That was the third time, and the strongest. What I would have run from the third time wasn’t pain. It was the coming of the thing I had waited for all night, the thing Sherrea hadn’t talked about. The number of hoodoo is nine, because it is three times three, and three is at the heart of everything. Something said that, as an aside. I wasn’t listening properly.

The eggs hatched out in a stream of — I don’t know, I don’t know. How does the charge controller feel, when the current comes down the line from wind or water or photovoltaic cell, and it holds it back, feeds it steady to the battery? Is it hot like that, thick and hot and sweet in the mouth and the muscles? Is it clean and brilliant as a breath of ozone after lightning? Silly. It’s hardware. It doesn’t know. I knew.

I lifted my foot, and the power surged in me as if a turbine had spun. Any motion did it. Stepping, leaping, twisting like the upward reach of a lick of flame. Any motion. Would it work in one of those other bodies, the woman or the man? I couldn’t imagine it. Not those borrowed suits of flesh. Just this pure envelope of energy, engulfed and blinded in a rising tide of white light.

Sherrea was in front of me, dressed in white. She sang out a line and voices all around me answered. I laughed and dropped to my knees in front of her. She held out a mirror.

I knew my own face. I had always used mirrors, to make sure I was unobtrusive, to be sure I looked as much like the people around me as I could manage. And so I knew my face, not as mine, but as a mirror and a blurry print of others. Now I knew I had to search this reflection for the real skin and bones, eyes and nose and mouth. Working, Sherrea had said, with the whole mind…

As I found it, I built a replica of it in my memory, so I could find me again without the mirror. A high, smooth forehead fenced with thick, black hair; black eyebrows that arched high and even over large, long-lidded dark eyes; a thin, high-bridged nose and a thin, long mouth; an angular, almost fleshless jaw and chin. Bones and features, bones and features, and not much else. No extras and ornaments. The bones were tired of staying still.

In my right eye, I saw a spark. A reflection in the black pool of the pupil, a light; a little scene. I opened my eye wider and came closer to the mirror.

A riverbank, and a reflection off metal — there was a figure lying spread-eagled on the riverbank. It was transfixed with swords, the white metal bright in the new sun. The feet, the knees, the belly, the breasts, the hands. On the sand, silver-blond hair spread out in starfish arms, wet and clotted with dirt. One long bright sword stood upright in and through the open mouth, below the shocked, wide-open eyes.