They descended into the manor grounds, down a long metal staircase with a catwalk at the halfway point, hugging the vast concrete barrier that surrounded the estate like protective cliff walls. The style was incongruous, to put it mildly: an industrial warehouse and high-tech corridors loomed high above an antiquated reproduction of aristocratic life. The grounds themselves looked immaculate and well-maintained, and it wasn’t long before Reshy and Joe glimpsed the reason.

At the end of a long row of hedges, bent on one knee in a bed of flowers, a gardener carefully pruned a rose bush. He was the first normal person Joe had glimpsed in—well, who knows how long, he thought. I’m not sure how long I’ve been here, and my sense of time in this body is… strange. He approached the man, once again feeling awkward about his state of dishabille, the torn pieces of clothing barely clinging to his curves as he clutched them.

Reshy hissed from behind him, trying to get his attention. “Excuse me,” Joe said, then saw the gardener’s face. Rather, the absence of face. The man looked like he was wearing gloves and a hood or balaclava, both made of a fine, black fabric. However, Joe couldn’t discern any kind of human features beneath the fabric, just the faint impression of molded features, a nose and chin, the shape of a jaw. Of course, thought Joe, stepping back instinctively. I thought he was a normal person based on his ordinary dress and behavior, but he’s another puppet or mannequin.

“Pardon me, Mistress. I must tend to my work, and you to yours.” The faceless gardener went on pruning, tossing a stem into a pile of weeds and clippings. He wore a tweed cap, work boots, and a pair of rough-spun gray overalls. All too normal, save for his lack of face, hair, or recognizable skin.

Joe was at a loss for a moment. “Don’t talk to it!” Reshy said in a loud whisper from ground level. He ignored her. This… entity didn’t seem hostile, at least. Perhaps it had information or needed help.

“Thank you, but I’m wondering if you can help me find—”

The gardener set down his shears with an impatient clank, then craned its head forward in an awkward, aggressive motion. “Pardon me, Mistress. I must tend to my work, and you to yours.” Joe blinked, and the gardener gestured down the path. The demeanor of the thing held an unnerving menace, despite its lack of facial features.

The black hair, smooth with the faintest hint of fabric-like fuzz, swiveled to watch Joe as he retreated, stepping lightly down the graveled path. “What’s going on…? Is that another human trapped in a puppet body, or something else?” He tried to keep his voice quiet.

“If it’s what I think it is… then ‘something else’ is putting it mildly. I think that gardener is something called a Shade. Or at least, that’s the term the records I’ve found here use for a kind of entity I thought was only theoretical, or apocryphal…”

Joe was about to interrupt again and ask the little doll to speak more plainly, but decided there was no point. Just let her ramble and see what she says… she always knows more than she’s letting on, he thought. He scooped her up as they moved away down the garden paths.

“Rewind,” Joe said. “Shade? You mean like a ghost or something similar?”

She nodded. “One type of ghost. Pure ka, to use the Egyptian term. Life force, trapped in an echo of life. I’m guessing you know about ghost loops.” They were moving past the flowerbeds towards a row of tall hedges.

“Sure,” Joe huffed. “I’m not a total idiot. Been around crime scenes and families with lost loved ones enough, in my line of work. It’s when ghosts just keep repeating something they remember from life, routines or other fixations.”

“Remember isn’t exactly the right word, because—never mind, sorry, I’m digressing. So, like… imagine that you crossed a ghost like that with a behavior script written by a computer programmer. In theory, a shade can run on its soul energy, repeating lines or doing simple tasks forever. The perfect servants.”

Joe stopped, listening to Reshy but also peering down the path towards an enclosed seating area, where three figures hovered. They looked like women and wore black and white uniforms. Might be more Shades. “Whose servants, exactly? That demon have a thing for playing aristocrat?”

Reshy shifted her lumpy little head. “I’m guessing they’re here as part of the test trials for puppets. In theory, you can program the behavior of a shade, but they’re very limited. State machines. Puppets like you or me… well, we have other parts of the soul, the self-aware consciousness, personality and ego and all that. But as you’ve seen, we can’t just be told what to do, so there are tests instead.”

Joe scowled. He liked the sound of this less and less as time went on. “And we have to get through these tests to find our bodies, it looks like?”

