Hypermorphia

Children born with bones that shift from wood to gold to glass. Blood that turns to sand or molten lead or honey.

The first time you meet her is at a drop-off. She’s wearing the mask. You see a ripple of feathers behind it, before pulling away with the cargo.

The second time, she’s standing guard, on watch as your small band collects a package from outside the border. No feathers, this time, but something twitches inside the hood drawn around her face. The mask is smooth and white, with thin eye-slits extending almost to its edge, for peripheral vision.

Back at the lab, unpacking bodies from the black duffel bag, you ask a colleague who she is. “One of them,” he says, only to be corrected by Leader an instant later: “It’s Abraxas-Sylvata.”

“On her face?”

“So they say. I hear she’s ambitious. Rising quickly… I guess it helps to have a calling card.”

Abraxas-Sylvata Syndrome.

Accelerated mutational cell regeneration. Colloquially known as Magician’s Cancer.

Abnormal cell growth. Abnormal molecular re-assembly. It may remain benign, and fester only in its source tissue, or it may spread. Internal disorders can go unnoticed, but typically lead to death. Externally, it is instantly recognizable.

You visit the archives. You leaf through the case files. Children born with bones that shift from wood to gold to glass, shattering, splinters, bleeding, death. A young girl whose cardiac tissue morphs during systole, cannot be trusted to stay elastic, is sometimes stone or velvet or a sponge that lets the blood escape. They can only keep her alive for so long.

Blood itself that turns to sand or molten lead or honey…

Most cases of Abraxas-Sylvata Syndrome are malignant. Most cases are deadly. It is impossible to tell whether a previously stable affliction will one day begin invading nearby flesh.

When limited to the skin it is survivable, but the results are hideous. There are photographs. Far more on the internet than in the library, you learn, on the snuff-sites and morbid forums. Videos of hands that warp, senesce, iridesce; phalanges become talons. Lips changing from ivory to what looks like pus-filled bubble-wrap, seething green foam.

---

The third time you meet her, you’re riding the same bus, and you decide she can’t be ascending the Mafia ranks that quickly, if she’s still consigned to public transit. Is it a death wish? She’s hardly inconspicuous, in a mask so somber and theatrical, dark hoodie pulled tight, sleeves tucked over her fingers. You’re admiring the design, some faintly embossed spiral-work, when she tilts the mask to the side, and vomits into the aisle.

As a pre-med student, claiming you’re a doctor isn’t strictly dishonest. Nobody else seems eager to become involved, anyway.

You support her as she limps out of the bus, shuddering. Rain slicks the hood’s fabric to her scalp, which is changing at a pace that shouldn’t be possible, textures forming and merging, lumps growing and receding and splitting: like a timelapse of a black landscape over millions of years, accelerated beyond coherence.

She has a wristband with contact information and a short description of her condition. Between spasms, she says she doesn’t want to go to the hospital.

That’s fine. You haven’t taken any oaths.

---

Twenty years ago, lesions opened in the fabric of reality, and our cities were beset by pixie legions, and for a long time we were too busy to notice the radiation. We evacuated.

Things change. Infants are born with horns, tails, vestigial butterfly wings. Rather than rot, meat now turns hard and glittery, crystallizes like sugar.

The shining demon warriors, forced to retreat, still skirmish with the troops stationed around the border, distant enough from the lesions that we think they won’t grow fangs, go feral, or wake up with pixelated eyeballs.

It is highly illegal to venture beyond the border. There are several reasons for this.

To begin with, the lesions are connected, and the world within is small, and if you have the courage to battle goblins, you can effectively teleport between countries. This function is primarily used for smuggling—hence your uneasy alliance with the Mafia, who have a tank stationed within the lesions, and periodically make trips between City and Tokyo.

Secondly, public safety. You’ve snipped through the flimsy barbed wire, crawled past the bright purple radiation signs enough times to know this is a pretense.

And finally, there is the matter of the mysterious ban on sampling the lesion, on dissecting magical creatures. Your group jokingly calls itself the grave robber’s guild, though circumstances have never been quite so desperate—the Mafia always has plenty of bodies to sell, beautiful insect ladies, mermaids, scaled dwarfs and elfish, transparent gremlins.

As it happens, the law also forbids the biopsy of Abraxas-Sylvata victims.

---

You shoulder your way into her apartment, after trying every key on the rung, and carry her to her cot. She’s seizing. The mask comes off.

Eyes are multiplying, splintering across her face, rolling and blinking, merging, reforming as lumps of roiling diamond, a polygonal ocean surface. Waves break and become fur, growing in spirals, solidifying as a tiling of stone barnacles. The innermost whorls rise synchronously, become horns, flatten into scales, turn plastic and transparent, then sink into her skin and for a moment a perfect, flawless human face beams through the psychedelic murk.

Then a black fungus spreads, and her topography is shifting as frantically as before, and blood is pooling in her hands where the nails have dug in. You turn her on her side, bandage her palms, and swallow a caffeine pill in preparation for your vigil, hoping not to be stuck with a dead body next morning.

