found her eyes tracking the broad slope of a male jogger’s back as he passed, the shift of his shoulder muscles under a damp t-shirt. A strange, low curl of heat plumed in her belly. She looked away, furious.
“You okay?” Marcus murmured, his voice unnaturally gentle.
“Just walk,” she squeaked, the sound swallowed by the rustling leaves.
The bell above the bookstore door was the same. Its tinny chime was a trigger, unlocking the visceral memory of dusty air and that predatory smile. The interior was unchanged: towering shelves choked with leather-bound decay, the same stale scent of yellowing paper and polish. The proprietor stood behind the counter, not reading, not sorting. He was waiting. He looked exactly as he had that first day, his wiry frame perched on a stool, his eyes like chips of obsidian in the lamplight. They landed on Bree and didn’t leave. A smile, thin and knowing, stretched his lips.
“The reader returns,” he said, his voice a dry rustle. “And brought friends. How… communal.”
Lena stepped forward, her scientist’s armor clicking into place. “We’re here for an explanation. The biological transformation you catalyzed.”
“Catalyzed.” He savored the word. “Such a modern term. I prefer ‘edited.’ The narrative required a revision. The reader was an amenable text.”
Bree’s new vocal cords tightened. “Change me back.” The command, meant to be fierce, emerged as a piping, childish demand.
The man’s smile widened. He ignored her, looking at Lena. “You measure, you record. You think in terms of data and deviation. This is not science. It is art. A year-long sonnet, written in flesh.” His gaze swung back to Bree, penetrating. “Your body is the verse. It will hold its form for one turning of the seasons. Then, the ink fades. The original manuscript returns.”
A year. The words hung in the dusty air. Bree felt her knees go soft. A year in this tiny, squeaking prison. But it wasn’t permanent. It was a sentence, with a parole date. A shaky, pathetic hope breathed to life in her chest.
Marcus stepped up beside her, a solid wall of simmering anger. “Or what? There’s an ‘or.’ There’s always an ‘or.’”
The proprietor’s obsidian eyes gleamed. “Or the edit can be made permanent. The new form cemented. A simple act of ratification.” He leaned forward over the counter, his voice dropping to a confidential whisper that seemed to coil around Bree alone. “A consummation. Swallow a man’s essence. Make the transformation yours. Then, the body remembers. It becomes the only truth.”
The crude, biological finality of it landed like a stone in Bree’s gut. Her mind recoiled. Ben’s mind, cultured on literature and sarcasm, vomited at the imagery. But her body, this traitorous new arrangement of responsive tissue, reacted differently. A flush, hot and unwelcome, spread from her core outward. The low heat in her belly tightened, pulsed. She felt a faint, shocking dampness between her legs. It was instantaneous, a horrifying autonomic response to the vulgar instruction. Her face burned with a shame so profound it threatened to dissolve her.
“You’re disgusting,” Lena stated, coldly.
“I am a curator of consequences,” he corrected, unoffended. He waved a bony hand toward the door. “You have your parameters. Twelve months of curated femininity. Or a single, definitive act to own it. The choice, reader, is wonderfully yours.” He picked up a small, filthy rag and began polishing an already-gleaming brass paperweight, dismissing them.
The walk back was silent. The night air felt colder. Bree trembled inside the oversized coat, the proprietor’s words looping in her skull alongside the visceral, betraying thrum of her own body. A year. Or swallow cum. She flinched at the internal phrasing, Ben’s vocabulary rejecting it even as Bree’s nerves hummed.
They passed a group of guys spilling out of a pub, loud and expansive, their laughter booming. One, tall with a scruffy beard, bumped against Marcus with a sloppy “my bad, brother.” His eyes, glassy with beer, slid past Marcus and found Bree. They lingered on her face, then dropped, just for a heartbeat, to the collar of the coat where her neck met her shoulder. A slow, appreciative smile touched his lips.
“No worries,” Marcus growled, steering Bree away.
