Hm. Kara was afraid of Graham. I studied him a little more carefully as he began to explain the testing process to me. He didn’t seem scary. Maybe I was missing something.

Two hours later, I was well and truly shaken.

Graham had asked me to report whatever I saw. Then he’d changed from one person into another as I watched — a heavyset middle-aged farmer, a schoolmarmish old lady, a slinky beauty, a broken-down old man. Each time, I had to describe the person I saw in detail.

Seeing Graham change like that reminded me of Williams, with his Blandy-McBlandsville disguise. I didn’t want to be reminded of Williams.

Afterwards, Graham picked up a decorative bowl from Callie’s coffee table, and I watched as it shifted from bowl to football helmet to soccer ball, and finally to a living armadillo, which turned its head and looked right at me. I had to describe each one of those things, too.

Apparently finished with the special effects, Graham sat back with a sigh.

“Well, this has got to be pretty unusual. I haven’t seen anything quite like it.”

“Is something wrong with me?”

My tone seemed to get his attention. He leaned forward and caught one of my hands, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

“Elizabeth, I know this must all be very unsettling. It’s always like that at the beginning. I promise, it’ll start making sense. You’ll adjust, and it’ll get better.”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to sound so quavery.

I reminded myself that I was supposed to be confronting this stuff, not just reacting passively and letting my fear of it rule me.

“I’ll explain what’s going on, as best I can. Remember how I mentioned earlier that Seconds and some humans can sense and manipulate essence?”

I nodded.

“There are two ways to manipulate essence. One is called a ‘working.’ A working changes essence from one state into another. And remember, essence is the substance of everything. That’s why I said we’re capable of reshaping reality itself — if you change the building blocks, you change the building.”

“Right, okay.”

“The other kind of manipulation is called a ‘half-working’ or ‘halfing.’ When you make a half-working, you don’t change essence fully from one state to another. Instead, you let it oscillate really fast between its original state and what you’d like it to be. So long as the essence has the shape you want more than half the time, that’s the shape normal people are going to see.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“It saves a lot of energy. Essence really wants to stay as it naturally is. It takes power to keep it in an altered state. When you disguise yourself, you might have to keep it up for a long time. Halving your energy use can make all the difference.”

“And that’s what you were doing just now?”