You intend to study, but words can’t hold your attention, not when her face is a mass of twisting shadows, matte one minute; then shimmering in the lamplight, always a glint in the corner of your eye. The paroxysms die down, and she sleeps. Her transformations are slow-paced, and not inhuman anymore. Glacial creep from male to female, combinations of traits evoking ancient races, royalty, peasantry, freckles blooming and vanishing, ears pointing and softening.

You examine the mask. Despite its symmetry, it seems to be some kind of shell: bleached white, nacreous lining, swirling engravings so faint as to be invisible from a distance.

---

In the morning, she’s bedecked in fluttering monarch scales. She’s grateful. She’s beautiful.

You don’t have the courage to ask for what you really want, so you ask for a pound of flesh.

---

She visits the lab. Leader dazzles her with his manifesto, the same private speech every ally of yours has been recruited with: He alludes to science, Progress, the importance of measurable data; claims that the bans on magical dissection are worsening the gulf between the theoretical and the experimental, “Before the latest decade, people would have rightly dismissed the idea of ‘theoretical biology’ as preposterous—”, we’re being held back by unfair legislation; history has justified the first grave robbers and so it will be for us. He rounds it off by attacking the non-transparency of the laws, the growing military, and the Orwellian surveillance of university students and staff.

Behind the mask, it’s impossible to tell whether she’s moved. (Later, in private, she’ll call it the ultimate poker face.) She consents to the surgery.

Fine-needle aspiration is easy enough, though as usual, you are left wondering who financed the equipment. The procedure is complicated by her churning skin, which sometimes crests, eager to meet the needle, then shyly sinks away. You end up drawing the sample from her upper cheek—your first pin breaks off in a sudden burst of glossy fur, but the next attempt is a success.

Months later, you’ll read that anesthesia notoriously fails on Abraxas-Sylvata tissues, and wonder how she resisted wincing.

None of the usual tests yield any results. Under a microscope, her cells continue to morph, seemingly aging backwards, or merging, dissolving, hardening and softening, trading nuclei, their walls changing in permeability.

Its interactions with the radiation make no sense. Unlike the pixie blood you’ve handled, the Geiger-Bifröst counter detects nothing, and in fact, the tissue appears to absorb radiation and purify the surrounding air. Leader has knotted fists, is obsessed, and you suspect several theories of his are being quashed.

She returns to the lab. You take blood, swabs, run a full genome sequence. You talk Leader out of asking for a spinal tap.

There are a few more drop-offs. She’s always there now, intimidating and distant with her gun, dark coat, and mask. She’ll text you after. You’ve begun staying most nights at her apartment. The seizures are more frequent.

You draw a line on her neck in permanent marker, delineating the boundary of her cancer. By the next week, it’s gone, swallowed by the rippling territory of her disease.

You play cards. She usually wins—if there are any tics hidden in her spastic transformations, you haven’t learnt to decode them. Her face seems completely independent of her mind, reveals either no emotion or incongruous emotion, never jives with her sweet, unaltered voice.

She gets you drinking coffee again, the real kind, warm and filling, rather than pills.

The vision fades from one of her eyes, optic nerve swallowed by the chimaeras. “You’re my only friend. When my other eye is gone, I want you to kill me.” You refuse.

Leader is ravenous, thinks he’s making progress, but it’s all moot, because—

—the week before exams, the lab is raided.

---

Arrests sweep the campus.

You’re afraid to attend finals, afraid to return to your dorm. You turn off your phone.

For a week, you loiter in Central Station, sleeping on benches, avoiding security. The place is crawling with homeless, and you blend in with less effort than you would have liked. Abandoned newspapers list the names of detainees—you recognize a few friends, but no sign of Leader, and none of her.

When you can’t take it anymore, you turn on your phone and receive a barrage of messages from less paranoid friends.

You read hers first, of course. An address—well, not exactly, but an allusion to somewhere you think you know, one of the Mafia’s less notorious strongholds. You begin walking as you scroll through the rest. Something’s wrong. They grow frantic, but not in the way you expect, (or, truthfully, had fantasized about: growing concern for your absence, a want for your return…) instead, her phrases lose meaning, immaculate spelling turns awry, words and letters are dropped.

“You yo ginih iy,,, do muvhj eotdr than I ahd imahined” is followed by “i need uyo”. Your stomach churns. You want to run, but you can only limp. A cowardice much deeper than the paranoia that drove you to isolation is growing in your pit, the vertiginous intuition that the world has gone deeply wrong, that you forfeit something during your absence, and that you would much rather remain suspended in this nauseating moment than find out what.

Your destination is one of the few surviving buildings of the inner ring, as near to the lesion as civilians are allowed, flanked by barbed wire on one side and crumbling cement ruins on the other. Once a warehouse, it had been refurbished as a theater just before the great catastrophe, and then served as a military base for both sides during the conflict. It now lay abandoned, except as a temporary camp for the Mafia during their various rift-crossing operations. You and Leader once found a goblin skeleton tangled in the stage elevator’s hydraulic mechanism.