But the look had been a key in a lock. The man’s gaze hadn’t seen Ben. It had seen a small, red-haired woman with wide eyes. And Bree’s body had seen him. The heat returned, stronger, a deep, pulling ache that centered in that new, damp cleft. Her nipples tightened painfully against the lace of her bra, a sensation so sharp it made her gasp. She walked faster, the tap-tap-tap of her small shoes frantic on the pavement, trying to outrun the feeling.
Back in Lena’s lab, under the relentless fluorescent glow, the clinical reality reasserted itself. But it was different now.
“A year is manageable,” Lena was saying, pacing. “We can construct a cover. We can wait it out.” She stopped, looking at Bree. “Unless the psychological strain proves unsustainable. The arousal response you’re exhibiting is a direct hormonal and neurological adaptation. Your system is priming itself for the procreative function of the new form. It will likely intensify.”
“Stop analyzing me!” Bree’s squeak broke. She hugged herself, rocking slightly on her small feet. She could still feel the phantom pressure of that drunk guy’s gaze on her skin. It felt like a brand.
Marcus ran a hand over his buzzed scalp, his face grim. “So we wait. We just… get through it. You’ll be you again in a year. We can do that.”
Bree looked up at him, her best friend, his tall, familiar frame now seeming to tower over her in a way that felt suddenly, fundamentally different. Her eyes traced the line of his jaw, the solid column of his throat. A completely alien thought slithered through her panic: what would it feel like to be pressed against that? To be surrounded by that strength? The thought was followed by a wave of such nauseating self-loathing her stomach lurched.
But the physical echo of the thought remained—a fresh, slick warmth between her thighs.
She saw the moment Marcus noticed something was off. He saw her dilated pupils, the rapid flutter of her pulse in her throat. His own expression shifted from concern to a dawning, uncomfortable comprehension. He took a subtle step back.
That small retreat hurt more than the laughter.
“I can’t… I can feel it happening,” Bree whispered, the confession torn from her. She wasn’t talking just about the curse anymore. “When men look at me. It’s like a… a switch. My body just… answers. And I’m still in here. Watching it happen.” She looked at Lena, desperate for a chemical solution, a pill to kill this new hunger. “Make it stop.”
Lena’s clinical detachment finally cracked, revealing something akin to pity. “I can’t. It’s not a disease. It’s the design working as intended.” She paused, choosing her next words with care. “You have two paths, Bree. Endure a year of this escalating conflict, your mind at war with a body that wants to be used as it was made. Or choose permanence.” She didn’t say the rest. She didn’t need to.
The silence in the lab was absolute, broken only by the hum of machinery containing frozen, static life. Bree stood at its center, a vessel of warring truths. The hope of return was a cold, distant star. The reality of her awakening body was a hot, pressing darkness, inviting and suffocating. She had a choice. Both were forms of annihilation.
She looked at her small, smooth hands, then at the two people watching her, one with pained loyalty, one with rapt, clinical fascination. The momentum of the night crested and broke, leaving her stranded on a shore of impossible decision, the tide of her own blood pulsing a relentless, tempting rhythm against her will.
The silence in the lab was a physical pressure. It squeezed the air from Bree’s new, smaller lungs. She could hear the individual hums of each piece of equipment, a discordant choir underscoring her paralysis. The proprietor’s words—twelve months, a single definitive act—echoed alongside the memory of the drunk stranger’s gaze, two horrifying paths diverging in the yellowed linoleum.
“I need to get out of here,” she squeaked, the sound pitiful even to her own ears.
She turned from their stares, Lena’s analytical and Marcus’s pained, and fled back to the apartment. It offered no sanctuary. It was a museum of a ghost. Ben’s oversized swim team hoodie was draped over his desk chair. His size-eleven sneakers lay by the door like abandoned boats. Her own—Bree’s own—few borrowed items from Lena were a pathetic pile on the floor.
