Page 143 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

Troy brings Riley new books, most of them scientific, stuff about animals. It’s innocuous enough and any book is fascinating, but as Riley reads, he discovers there’s always a reference to something that gives him a little more understanding of whatever is happening to him.

In a book about aquatic life, he reads about clownfish, wrasses and parrotfish, which are all sequential hermaphrodites. This, Riley learns, is when an animal starts life as one sex and later changes to the other, with bodily shifts in hormones, traits and behaviour.

In a book about amphibians, he reads that certain frogs can change their sex when the environment is disturbed or they experience stress.

In a book about small animals, he learns that earthworms are born with both sets of reproductive organs at the same time. Each worm can both give and receive sperm when it finds another, an adaptation to a life where encounters underground are rare. Riley thinks about the earthworms a lot. He thinks about them wanting to adapt no matter who they meet. He thinks about their dark little lives.

It takes him a while to realise Troy isn’t just bringing him books to be nice, he’s trying to help him figure this out.

Riley is getting bigger, and stronger.

His arms fill out first, then his shoulders, muscle gathering beneath his skin almost faster than he can grow accustomed to it. His shirts pull tight across the chest. His pants strain around thighs that have grown thick and powerful while hanging loose at his narrowing waist. His balance becomes unnaturally exact. Riley can turn on the narrowest foothold without wavering, his body correcting before he even knows he has slipped. He sweats constantly now, heat pouring off him sometimes, his whole body restless with energy that has nowhere to go.

It wants speed. Distance. Open ground.

He burns to run.

Oh God, he wants to run.

Not towards anything, not away. Just to open himself up beneath the moon and find out how fast this new body can carry him.

Sometimes he breaks things accidentally.

It always feels weirdly good.

Addictive, even. There’s a heartbeat in the dark.

A tiny thing, small and strong.

He loves when he dreams this dream because it’s soothing and calm. The heartbeat makes a song where he feels rather than hears frequencies, and he knows that this heartbeat belongs to a girl.

It’s all that keeps him sane sometimes.

At fifteen, his body comes under siege from what Troy calls hormones. Riley’s irritability becomes dominant every minute of the day except when he’s on the roof. Despite the emerging physique, he doesn’t like himself at all. He doesn’t like what he sees in the mirror, feels confused and repelled, wishes Troy would take it down, but he says he needs it for shaving. That dislike for his reflection easily becomes hate.

Riley hates his body.

Hates his face.

Hates everything about himself.

And late at night when he touches himself, he hates that too, but his body is making demands and when he can’t sleep because his pulse is racing and his skin is hot, there’s nothing else to do.

The sullen exploration of his own body does nothing to help how much he hates the skin he’s in. For the first few months, he didn’t really care about the small opening tucked directly behind his balls, hidden between two folds of skin. It isn’t where he pisses from, which is still his dick, and it isn’t his asshole. It’s entirely a new part of him. The skin around it is so sensitive that touching it sends involuntary shivers through his whole body.

Sometimes he’ll push a finger inside the newness, and he feels so at odds with who he is that it makes him want to die. Riley has never felt especially sorry for himself, but this… this is hard to bear, and it all gets much worse when the cramps set in.

It takes a while to tell Troy.

Riley still doesn’t want to tell him anything, but it gets bad enough that he’s terrified of a repeat incident of the bathtub, so he tells Troy, who listens carefully and then nods.

‘All right. Sit down.’

Riley sits on his bed. ‘Are you gonna bring that doctor back?’

‘No, I think I know what it is,’ Troy sighs, running a hand through his dark hair. He stares unseeingly at the walls of Riley’s bedroom. ‘There’s people in the world who are more than human. Government only talks about one kind, the most common. They call them Paranaturals, but they’re actually called Brightlings.’

‘Brightlings,’ Riley echoes. ‘Am I… is that what I am?’