My dreams were full of raging voices and eyes staring blame at me like knives.

I woke with a start, wracked with fright. The bed was empty and cold beside me. Hadn’t there been a warm presence there when I’d drifted off? I blinked owlishly. Where was I?

Dark drapes drawn over large windows. I was in a lavish and chilly bedchamber, barely lived in—

Aralia had taken me to her bed. But she was gone. She’d left me here alone.

I pulled the covers up to my face and huddled inside them, staring around at the frigid shadows. The pale of early dawn was just beginning to filter in around the edges of the curtains.

I felt jumpy, ill at ease, my thoughts straggling haphazardly out of the tangled skeins of my nightmare.

Last night, Aralia had intimated several treasons to me, not the least of which was an elaborate and intentional loyalty to kuffa and the alchemical alterants that were so important to us—the halia, as she’d termed it. And then she’d refused to explain anything else.

Puzzles nesting inside of puzzles.

Remembering the sweet attention she’d lavished me with after sex made my chin sink and my eyelids flutter for a moment. And now that I’d glimpsed even the barest edges of her reasons for protecting and hiding me, I felt somewhat safer in her arms. For some reason, hearing her imply that she valued me for my degeneracy, not in spite of it, filled me with a well of unmistakable relief.

Then I bit my lip as doubt wormed into my heart. The uncomfortable caveat was that Aralia was obviously using me as a distraction—a way to unwind, a comfort item. Everything she’d hinted at last night, all her ancient oaths and her mysterious past, in some ways explained the mystery of why she had bothered to shelter me at all, but talk was cheap.

A more jaded part of me whispered that I would never really know whether I was anything more than a fucktoy for her until the day I ceased to entertain her.

Wrapping one of her blankets around me, I slid out of her bed and began casting around for my clothes. Aralia clearly knew the most about the halia, though. She had known other kuffa—perhaps knew some still. The thought of finding more girls like me set a high, clear note of longing ringing in my breast.

How could I get her to tell me more? Could I wheedle it out of her with pillow talk? I rolled my eyes. Unlikely. I needed leverage.

But did I dare do anything to risk Aralia’s displeasure? I paused in the middle of pulling on my dress to wince. After all, it was anyone’s guess how long it would be before Mila judged it safe enough to see me again. And despite being at the beck and call recently of several girls who happened to hold a breathtaking amount of power over me—or perhaps because of that—I still harbored a desperate hole of loneliness in my innermost heart.

And unless I had misunderstood her, Aralia had offered to take me to her bed regularly. I was still so starved for any small tenderness that I was in no position to pass that up.

Maybe I needed Aralia for intimacy far more than she needed me, right now.

Maybe she was deliberately cultivating my emotional dependence on her, as a more agreeable leash around my neck to hold than the threat of turning me in.

I sighed as I slipped out the door. On one hand, I found it so hot to be treated like an object during sex. On the other…sometimes it felt a little too close to the facts of my actual life here.

~ ~ ~

The next few days dragged by, with no sign or summons from either Mila or Aralia. When I wasn’t working, I tried my best to avoid languishing in the dark hole of my sleeping cell by going for night-time explorations of the service passageways that ran beneath the whole breadth of Harmine, connecting basements and boilers, sewers and cisterns. Down there, the darkness hung heavy and thick on the stale, chilly air.

Except for the brief respite of shift changes with Jaques and Ros and the other staff workers, loneliness and isolation all but hemmed me in. My dreams were full of curled lips, hostile eyes, backs turning away from me.

When I returned to my sleeping cell one morning, bleary-eyed and dragging my feet, to find Mila sitting on my mattress with a quiet smile for me, my heart jumped straight up with delight.

“Mila!”

“Shhh.” She was holding a finger to her lips, but she was also grinning at my enthusiasm.

“You came!” I gabbled, more softly, some of the stiffened muscles of my face stretching for the first time in days. “Hi!”

“Hi yourself. You look so tired, Ellie—are you just getting off work?”

“Yes,” I mumbled with a shrug. “Overnight shift.”

“Oh, I’m sorry if this isn’t the best time—you must need to sleep,” Mila apologized and made to get up.

“No!” I blurted, and blushed. “I mean, please stay. I-I’d rather you stayed.”

“Oh?” Mila’s lips played with a smile.

I nodded emphatically. Longing swirled through my ribcage in shuddering waves.

“And do what?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it, as breathless as a fish. Mila watched me, eyebrows arching, as my face heated. I tried again, then immediately swallowed my soft mutterance.

Dark eyes twinkled at me. “Girl, what?”

I hesitated, my throat wrestling to hold back the words with a palpable, involuntary force. “Would you just—” I shut my eyes, bracing for disappointment. “H-hold me? For a while?”

Asking Mila to lend me her steadyness, when I had none of my own to offer her in return, felt like being asked to extend, bridge-like, across the void of a chasm, not knowing if the other side was even in reach. If I missed, it felt like I would fall forever.