She sank onto the edge of Marcus’s bed, not her own, because her own bed still smelled faintly of Ben’s deodorant and that final, sleepless night of dread. She stared at her hands, the neat nails, the delicate veins. The traitorous heat from the walk home had faded, leaving a cold, hollow ache. Her body felt like a rental. A cursed, beautifully crafted rental with a faulty voice box and wiring that short-circuited at the slightest external stimulus.
The door opened. Marcus entered alone, shutting it softly behind him. He leaned against it, not approaching. The space between them felt continental.
“Lena’s running models,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically subdued. “Trying to graph the… the arousal response against possible hormonal triggers. She’s making a spreadsheet.”
“Of course she is,” Bree whispered.
“This is fucked, Bree.” He pushed off the door and ran a hand over his face. “A year. We can do a year. It’s just… it’s like you’re going abroad. A really weird, personal-study abroad.”
“Where I’m the cultural artifact,” she said. The squeak made the sarcasm land weakly.
He didn’t laugh. He looked at her, really looked, and she saw him working to reconcile the image. The best friend he’d played video games with for three years was now a petite redhead sitting on his bed, her legs folded under her, drowning in a sweatshirt. His eyes drifted from her face, down the column of her neck, to the pronounced swell of her chest that even the baggy fabric couldn’t hide. He snapped his gaze back to the wall, his jaw tightening.
That look, from him, was a different kind of violation. It wasn’t the crude appraisal of a stranger. It was a fracture in the foundation of their entire relationship. It was proof that the body she wore dictated everything.
“Don’t,” she said, the word sharper.
“I wasn’t—” he started, then stopped. “Yeah. Okay.” He exhaled, a long, frustrated sound. “What do you need? Right now.”
What she needed was impossibility. She needed the last two weeks erased. She needed to not feel a constant, low-grade awareness of her own breasts, the weight of them, the way the bra strap indented her shoulder. She needed to not wonder, with a sick fascination, what the other option from the bookstore proprietor would actually feel like in practice. The thought made her stomach clench. Not with disgust. With a terrifying, curiosity-laced dread.
“I need my own clothes,” she said instead, a practical anchor. “These are Lena’s. They smell like her lab. I can’t… I need something that isn’t borrowed.”
Marcus nodded, eager for a concrete task. “Okay. Yeah. We’ll go tomorrow. The mall, or something.”
“No,” she said, the panic sudden. The thought of navigating a public space, of salespeople’s eyes, of changing rooms, was overwhelming. “Not… not out there. Not yet.”
“Online?” he suggested.
She shook her head. The measurements Lena had called out flashed in her mind. 36-24-38.5. Those were numbers for a stranger. She couldn’t order a stranger’s life online. She needed to touch the fabric, to know the weight. An idea, fragile and desperate, formed. “My stuff. From before. From my parent’s house. There are… there might be boxes. Old things.”
It was a thin hope. Ben hadn’t lived at home for three years. But his mother was a sentimental pack-rat, the attic a time capsule of his childhood. There might be forgotten things from high school, from his early teens, that could fit this smaller, softer frame. It was a thread back to a life before the curse, however tenuous.
“A road trip,” Marcus said, the concept brightening him momentarily. “Okay. We can do that. This weekend. I’ll drive.”
It was a plan. A tiny, forward motion. It didn’t solve the year, or the gnawing hunger in her nerves, but it was a task. A destination other than this room, this body, this tormenting choice.
Later, desperate for a distraction, she began to clean. It was Ben’s old habit, a response to stress. She started with the chaos of her side of the room. She gathered the discarded male clothing—the jeans that would no longer fit over her hips, the boxers that hung loose, the t-shirts that draped like tents. She folded them, a funeral ritual for her former self. She opened Ben’s bottom dresser drawer, intending to pack them away.
Under a pile of old graphing paper and physics textbooks, her fingers brushed something coarse and unfamiliar. Not fabric. She pushed the books aside.
It was the backpack. The one she’d been carrying the day she’d gone to the antique bookstore. She’d forgotten about it entirely in the ensuing panic. It was shoved in the back of the drawer, a relic from a past life. Her heart, already a frantic bird in her new cage, stuttered.