The stronghold is huge, stark and unbreachable, but its real utility is in the network of service tunnels lurking below it, many of which lead beyond the guarded fence, extending nearly as far as the lesion.

You enter through a back door. The auditorium is deserted, so you descend, into the angular viscera of the structure. The underworld is quiet without the hum of live cables or working pipes. You feel embalmed. Sound travels here—you navigate by echo, following faint vibrations until they become distinct, until you see a figure at the end of the corridor.

You approach slowly, with your hands up (they’re shaking), expecting some trigger-happy watchdog, but it’s a student, one you know well—for a moment, his face lights up with relief, but the expression collapses within a second, twisted into a sickly cringe of dread and guilt. “You really don’t want to—”

There are bags under his eyes. His fingers are stained yellow with nicotine and red with blood. The surgical mask around his neck is spattered with several kinds of dampness. You notice all this as you crash past him, through the swinging doors into the locker where Leader sits, on the floor, exhausted, against the wall but conspicuously facing away from the gurney where—

You know, somehow, that the body is dead, despite its spasmodic dancing, the fluttering extremities and arching spine, the chest contractions that make a mockery of breathing. Her face has been ripped open.

Something in your mind drops away.

The edges of her wounds burn with blue flames that turn to petals and then thick slime, trickle into the gaping hole where her skull is pulverized (beside the gurney are several chisels, a hammer, and an electric drill, all coated in whitish-yellow dust), bubbles burst, bloom, erupt, spinning lilies unravel into silkworms that schism, hydra-like, masses of caterpillar heads merge into green-black lollipop swirls and prolapse, horns like carnival tents melt, peel, citrus-flesh plasma pulses with veiny needles, crawling bulb tipped-wires spread fast and once tangled become shimmering plaits. Her most violent seizures were never this chaotic or quick. There’s no symmetry, only desperation. The air is thick with a perfume that, over the past few seconds, has cycled through cinnamon, putrescent lilac, lacquer, warm coffee

The memory of her face, in that single instant you may have glimpsed it through the cancer, swells in your brain, and refuses to be banished. You can’t breathe.

Leader, despite all his charisma, has never had a feel for when not to talk.

“She asked for this.”

It’s all he says, and all he needs to say, to draw your eyes to him, and to what you hadn’t noticed: the mask that he has half-shattered, tinkered with, knit into a sickly twist of iron cables and writhing flesh, feather-meat that morphs and undulates to a rhythm you’ve memorized, her cells soldered in a painful grimace that desecrates both of her faces.

You leap forward, howling, as all the grief that has just been born in you is transmuted into rage, mind-searing, unspeakable, vibrating rage; rage at the universe for its unfairness and her for her UNWILLINGNESS TO EXIST and yourself, for throwing away what could have at least been your final moments together, an opportunity to confess, for failing to prevent this sordid bloodbath, and at Leader: your target, backstabbing friend, the smug and unrepentant bastard who will receive the brunt of your diffuse fury.

Your foot connects with his chin, splattering a blood arrow on the wall. He raises his arms to defend himself, and suddenly you’re clawing, spitting, throttling the genius biologist, young prodigy, gentleman, womanizer; he fights back with all the pride and self-righteousness you hate him for, and you succumb to the whirlwind of vitriol. The gurney begins shaking, clattering.

The student is yelling, trying to tear you apart, but your elbow catches his face and he reels backwards, cursing. Fists crack against bone. Leader’s thumb is in your eye, you knee him several times in the sternum, he jabs your throat, you’ve grabbed his hair and are smashing his head against the wall when you’re finally dragged backwards, thrashing.

Leader has already reverted to contempt and you’re hissing, struggling to break free, when her body seizes one final time, and goes limp. Inside the skull, something shudders and starts flickering.

All three of you approach the blue glow, suddenly quiet, anger quelled by horror and curiosity. “The brain,” whispers Leader, through a nosebleed, “may retain structural integrity despite constant metamorphosis. The form changes, but information is preserved.”

And then, “You should take it.”

There are echoes in the corridor, the sound of many boots approaching. Mafia? Police?

---

You crawl up a narrow, rusted ladder, wearing her face, which Leader claims will protect you from the Bifröst radiation. Her mind is nestled in your shirt, still in the form of a gleaming gem wrapped in interlocking snakes. You can feel them slowly coil and loosen: do these twitches of scale correspond to her thoughts?

You emerge fewer than one hundred yards from the lesion. The portal itself is practically biological, with thick, fleshy walls and blisters at the edges, as if reality has rubbed it raw. You regret not having the tools to gather samples.

Her brain, now a glittering flock of butterflies, breaks loose from your grasp to flutter into the rift. There is nothing to do but follow.¹

1. Originally published in 2016, in a zine that was distributed at parties, until, as I understand it, the remaining copies were stolen by a restaurateur who fled the country.