Pain that starts in the center of your bones radiates slowly from the inside to the outside, cell by cell, layer by layer, burning marrow and bone and vein and blood, so that in the end even your skin burns.
I lay on my back on a hard bed inside a stone room. Walls and floor and windows were stone, the drapery on the window thankfully a thick enough material to dim the light down to near-dusk even at midday.
Each drop of cool water Induan dripped onto my hot forehead felt like it weighed a pound. If I moved, my joints screamed. Even if I lay still, my shoulders and knees were hot points of pain. My legs twitched of their own volition. My hands clenched and stretched on their own, as if they were wholly unconnected from my brain.
Rails around the bed kept me from falling to the floor. Tubes pierced my arms and legs, delivering nanotechnology, food, and fluid, and removing calcium and dead cells.
Machines hummed and clattered.
The room smelled alternatively of urine and sweat and antiseptic and flowers.
Each day lasted a year or more.
Two others were going through the transformation nearby. Sometimes when the door opened, I heard them scream.
Wings rustled around me as fliers came and went. The corners of my eyes caught the black shimmer of Tsawo’s wings, the dark blue of the band he wore around his neck, its single indigo feather iridescent when it caught the light. Sometimes I glimpsed Marti’s red wings. At least twice I heard Matriana and Daniel speaking softly. Induan slept on a cot on the far side of the room. When she came to cool me with dripping water, she struggled to hide the horror in her eyes.
The fliers chanted and sang. They whispered stories of flight in my ear. I tried to hold onto their words, to let them encourage my new being.
Of them all, only Marti had done what I was trying to do. She warned me that my bones would feel like blades made to cut flesh. She kept her hand on me, gentle as a feather, soothing.
I had attacked her once, trying to escape Amalo. He had seen me even though I was invisible, and I had knocked her down and broken a feather. Feathers had value, but she had let me keep hers in spite of my transgression. Induan had framed it and hung it where I could see it as I transformed. A beacon.
Chance or Induan or both were almost always in the room. They sang and talked, and sometimes hummed. Chance often painted pictures of flowers or sketched fruit, and Induan occasionally worked with yarn.
When they touched me, choking screams filled my constricted throat.
Pain kept me from sleeping. Rarely, Chance dosed me with strong tea—also dripped from the towel. It helped a little. Still, my throat and my bones and the skin under my nails all burned.
My legs grew so long that my toes reached the end of the bed. The metal railing felt blessedly cold, and I clutched it over and over with my long toes, arching my back and extending my legs.
“Be careful,” Chance whispered. “You can break.”
“I won’t,” I said through clenched teeth. “I. Will. Not. Break.” I stared at Marti’s feather. “I. Will. Not.”
One day, morning light slanted into the room as I felt my shoulders shattering, my fingers curling into my palms so tightly that if my nails weren’t kept trimmed, I would have poked holes in myself. I burned. Surely, I’d melt through the bed and into a puddle on the floor.
Sweat poured from all of my surfaces.
Light hurt.
Chance muttered, “Must you be unique in everything?” He stuck a needle into my arm, leaned over me, and spoke carefully. “We’re going to release the spinal targets. You will have to sleep through that.”
“Why …” My throat burned. “Why …” I swallowed, tried again. “Why sleep now?”
“This is the worst. If you slept through all of your transformation, you wouldn’t know the pain of becoming, and you wouldn’t pass into being a true flier.”
I could have been asleep?
“This is the part of my work that kills people who try to watch it happen to them.”
Panic shot through me. More pain than I had felt as my bones hollowed and my limbs lengthened?
He continued, relentless. “No one has lived through this part of the change awake.”
In that moment, I regretted my choice with all my heart. If I could have, I would have taken back all of my promises and my ability to run. I would have raced all the way around Lopali, and maybe all the way through the sky to Joseph and Chelo and Liam and the others.
“Don’t worry,” Chance said, “If you are lucky enough to wake up, you will feel the echo of the worst pain of becoming. That will be enough.”
I let enough air trickle into my mouth and fill my chest to blurt out a single whole sentence. “Fuck the pain of becoming.”
Chance grimaced and did something with his hand, and everything faded to black.