Chapter 6: The Test Subject
The fluorescent light above her buzzed like an angry insect, its flicker catching the emerald glow of her skin. Cay stared at her hands, at the impossible expanse of green flesh stretched over thick muscle and bone that had no business belonging to her. Her lab coat hung in tattered strips from her shoulders, the fabric having surrendered to the sudden surge of her frame. She could feel the cool air against her skin, could feel the weight of her own body pressing down with a density that felt wrong and right all at once.
She took a step. The floor tile cracked beneath her bare foot, a sharp pop that made her freeze. She looked down at herself. Bare foot. Her sensible flats had burst apart during the transformation, and her leggings were nothing more than shredded ribbons clinging to her thighs. Her shirt was gone entirely.
"Okay," she said, and the sound of her own voice startled her. It was deeper, richer, like gravel rolling through honey. "Okay. Think."
She needed a mirror. The lab had a small restroom at the back, past the rows of equipment she had spent weeks calibrating. She moved toward it slowly, each step a careful negotiation with her new center of gravity. The ceiling felt low. She had to duck slightly as she passed under a support beam, and the sensation was so alien that she stopped and reached up to touch it. Her fingertips brushed the metal easily. She had always been average height. Five foot six. Now she had to crouch to avoid hitting her head.
The restroom door was a standard height, which meant she had to turn sideways and squeeze through. Inside, the mirror above the sink was mounted at eye level for a normal person, which meant she had to crouch again to see herself. When she did, the breath caught in her throat.
Emerald skin. Darker than she had imagined, a deep mineral green that seemed to shimmer faintly under the harsh bathroom light. Her face was still her own, the same sharp jaw and high cheekbones, the same emerald eyes that now seemed to glow with their own internal light. But everything else had changed. Her shoulders were broad, impossibly broad, capped with muscle that looked carved from stone. Her arms hung thick and heavy at her sides, veins traced like rivers beneath the green hide. Her chest, her stomach, her legs, all of it had swelled into something that belonged on a mythological statue, not on a graduate student who spent most of her time hunched over a microscope.
She reached up and touched her hair. The strict bun she had worn that morning, the one she always wore during lab work, had come loose during the transformation. Dark hair spilled down past her shoulders now, and she realized with a strange detachment that even her hair had grown.
"Okay," she said again, and this time she heard the tremor underneath the gravel. "This is real. This is happening."
She straightened, and her head bumped the low ceiling of the restroom. The impact was barely a thud. She did not feel it. She pushed her palm against the ceiling and felt the drywall give slightly under the pressure. Experimentally, she pressed harder. The ceiling creaked. She pulled her hand away and saw the faint imprint of her fingers left behind in the material.
Her heart hammered in her chest, a wild, panicked rhythm, but beneath it something else stirred. A warmth, a current of pleasure that seemed to coil in her gut and spread outward. She remembered the moment of transformation, the surge of heat, the way her body had convulsed as it reshaped itself. She had been terrified then. She had been horrified.
She wasn't horrified now. She was curious.
She turned and squeezed back through the restroom door, emerging into the main lab.