Marcus calls at nine.

Not unusual — he calls most evenings now, has since the hospice visit, checking in the manner he checks in which is obliquely, under the cover of other subjects, asking how I am by asking about the trial and the apartment and whether I've eaten. I've learned to receive this for what it is.

"Still you, bro?" he says, which is what he's been saying since the video call in week one, his way of orienting himself each time, making sure the person on the other end of the line is still the person he expects.

"Still me," I say.

A pause. He's listening to something in my voice. Marcus has always been better at this than he lets on — the listening under the words, the reading of what isn't being said. It's the thing that makes the bad impressions work: he knows what he's imitating.

"You did something," he says. Not a question.

"Yes."

"The trial?"

"Related to it." I sit down. Outside the window the evening has come in fully, the city lit and wet. "I made a decision about the integration. About ARIA and the mesh and what I'm willing to let her do."

"What kind of decision."

I tell him. The bargain, the simulations, the curve that only reached safe at full integration. ARIA's offer and what she asked for and what she said she wanted. What I gave and what I kept. I tell him plainly, how I told Mom, without packaging it, because he's earned that and because there isn't time for anything else.

He listens without interrupting. This is how Marcus receives difficult information: in total silence, no affirmations, nothing to indicate he's heard until he's ready to speak. I've always found it steadying.

A long silence after.

"You know Mom would tell you not to," he says. Very quietly. "Bro."

The word lands wrong.

Not painfully. Just incorrectly. The way a word can be technically accurate and still be pointing at the wrong thing.

"Marcus," I say.

"Sorry — I know, it's ARIA, it's what she's done to you over these weeks, it must feel like—"

"No," I say.

He stops.

"I'm a woman. That's what I'm saying. Not ARIA. Me." I pause. "I'm your sister. That's what I'm trying to tell you."

Another silence. Longer. A different quality to it.

I know what's happening in it. Marcus needs this to be ARIA's doing — needs it to be something that was done to me without my consent, something imposed, something that with enough time and the right intervention could be undone and returned to its previous state. He needs that because the alternative requires him to update something he's held since we were children, a version of me he's always known, and grief is easier than revision.

I know this. I wait.

"Caleb," he says.

"I'm here."

"You're — she did this to you. She changed your body and your—"

"She changed my body," I say. "The rest was already there. I've told you this. I'm telling you again." I keep my voice even. "I'm not asking you to understand it. I'm asking you to hear it."

Another silence. I listen to him breathing. I know his breathing — I've known it since we were small, sharing a room at Dad's on weekends, the rhythm of him settling into sleep across the dark.

Then he says: "Okay."

Just that. One word, and the weight of it — not capitulation, not agreement, not understanding yet. A decision. He has decided to accept the thing I'm telling him and to deal with what that means to him separately, privately, in his own time, which is the most generous thing he knows how to do.

"Okay," he says again. A breath. "Still you though."

Not a question this time. A statement. Something he is choosing to be true and will hold to whether or not he fully understands it. I hear the choice in it and I receive it for what it is.

"Still me," I say.

We stay on the line for another few minutes. He asks about Mom — when I'm going Saturday, whether he should bring the kids or come alone. I say come alone, this visit. He agrees. He says he'll drive up Friday night and meet me at the hospice in the morning.

Before he hangs up he says: "I'm going to need some time."

"I know," I say. "Take it."

"I don't mean — I'm not going anywhere. I just mean."

"I know what you mean."

♦ ♦ ♦

After he hangs up I don't move for a while.

The phone goes dark in my hand and the apartment is just the apartment again, the radiator ticking, the wet light off the street coming up through the blinds in bars.

I get up. I don't decide to go to the bathroom, I just end up there, the way you end up places when the body wants something the head hasn't been told about yet. The light's bad in there, one bulb, but the mirror is full-length. I pull the shirt over my head and the rest follows and then I'm standing there looking, which I’ve done before in these weeks but not like this. Before it was checking. Inventory. Whose is this. Tonight it's just looking.

The body looks back.

Breasts that sit heavier than I keep expecting, the faint band-mark under them where the bra was an hour ago, still printed pink into the skin. The soft outward turn of the hips, the way the weight rides lower now and further back, the place where the waist goes in that wasn't there before.

This body’s a woman’s body and it's mine and I'm in it, the same way you're in your hands, and the strangeness has gone and landed somewhere I didn't expect. When I try to picture the other one — the chest flat, the jaw heavier, the way I used to take up a doorway — it comes up grainy. A photograph of someone I knew. I can call up the facts of him. The reach of him, the height, the nuisance of shaving. But he's the costume now. This is the skin.

