It was, in every given moment, a feeling like being on a ledge, the natural and instinctive adjustments to fix her balance pushing her forward, and her stomach lurching, alarm surging through her mind. She couldn’t remember having a stomach that would react like that, or being afraid of falling, but she’d dreamed of it, and so it was intimately familiar without truly existing.

A few hundred times over, she felt it. Reflexive, natural movements, each one prompting that surge of alarm, of tension, the desire to overcorrect and overreact. The feelings washed over her like a wave, overlapping, combining, contradicting. Dealing with it in every minute of the last nine years.

The faces of the dead had never quite left her. They drove that alarm home and made the analogy of the ledge a lie. There was no dream of holding a baby, but she’d heard it before and she liked babies, so it made a kind of sense. The feeling, a dozen times in a second, that she’d been holding a child and she’d let it slip and fall. That a whole, entire, precious life would be lost.

That lurching, lost, horrible feeling came with every thread of herself that reached out. Extended to hooks and pulls, moved along the kinetic pad, rods and framing that connected the mechanical arm Rain had made her to one of her primary organs. He’d given her a gift by giving her these arms, because their movement felt like arms she’d dreamed of. She could feel fingertips drag along plastic laminate, as she turned a page.

She had brought her portfolio with her. Each picture was a story in a long and hard journey. The earliest ones had no sanity, no order, no choice of color, only long and narrow slashes of paint. When she hadn’t even had the control to pick what paint to use, only the paint, the canvas, and enough emotion boiling inside her to drive her to attack the canvas with that paint, to tear at the canvas.

Then, here, one picture. Vertical slashes on glass, photographed, because the glass wasn’t canvas but someone had wanted to preserve the image for her. Vertical because she’d struggled and fought so hard and so long on that day that her inhumanly strong limbs had lost their last iota of strength. She had collapsed against the glass, tendrils slick from tearing open paint tubes, and she had slowly slumped down, dragging the paint down with her.

Then paintings with more form. Experiments with control, to attack the canvas, then to move more gently, moving near it and directing focus elsewhere, so it was gentle movements only. There were experiments where she had everything covered with paint and then used her tendrils to whip it away, uncovering the pale canvas beneath. Negative images.