I opened my eyes on the alien sky I normally saw above the forest. For the first time, it was perfectly clear, unobscured by trunks or branches. I gasped, sitting upright, digging my fingers into the grassy knoll beneath me. They felt strange. I glanced to my left and saw that my hand was a hand again, even though this was the landscape of my dreams, the place where my slow mutation had been more than skin-deep. Disentangling my fingers from the grass, I raised my hand to eye level and studied it carefully. The green shade of my skin was what I had come to expect, but the hand itself was back to a perfectly human norm, shaped and sculpted by Anastasia Miller’s DNA.

“This should be less traumatic for you.”

My head snapped around as I shoved myself to my feet, stumbling away from the woman standing next to me. She looked like me or, rather, she looked like Anastasia Miller, refined down to the purest expression of what she might have been, had she remained perfectly human. She was tall, slimmer than I was, with an athletic build I had never aspired to maintain. Her hair fell around her face in perfect waves, sleek and cut to flatter her bone structure. Even her makeup was perfect.

She blinked in confusion. “Is it not?” she asked, and her voice was an eerie echo of my own played through a set of speakers, rendered foreign to my ears by its distance. “Most have appreciated seeing the face of their foster species, at least in the beginning.”

I eyed her warily. “Who are you?”

“We have names, but not in the way your ‘humans’ do. Verbal speech has never been our primary means of communication.” She sounded apologetic, at least. That was something. “You may call me ‘First,’ because I have been chosen to carry the honor of being the first to contact this world’s harvest. We are so happy to meet you, as we have always been happy to bring our bountiful children home.”

My wariness faded into a suspicious frown. “This isn’t what you really look like. This isn’t what I really look like.”

“No, this isn’t what I really look like. Your own face, however, is the one you will wear for the length of your growth in this or any other world. You are lovely.” She smiled. “All of you are lovely. What a strange garden this has been, to make you so! Every garden is different, but it is always a delight to see the first harvest home.”

“What do you look like under there?” I waved a hand. “How are you doing this?”