Charlotte

  Often, when you are sick, you don’t notice when the symptoms fade. Not the exact moment, anyway. At least not all of them. On some level you know the chills are gone. Later, you realize it’s been a while since your last cough. One thing at time disappears until you are healthy, and it’s not until later that you realize the illness has left you entirely. Because you distract yourself. You try to keep your mind off of your misery. You sleep through it.

  It hasn’t been like this for Leo. Not exactly. It hasn’t been like this for any of them. It wasn’t as simple as unlocking a door for anyone, from sorrow to joy in a single instant. But when most saw the sunrise they let the warmth and the light kiss their skin and they reveled in it. Only me. Only I have been so choked with hopelessness that I failed to really appreciate that . . . I am better now. I am me. Like with a long fever, broken in the night, it wasn’t until now. Now, waking up in the morning weeks later, that I fully realized it. I have seen such joy around me, every day. Such laughter, and community, and I felt isolated from it. I felt like I was outside, because I was. Because I tried to save everyone, and I made the wrong choice to do it. I have felt such hopelessness for so long. Long before that mistake. Before I traded the people trying to help me for my son's future. For their future.

  I don’t know what changed. I still feel hopeless. I still look over my shoulder, waiting for the knights to surround us and punish us for breathing from the wrong bodies. I still picture Lily, and Sara, and all of them, bleeding in the dirt. I still hope every day to find the others Leo and I brought her. But today, I feel new. I woke up, my blankets discarded in the middle of a hot night, and looked down at my exposed body in the empty tent. At some point, I stopped hating what I woke up to. At some point, I stopped falling asleep to the empty dream of waking up in a different body than my own. I don’t remember when it happened. I was too distracted by the misery of my hopelessness and the choices it brought me. I never properly acknowledged that one of my dreams, one of the deepest desires carved into my heart, had come true. The reality I had written off as hopeless long before anything else.

  But here I am. The woman I have always been in the body that was always mine. I know that so many people back home will still reject this reality. I know it was never really about my body to them. I was a woman long before any physical changes. Just like the lack of them couldn’t change that, the fact that I have them now won’t change any minds. It was never about that, to them. It has always been about control. Even so. It’s like a deep thorn has been pulled from me. I didn’t need a new body to be a woman. But that everyday feeling, like turning a key in the wrong lock, was still tied to the old one. I’m still bleeding from the wounds it left, but I am free of it. The joy all around me, that everyone else feels, that Leo brought to all of us . . . it belongs to me too. Which means . . . maybe nothing has ever been hopeless.

  This thought is bittered by the reality of my choices. If nothing is hopeless, then a choice driven by a lack of hope can’t be excused. What do I feel? Exuberant and relieved? Or this fresh shame, actually earned. My thoughts return to Rose. My friend from so many years ago. My very first Lillith, who avenged the death of my other hopeful friend. So fiery. So angry. So fucking hopeful she lost everything for it. Was I supposed to keep watching my friends die? Keep watching them give up what little existence we could claw away from the rest of the world? How was I supposed to let people die, and suffer, and hurt, over, and over, and over and over again? I couldn’t bear that. I can’t bear it now.

  “Are you alright?” a voice asks, causing me to jump. Ryanna sits up from the opposite side of the tent. I usually wake up long before anyone else and was expecting the usual time to pass for personal reflection. I must have been too loud, because the other, usually bright and chipper woman, is staring at me with an intensity I struggle beneath.

  I don’t know what it is that breaks my silence. The cracks I am letting my joy through, perhaps. The feeling I woke up with, like I am fresh from a bath and something has been scrubbed from me. Or maybe the weight of my past has finally grown too heavy to drag on my own. In any case, I make a snap decision. I decide to tell her. Everything.

  “Can I tell you a story?” I ask. She tilts her head, but nods.

  “We have time, I’d love to talk,” she agrees. Her phrasing implies she understands, somehow, the intent of the story, before I’ve even told it.

  And so I tell her. I tell her every story I’ve worn like a hidden bruise. I tell her about Amelia, my first friend, and her disappearance. I tell her about Sadie, and how she was poisoned when we tried changing our bodies before. About Rose, who disappeared after killing Sadie’s murderer. I tell her about meeting Leo, then Lillith, then Godfrey. I tell her how much I’ve lost. Who I’ve lost, and I tell her how I tried to stop it from happening again. She listens to all of it. My entire life story, it seems. She doesn’t interrupt once, despite her recent tendency for excitability. She takes a deep breath as I describe the joy. The boundless happiness Leo has brought us all, and my struggles accepting it.

  “You’re wrong, you know,” she says after I finally stop talking. I blink at her.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “About what?” I ask.