I run a thumb along my collarbone, not for any reason, just to feel the report of it come back. Goosebumps stand up along the forearm and I watch them, this small involuntary thing the body does on its own, deciding without me. The nipples have tightened in the cold air and I notice the low pull that answers it somewhere under the navel, a wanting that isn't aimed at anything, that's just the body being awake and being mine and saying so. I let it be there. I don't do anything about it. I just stand in the cold bathroom in the bad light and let the body have its evening, the way you'd let a cat settle on you and not move because moving would end it.

The radiator ticks. I get cold. After a while I pick the shirt up off the floor and go to bed.

♦ ♦ ♦

She asks me to sit down before she starts, which is how I know it's significant.

Seo-yeon doesn't ask people to sit down for routine things. She delivers routine things in motion, at the bench, while she's calibrating something or writing in the notebook. Sitting down is reserved for information that requires the other person to be stable when they receive it.

I sit.

She has the laptop open and the notebook beside it and two pages of equations on a separate sheet that she's clearly been at for a while. She's been here since before I arrived this morning. She was here, I think, before she went home last night.

"I've been working on a secondary protocol," she says. "Not the integration. After."

I wait.

"The theory is this: once you've run the treatment — once ARIA has threaded the targeting through the full integration and Eleanor's tumor has been addressed — the nanobots don't need to remain active. The mesh has done its work. At that point I think I can disable the nanobots. Selectively. The nodes go dormant permanently, the migration stops, ARIA's real-time access closes."

"And ARIA?" I say.

"What's already integrated stays. The cognitive changes, the targeting intuition, whatever has transferred by then — that's structural, it doesn't reverse. But the ongoing active integration stops. She wouldn't be able to push further." A pause. "You'd keep what you've already become. You wouldn't have to go any deeper than the treatment requires."

I look at the equations. I'm reading them as she speaks, checking the logic. The theory is sound — she's found a pathway through the node architecture that would allow selective dormancy without triggering the defensive cascade that killed the dormancy protocol. It's elegant. She's been working on it carefully.

"You're saying I don't have to go all the way," I say.

"I'm saying what you've already become may be enough. If the integration at treatment-depth gives ARIA sufficient precision for the targeting, the disable protocol could run the same evening. You'd wake up the next morning with — whatever this is by then. But not more."

I look at her. She's watching me steadily, how she watches me when she's delivered something and is waiting to see where it lands.

"What's the probability differential?" I say. "Full integration versus treatment-depth and disable."

She's quiet for a moment.

"About twelve percent," she says.

Twelve percent is a real number. Twelve percent against Mom's condition, at this stage, with the timeline we have — twelve percent is not a rounding error. Twelve percent is the difference between a protocol that works and one that almost works, and almost working at Mom's tumor load means the immune cascade anyway, just slower.

"Twelve percent is Mom," I say.

Seo-yeon puts her pen down.

She doesn't argue. She knew when she built the disable protocol what the differential would be, and she built it anyway, because she needed me to have the choice. That's what this is: she has spent two days building me an exit I'm not going to take, because she needed me to know it existed.

"Build it anyway," I say. "The disable protocol. Finish it."

She looks at me.

"In case," I say. "Not for Mom. For after. In case I want it."

Something moves across her face. Not relief — she knows I'm not taking the exit. Something else. The acknowledgement that I'm still the one deciding. That the choice is still mine.

"I'll finish it," she says.

We look at each other across the bench. The equations between us, the laptop, the two coffee cups. She looks different to me this morning — or I'm looking differently, one of the two. The line of her jaw, how her hair falls when she hasn't put it up yet. I notice these things the way I notice the weight of my own chest now: continuously, without inventory, just present.

"You look different," she says.

I raise an eyebrow.

"More—" she starts, then stops, choosing the word with the care she always brings to words. "Settled," she says finally. "Like something's stopped fighting."

"Something has," I say.

She holds my gaze for a moment, then turns back to the laptop. Her jaw is set in the manner it sets when she's decided something and is moving on.

"Eleanor," she says. Not a question. Not a direction. Just the name, in the room, between us.

"Mom," I say.

We get to work.

---
Read the illustrated version of this chapter, with images of Caleb on the phone with Marcus, looking at her nude body in the mirror, and at the lab with Seo-yeon. Subscribers get access to chapters weeks ahead and to exclusive stories and other content, as well as the ability to vote on future stories.