Worse, some inner part of me was certain that if she refused, I could not stifle the stink of my own desperation or conceal the crumbling collapse inside my breast—and that, I knew instinctively, would cement her refusal, because the hunger of the loneliness inside me was toxic, and couldn’t be trusted. As soon as she saw its true face, she wouldn’t want anything to do with me.

And so admitting what I longed for was the act that most risked its denial. I flinched away from raising my eyes to look at her face.

She beckoned me in, nodding emphatically. “Come here, dummy.”

The breath rushed out of me, and I sagged towards her, shuddering with relief.

She drew me onto the thin mattress, nestling the back of my body into the curve of her front, wrapping me in both arms and squeezing me hard. “You think I’d come here just to fuck you, then leave if you didn’t want to?”

“Ah,” I gasped, my thoughts giving way to a soaking rush of warmth. “N-n-maybe?”

Her warm breath bathed my ear and my eyelids half-shut in bliss as I squeaked and squirmed in her embrace.

“You think that’s all you are to me?” she whispered. “A fun, new toy to use and discard?”

I twitched and shuddered, feeling my sex clench at her words. No. Bad Ellie. Don’t get helplessly turned on at the mere suggestion of being a girl’s toy.

“I’m not?” I whimpered.

She cupped my throat with one hand and I arched, offering my exposed neck. Her lips brushed the soft skin of my nape and I shook, my insides simultaneously yearning and cringing.

“No, Ellie,” she murmured. “You are not disposable.”

My eyes rolled up under heavy lids, and I shivered with rapturous pleasure.

“Trust me, I want to hold you.”

A little mewl escaped my lips. “R-really?”

“Yes,” she said firmly. “It feels good to me, too.”

“Th-thank you,” I breathed, my lungs opening, my shoulders loosening.

“Oh please bitch, I’m grateful for you,” she said fervently. “Finding you here—” Mila hesitated. “Let’s just say you’re very precious to me,” she finished softly.

I felt drunk on touch, my head swimmy with clouds of delight. Gresha had once dosed me with synthetic laudanum when I’d spilled a beaker and given myself chemical burns, and this feeling reminded me of nothing so much as the warm gooey pleasure-melt of that narcotic. I felt like I’d stumbled on an oasis of being wanted in the midst of a desert of loneliness.

“I know you’ve been so alone, and I know what that feels like,” she murmured. “It’s so, so hard, almost unsurvivably so. And your survival is very important, Ellie.” Mila took a deep breath. “More important to me than I can really convey to you, actually.”

I blinked, my thoughts fuzzing. “Th-thank you,” I repeated, a little stupidly. “That’s—you’re being so nice, when you don’t have to be.”

Mila squeezed me tight and nuzzled the back of my neck, drawing a shiver and a soft squeak from me. “I don’t know if that’s true,” she sighed. “You’re completely vulnerable to me, secrets laid bare, and I haven’t reciprocated. There’s a dreadful dissonance of power between us, Ellie, and I’m sorry that I’ve been keeping it this way on purpose.”

“Um,” I said.

She began stroking my head and I melted, whimpering softly under the firm, smooth petting.

“But I think I do trust you?” she said thoughtfully. “Which isn’t careful, given the threats I face and how little time we’ve known each other, but it’s almost like I can’t help it? It’s like a part of me needs you, needs that sisterhood, is starving for it.”

Mila saw me as a sister? I heaved a deep breath and released it with a shudder.

Some part of me had been clenched, braced for disposal, haunted with the fear that nobody would ever really see me as a girl, that even in the eyes of my new friends I was first and foremost a gendertrash half-thing—feminine perhaps, but only conditionally so. A hybrid curiosity, perhaps tempting to sample for sexplay, but always stranded on the far side of an unbreachable wall, too tainted by the Manhood I’d been assigned to really welcome into the emotional delicacy of their blossoming trust.

At Mila’s words, I felt that wall loosening and softening, deep in my lungs. I snuggled closer as her implicit offer of inclusion blazed warmly in my breast, banishing the phantasmagoria of suspicions that had glutted my mind, these past few days of isolation.

“Spending time with you is so nourishing, and Roxa has been acting so distant towards me since…well.” Mila sighed. “Sorry to ramble at you like this. You’re very easy to take comfort in, you know.”

“I am?” I squirmed dreamily.

“Yes. It’s almost as if our bodies know each other.”

I thought of how I had melted into Mila’s arms almost as soon as she and Roxa had captured me and dragged me into their room, how the dark pools of her eyes had caught me and calmed my panic, how her touch right now was making me feel like I was on drugs.

“Yes,” I murmured. “It’s so nice. I like tha—ah!”

I felt her hot breath on the back of my neck, then the sinking bite of her teeth. I uttered a soft cry and quivered, my sex aching pleasantly. Her tongue swiped and darted, painting a luxurious path across my skin as I spasmed helplessly beneath her.

Mila withdrew her mouth and stilled her petting. “How are you doing, Ellie?” There was a grin in her voice.

