Until this moment, she had not realized that he believed that shift had been made in name only. He still thought she was the puppet, he the master.

Inaya let go.

It was a painful, delightful feeling, like giving in to the euphoric exhaustion at the end of a long labor. She took him by the shoulders—he was not a slim man—and let her arms melt across his torso, coating him in a shiny straightjacket of organic resin that roughly approximated the chitinous sludge of the bug secretions that made up the city’s foundations.

Her body trembled, and sweat beaded her upper lip. She felt the stitch in the world open, ready to accept those pieces of her she did not use during the transformation. It took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to unmake her entire body into acidic mucus and devour him whole. She breathed deeply. Her sleeves hung, limp, against the narrow bands of resin where her arms had been, which now connected her to Michel. His face was pale, with the barest hint of a quiver. He had seen what she could do, certainly, but never had it directed at him.

“If you touch me again unasked,” she murmured, “I will reach into your chest and stop your heart. Do you understand?”

He nodded.

Inaya pulled away from him as her body began to reknit itself. Organic sludge became human body, became tendons, sinew, tissue, skin. She dropped her pale arms so the sleeves covered them over before the stubs of her reformed fingers regenerated the nails. Her arms and fingers were sticky with mucus. The stitch in the world closed. And then the disappointment came over her. It happened each time she shifted back to human form, as if her body had half hoped she would never return to this soft shell.

“Come back with the girl,” she said. “Or leave the movement. We have no need of you.”

She moved past him, into the open ambulatory of the church. Three women sat in a pew at the front, weeping. Two priests with swords stood to either side of the massive altar, nearly fifty paces distant. The church was an organic monster, the largest thing in the city, built on the old bones of some dead ship and crafted skyward, with an open ceiling that protected them from the elements with nothing more than a custom filter. Expensive, considering Ras Tieg’s lack of magicians, but most churches had them, so God could gaze down upon them. To remind them of where they came from. Of where, one day, God might return them.