Chapter 2: First Touch
The robe pooled at my feet on the cold tile.
I didn’t want to look, but the mirrors on every wall of the sterile safehouse bathroom gave me no escape. Reflections multiplied the stranger from infinite angles, trapping me in a funhouse of my own flesh. The air was too cold. My new skin reacted instantly, prickling with goosebumps, my nipples tightening into hard, aching points against nothing. I crossed my arms over my chest, a futile shield. The action felt different—my forearms pressed against the soft, heavy weight of my breasts, an unsettling, yielding pressure.
“The modesty is pointless, Justin,” Dr. Reed said from the doorway. She leaned against the frame, a tablet in her hand. Her tone wasn’t unkind, just factual. “That body is yours now. You need to know its map. Every scar, every mole, every response. Vega’s people will. If they touch you, and you flinch like a startled virgin, you’re dead.”
“Don’t call me Justin,” I muttered, the melodic voice still a shock in my own ears. It sounded like a plea.
“Sabrina, then.” She stepped inside, the hum of the fluorescent lights blending with the soft, rhythmic pulse from a small machine on the counter. “First lesson. Proprioception. Your brain is wired for a different body. You need to rewire it. Look.”
I forced my eyes up. The woman in the mirror stared back, her pink hair still messy from the pod, her brown eyes wide with a fear I recognized intimately. I made her raise a hand. She did. I made her turn slowly. She did.
The curves were obscene.
My waist cinched in sharply, a dramatic indent my hands could nearly span, before flaring out into hips that seemed impossibly wide. The tan lines were stark white straps across my tanned skin—one horizontal under the swell of my breasts, another cutting diagonally over my hip bone. A bikini’s ghost. I had never worn one. I saw the tattoos in full now: the colorful serpent coiled around my left forearm, its scales detailed; the cascade of flowers spilling over my right collarbone and onto the upper curve of my breast; a small, intricate geometric pattern on my inner right ankle.
And the piercings. The steel in my nostril. The constellation of rings in my ears—three in the left lobe, five in the right, the metal cold against my neck. My eyes dipped lower, against my will. The two silver barbells through each nipple stood out against the taut, sensitive flesh. My gaze fled lower, to my navel, where two more rings hung, gleaming.
“Touch them,” Evelyn instructed.
“What?”
“The piercings. Run your fingers over them. They’re part of your biography. Sabrina got the nipple done after a breakup. The navel ring on a dare. You need to know how they feel, so you don’t jump when a lover finds them.”
The word ‘lover’ curdled in my stomach. I swallowed, a difficult motion in a slimmer neck. I lifted a trembling hand. My fingers, smaller and smoother, approached my chest. The sensation of my own fingertips on the hypersensitive skin was electric, a jolt of static that had a pulse. I brushed a barbell.
A sharp, bright sensation—not quite pain, not quite pleasure—lanced directly from my nipple to somewhere deep in my core. I gasped, a short, feminine sound, and snatched my hand away.
“Again,” Evelyn said, her voice quiet. “Until it’s familiar.”
Tears of frustration burned behind my eyes. I did it again, tracing the cool metal, feeling the swollen, tender flesh around it. Each pass sent confusing signals, a biological alert system screaming about a vulnerability I’d never had. My other hand went to my navel rings, tugging slightly. A duller ache, a foreign anchor in my belly.
“Now the rest,” she said. “You need to know the topography.”
This was the descent. My hands, slick with a cold sweat, skimmed over my ribs. The bones were closer to the surface, the frame slighter. I felt the soft, giving flesh of my stomach, the pronounced curve of my hip bone under the skin. My hands moved to my backside, and a flush of hot shame swept over me. It was large, soft, a substantial weight. I cupped it, and the sensation of my own grip on that fat and muscle was profoundly alien. I was holding a part of my body that felt like it belonged to someone else.
“The center of gravity is lower,” Evelyn narrated, as if for a documentary. “You’ll move differently. Walk.”