I whined and nudged her hand with the top of my head, and she returned to stroking.

“The thing with Roxa,” she mused. “Is that we’ve both hidden stuff from each other this whole time. I’ve never deluded myself about that—she’s obviously not just a student. But our trust has grown so strong, alongside our secrets, and that feels so rare. It’s almost a miracle that our loyalty to each other could thrive and feel so special and precious, given the conditions here and how divergent our paths were before they crossed.”

She went silent for a moment, then sighed heavily. “But it feels…different, now. Shifted. As if our secrets have thickened in the air between us. I feel so sad about it, right now. And so glad I have you, Ellie.” Mila squeezed me from behind. “At least you’re safe to be close to.”

I stiffened with a sudden twinge of guilt. I’m not safe, though. If she found out about Aralia’s hold over me—

Imagining the betrayal in her eyes swamped my insides with a prickling, festering itch of nausea. I was wrong, somehow. I was an imposter—dangerous, deceptive.

I felt her notice my frozenness.

“Ellie?”

I closed my eyes. Was this the moment to confess? When else would I be able to work up the courage?

But then the thought of all I would lose hit me like a horse kick to the gut—Mila’s trust, the intimacy we were sharing. She would know it was fabricated, a veil. She would rip herself away from me, and it would be my fault, because what choice would she have? There was no way to neutralize the power that Aralia held over me—a power that could be wielded against anyone close to me.

All this would be over, and I would have ruined it.

The welling secret inside me faltered. Not yet. I had to think about this more. I needed more time.

But I had to at least try and warn her.

“I-I don’t know if I’m safe, Mila.”

There was a moment’s silence. I closed my eyes, cringing, waiting.

“Why not?”

I hesitated. So many of my secrets were rusted together. Was there any harm in excavating another face of the massive engine of fault grinding away inside me?

“Even with how well the, um, alterant worked—even though I look different in the mirror now, I still feel wrong sometimes? Like when I’m moving across a room, I feel like some halting, hulking, lumbering thing, a monster without a face, instead of a girl.”

I took a shallow breath, the words tumbling out of me. “Or, a patchwork quilt in the outline of a person, but at the same time a set of tailor’s scissors? And I’m always snipping at my own seams, catching myself at fault for every lapse, clocking every piece of myself that doesn’t fit—”

A disquiet swept through me and I fell abruptly silent, my cheeks heating rapidly.

These innermost fears, I was suddenly certain, were only for the ears of other tea girls. I couldn’t risk them with anyone else, no matter how close we were. I swallowed on a throat that felt like it was now embedded with shards of broken glass. I was a fool. I had said too much. Who else but tea girls could relate to this stuff? I had simply emphasized how alone I was, how polluted I was by the reflexive self-disgust this empire had trampled into my brain.

I sank my face into my hands, shoulders tightening, caustic shame flooding my insides.

“Ellie,” Mila spoke my name like a leaping flame. “We monsters are beautiful, do you hear me?”

The force of her voice reached into my chest and seized hold of something there. I wiggled around to face her, drawn by the raw, spoken fire of her, without fully understanding her meaning.

The dark pools of her eyes were charged, magnetic, and close enough to drown in.

“Everything under the sun is ceaseless transformation. Everyone you will ever meet is a change in the making and made in the changing—a messy, impure, constructed assemblage of parts, and most of them will never dare to fully face the power of that, because they can get by better than we can under the regime of the dull.”

Mila’s firm, warm fingers slipped between my limp, chilled ones and clasped tight. “But monsters are forced to do the hard work of making ourselves from scratch, with only each other for help. We can be so much fiercer and stronger and more beautiful because of that—because we risk everything in order to flourish on our own terms. We can be the freest beings in the world and the overseers of the dull cannot stand that.”

I gaped at her, breathless and dizzy. “Mila, what are you—”

“I’m a tea girl, Ellie,” she said, so softly that the thunder in my ears couldn’t be real, I had to be imagining it—why was my pulse pounding? “I’m kuffa, too.”

Her meaning struck me like lightning.

“You’re a tea girl?” I repeated dumbly, trembling freely. My heart was soaring with excitement, pumping rapidly, higher and higher.

I don’t have to be alone, anymore.

“I’m sorry for hiding it from you for so long. You deserve to know.” She shrugged, smiling. “And the closer we got, the harder it was to withhold myself.”

She spoke of sisterhood. This girl is my sister. Like, really, really is.

“T-that’s good—I mean, thank you,” I stammered. “I’m so, so, so glad you’re here with me.”

Mila pulled me into a hug and slid her arms around me, squeezing me close. I squeezed her back, tears sliding down my face.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice wavering with emotion, “for being here with me, at my side. I feel so lucky to not be alone.”

A quick sob leapt out of me, and then a laugh, and then we were both giggling and snotting on each others’ shaking shoulders, giddy with relief.

In the cool dimness of the stone cell, we curled closer around each other.