She pulled it out. It was just a worn navy JanSport. It felt heavier than it should. With trembling hands, she unzipped the main compartment.
The smell of old paper and dust bloomed into the room. The book. The slim, leather-bound volume with the untitled spine. She hadn’t opened it since that first, fateful night. Seeing it now was like staring at a poisonous artifact. This was the source. This was the thing that had begun rewriting her cellular language.
She recoiled, dropping the backpack as if it were scalding. It thudded to the floor, the book sliding halfway out. She stared at it, breathing hard. The urge to burn it was a white-hot flame in her chest.
But beneath that urge was the colder, sharper drive of Lena’s scientific mind, now partly her own survival tool. Data. Understanding. She forced herself to reach for it. Her small hands, so wrong, picked up the object that had made them so.
She didn’t open the text. Instead, she turned it over, examining the binding, the cover. Nothing. Just worn, featureless leather. She felt along the spine, pressed the covers. Her thumb caught on the inside of the back cover. A slight ridge, a thickness that wasn’t quite even.
Her pulse hammered in her throat. She pried at the edge of the leather with a fingernail. It wasn’t glued shut. It was a clever, shallow pocket, seamlessly integrated into the binding. Her heart stopped.
From within, she slid out a single, stiff piece of parchment, not paper. It was the size of a bookmark, and yellowed with extreme age. On it, drawn in a brown, faded ink that might have been iron gall or something worse, was a intricate, singular symbol.
It was a double helix, but twisted into a Möbius strip, and integrated with alchemical sigils—the sign for quintessence, the symbol for transformation. At the precise center of the twisted helix was a small, perfect, and unmistakable illustration: a human form, halfway between male and female, with an arrow pointing from one state to the other. The arrow was labeled in a cramped, Latin script: Per Somnum. Ad Sanguinem. Through Sleep. To Blood.
But it was the lower corner of the parchment that froze the air in her lungs. In the same ancient hand, but fresher, as if added as a footnote, was a tiny, precise sketch. It was a petri dish. And in the dish was a faint, familiar, pinkish culture.
She’d seen it before. Every day for the past week.
On Lena’s lab desk, next to the half-melted one. A petri dish Lena had never explained, glowing with that same suspicious, pinkish hue.
The world narrowed to the parchment in her hand. The hum of the apartment vanished. The symbol seemed to pulse, a visual echo of the curse’s logic. Through sleep. To blood. The biological alchemy. It was all right here, a schematic of her doom.
And Lena had a piece of it on her desk.
The discovery wasn’t a liberation. It was a deeper, darker confinement. The laboratory across the hall, with its chemical stink and clinical sanctuary, was suddenly a question mark. Lena’s ravenous curiosity, her instant offer to help, her relentless measurements… were they the actions of a detached scientist?
Or had she been looking for this symbol all along?
Bree slowly folded the parchment, her movements glacial with dread. She slid it back into its hidden compartment, her mind racing faster than her squeaky voice could ever articulate. The betrayal, if it was one, was so profound it felt like the floor had dissolved beneath her. She had trusted Lena with the wreckage of her self. She had been a fascinating subject.
Now, she might be something else entirely.
A specimen that had wandered, pre-cursed, into the lab of the very person who understood the curse’s architecture.
She placed the book carefully back in the drawer and closed it. She sat on the floor, her back against the bed, and waited for the tremors to subside. The two paths forward had just multiplied into a labyrinth. The year of waiting, the violent act of ratification, and now this: the terrifying possibility that her sole ally had been observing her with a secret script in her hand all along.
She heard the click of the key in the apartment door. Lena’s voice, bright with intellectual fervor, carried down the hall. “Bree? Marcus? I think I’ve correlated the hormonal spikes with the sleep phases. The data is beautiful.”
Bree pressed her palms flat against the cool floor. She made her face blank, a mask of soft, pretty confusion over a churning ocean of terror and suspicion. The next move was unknown. But the game had just become infinitely more dangerous.