I took a step toward the mirror. My hips rolled. Not a conscious choice. The anatomy dictated it. The shift of weight from one leg to the other caused a sway, a jiggle of flesh on my chest and backside that made my face burn. I felt exposed, every movement broadcast, amplified.
“Again. Without the grimace. Sabrina is comfortable in this skin. She owns it.”
I walked the length of the bathroom, ten steps. Each one was a lesson in physics. I bumped my hip against the counter, misjudging the width. The pain was sharp, a new bone protesting. I kept going, turning, walking back. The reflection showed a woman with a forced, awkward stride, but the underlying rhythm, the roll of the hips, was becoming insidiously natural. My brain was adapting, stitching this new motor function into my cortex.
“Good. Now, the practicalities.”
She opened a drawer and removed a small, pink device, handing it to me. It was curved, plastic, unfamiliar.
I stared at it. “What is this?”
“A razor. For your legs. And elsewhere. Sabrina maintains a certain… grooming standard. You’ll need to do it every other day.”
A laugh, brittle and humorless, escaped me. “You’re joking.”
“Look at your legs.”
I did. They were smooth, hairless from the transformation. But a faint shadow, a dark suggestion, was already visible on my calves. Stubble. Growing. On my legs. The reality of it, the mundane, relentless biology, was a deeper violation than the pain in the pod. This body would keep insisting on its own maintenance.
The next hour was a blur of humiliating tutorials. How to secure my breasts in a bra without wincing at the sensitivity—the clasp in the back a frustrating puzzle of fine motor skills my new fingers fumbled. How to walk in the low-heeled boots that were part of Sabrina’s “uniform”—the tilt forward, the strain in my calves. How to apply makeup with a steady hand, the feel of the brush against my eyelid, the smear of color on my new, fuller lips.
Through it all, a constant, low-grade awareness thrummed beneath every other sensation. A pulse. A wetness. An emptiness. Between my legs, the new anatomy was a quiet, persistent whisper. It felt fragile, labyrinthine, a hidden cleft that seemed to clench involuntarily when I moved wrong, a slick warmth that had nothing to do with arousal and everything to do with a body functioning on its own unfamiliar protocols.
I finished applying the dark lipstick, my hand finally steady. The woman in the mirror was Sabrina Thompson. The makeup accentuated her eyes, made her lips look bruised and inviting. The leather vest and tight jeans they’d provided encased the new topography like a second skin.
“The final thing,” Evelyn said, her clinical demeanor faltering for a moment. “The monthly cycle. The implant I’ve inserted will suppress it for the duration, but there may be… emotional fluxes. Cravings. Your brain is swimming in a new hormonal sea. You might cry at nothing. You might want to eat a whole bag of chocolate. Note it. Control it.”
I just nodded, staring at the stranger. Justin Hayes was buried somewhere under the tan skin and pink hair, screaming. But when I moved, Sabrina moved. When I spoke, her voice came out.
“Your cover apartment is stocked with her clothes, her food, her music,” Evelyn said, handing me a keycard and a cheap smartphone. “Live there. Be her. Your first contact at The Eclipse Club is tomorrow night. A man named Milo. He’s the talent booker. He likes dancers who are… unselfconscious.”
I took the items. The keycard felt flimsy. The phone was sticky with glitter from a case.
“And Justin?” she added, as I turned to leave the bathroom of mirrors. I paused, not looking back. “It does get easier. The body learns. The mind… adapts. Or it breaks. Try not to break.”
I walked out into the sterile safehouse living room, my new hips navigating the doorway perfectly this time. The movement was already more fluid, the sway less of a struggle. That was the most terrifying part of all. It was getting easier.
The front door led to a dingy apartment hallway. Sabrina’s world. As the door clicked shut behind me, leaving Evelyn and the lab behind, the full weight of it settled in my chest, a heavy, sickening dread.
This wasn’t a suit I could take off. This was the skin I lived in now. And somewhere in the city, Arlo Vega was waiting, and the only way to get to him was through the reflection in the mirror, a reflection that grew more familiar with every step I took down the grim hallway, the tap of my boot heels echoing like a countdown.