  “A lot of things, but first, about that last thing. The joy. It’s not just Leo who gave it to us, and it’s not just because we finally woke up in the bodies we spent our lives dreaming of. It is because of that, you're totally right, but you’re also wrong. It’s . . . more than beautiful to see in my reflection an image that only ever existed with my eyes closed before. But the real joy? That's in this . . . community. The people around us. It’s in safety and expression. The joy is its own source. Because it’s exactly as you said. Whether I have breasts or not, whatever is between my legs, and whether I can bear children or not, I would never have been accepted back home.

  “Look at Frey. They describe a home like none I’ve ever heard of. With gender just as strictly enforced but with entirely different definitions for it. The criteria for who you are forced to be is completely different. Or maybe the same but shaped differently. But one thing that always remains is ownership. Authority. Whoever we are, and whatever we look like, our owners will always demand compliance. You want to know why we are so happy here? Why we feel so alive all the time? Yes, it’s because of a long cherished dream come true. But it’s also because here, we are free from all of that. Because we are all allowed to live our lives. No one tells us our existence is offensive. No one tells us we are dangerous, or unfair, or sick. And no one would, even if our bodies never changed. Even if we were still twisted into the horrors the Radiant Woods forced on us. We are simply who we are, and we are allowed just . . . live without being hated for it. We smile because finally, everyone knows existing is not hostility.”

  Once she starts speaking she has difficulty stopping, and her quick pace makes it almost difficult to follow. But I understand exactly what she means. Leo was so happy when he started to change. But he was happier when he met Vance and Ryanna. Happier still with each subsequent addition to our community. Of course that is why everyone is so bright all the time. And of course I have been behind them in all of that, because . . . “That only makes me more guilty, for what I did. Doesn’t it?” I ask.

  “No. Yes, but no,” Ryanna says. I raise an eyebrow at her and she shrugs. “You don’t own any guilt for feeling hopeless. We have all lived lives where shame was sewn into our skin from the day we are born. From the day we first ask our parents the wrong question. We all know how dangerous it is just to . . . be. Otherwise it wouldn’t feel so brilliant to exist outside of lives like that. Safety is job one. For all of us. In a world that hates us, safety is all we can fight for sometimes. Every scrap of security is won through blood and compromise for us. Because so many other people are allowed comfort, and as long as they have it, even a little, they aren’t going to stick their necks out to make sure we do too. None of us. None of us have earned even a shred of shame for doing what we need to to feel even a little safe. As important as hope is, it is not a sin to lose it. Losing hope wasn’t your mistake. It may have contributed to it, but it wasn’t something that you did wrong.”

  “If not that, then what?” I ask. She offers me an awkward smile.

  “Control,” she says. “The desire that has tormented all of us, as long as we have lived. The desire of others to have us under their control. I understand the trauma of loss. Especially knowing what likely happened to your friends.” She shudders at this, her own broken memories boiling up at the thought. “You wanted to prevent another tragedy. You wanted that safety, not just for yourself, but for everyone. But . . . you didn’t give anyone else a choice. You didn’t let them choose who to trust. You didn’t let them decide what safety looked like to them. You sold their future to someone you trusted, when you knew they had chosen another path. That’s where you fell short. Because both were a gamble. No one knew what would happen or how. They weren’t walking toward guaranteed death, and you weren’t taking them toward guaranteed prosperity. Their choice didn’t require you to act, or anything at all from you. Everyone was taking a risk, and you tried to choose which risk they were allowed to take. That was your mistake. Control.”

  I hang my head a bit. That’s even worse. “What do I do?” I ask. She leans forward, then awkwardly shuffles across the tent to sit next to me. She then touches my shoulder with one hand and giggles a little, filling the uncomfortable silence.

  “Well. I said losing hope wasn’t a sin. I didn’t say getting it back wasn’t a solution. I don’t know how you talk to these people, if you meet them again. I don’t know how to make it right. You did hurt them. But look around you, and hope. Just hope, and let other people hope. That’s all you can do, moving forward.”

  I open my mouth to respond, but a commotion outside draws both our eyes to the flaps of the tent. A commotion we have both heard many times since we met, but not in the last couple of weeks. We haven’t run into anyone new in some time. But we know the exact type of muttering that comes with a new introduction. We trip over each other, rushing out of the tent. Leo and Vance are already standing on the furthest edge of the clearing, with other groggy campers emerging alongside us. I run, using a bit of mana for energy to reach the front first.

  This time, there are three new people at once, already twisting and contorting back into human bodies. Instead of grinning, Leo is looking at two of them with shock and relief. I look at the same two with the same emotions, but with fear as well. Their faces are coming into focus, and I recognize exactly who they are. The two who fell into the woods with me. The two who weren’t tortured because of who they were, but because they tried to stop me when I made the biggest mistake of my life.

  Even these two don’t shake me as much as the third, however. I barely recognize her. She is older, and more weary. And like me she is going through other changes. But I know her. I’d just told Ryanna about her. Why now? Why three at once? Why these three, all connected to me, at this moment?

  “I think it’s time we started moving again,” Leo announces happily.

  “Rose . . .” I whisper.