“They blindfolded me when they led me through here… and I was several feet taller. But yeah, my best guess about where our bodies are is somewhere inside the manor, possibly under it.” If Joe’d possessed saliva glands at that moment, he would have spit in disgust.

“Well, let’s get on with it.” He readjusted the tatters of his leotard around his chest, still feeling the gut-wrench of dysphoria every time he saw or felt the doll body, and walked towards the trio of female shades. They resembled a variety set of “Victorian maids”—slightly different clothing and hair colors, but all with the same smooth gray fabric-like skin as the gardener.

“Be careful,” Reshy hissed. “If you disrupt their routine, I’m not sure how they’ll react to parameters they haven’t been set for! These aren’t puppets like you or centipede-form Diji…”

But the trio of maids were already turning to regard Joe with slightly tilted heads, their motions stiff but clearly taking notice of their visitors.

“Oh dear,” said the most ornately dressed maid, in the middle. Her skirts swept out around her, clearly supported by petticoats.

“Oh dear,” said the maid to her right, who had pale hair and a bountiful expanse of cleavage above her modest apron. The maids looked more like a modern fetish of maid uniforms than anything historically accurate, he realized.

“Oh dear,” said the last maid, almost in time with the second. A long fall of anachronistically modern bangs swept over one of her eyes.

“I don’t want to intrude,” said Joe, holding up one hand. A torn piece of leotard slipped from his grip, exposing the swell of his breast flesh. Not again. At least I don’t have any nipples to slip out, he thought. The three mannequin-women seemed to vibrate slightly.

“This won’t do at all. Your attire is quite improper!” All three of them spoke the same line, in slightly distinct tones and cadences. A shiver ran up Joe’s spine. The women moved towards him.

Joe backed away slowly. “All right, I can see if I can find some clothes in better shape? Maybe you can help me—”

“Hussy!” yelped the pale-haired maid, wagging a finger. “Who does she think she is?”

“Just a vagabond, no doubt.” The maid with wide skirts flexed her fingers in a way Joe was used to seeing before a fistfight broke out. “The lord and lady won’t stand for this sort of thing. We’ll have to notify them immediately.”

“Notify them immediately!” Joe was already turning to leave, keeping Reshy’s warning in mind. He stopped in alarm, Reshy clinging to one elbow, as he saw another group of shades approaching from the direction they’d arrived from, along the row of hedges. This group seemed more masculine in design, clad in long blue overcoats. Some of them had mustaches attached to their blank faces in the proper spot, beneath the smooth bump that served these things as noses.

“Shit,” muttered Joe. “You think we can convince them we belong here?”

“They don’t seem to like your wardrobe, that’s for sure.” Reshy was trying to secure herself inside the waistband of the doll’s outfit.

“Here now, what’s this?” said the first of the newcomers, who wore a peaked cap and swung a heavy truncheon at his side. Two or three of the other shades in overcoats repeated the words.

“Nothing—nothing at all! Just a misunderstanding. I’ll be on my way.” Joe felt his face burn; if these things had human souls and the semblance of minds, even locked in an endless loop, he could imagine exactly how those maids had interpreted him: bare chest, torn leotard, and scratched-up legs.

The captain of the shades, if that’s what he was, moved his head up and down as if inspecting Joe. “You’re trespassing, young miss. You’ll have to come with us, I’m afraid.”

“Come with us, I’m afraid!” repeated the soldier behind him, an unsavory hint of enthusiasm in his faceless voice.

Joe raised his hands with palms open. “Now please listen to me—” But the captain grabbed for his arm. Joe stopped trying to preserve his doll body’s modesty, sidestepped the grab, then drove a fist into the shade’s stomach so hard it doubled him over. The blank-faced thing staggered back; Joe quickly rolled below the arc of another swipe from the truncheon of one of his companions.

“Here now!” The male shades all began yelling. The maids were shrieking, at least one of them continuing to cry “Hussy!” and “Vagabond!”

Joe lashed out with one foot, sweeping away the leg of another dark form that grabbed for him. It fell heavily to its knees, and Joe brought down both fists on its woolen cap in a hammer blow. The empty face of the shade crumpled like cheap plastic, the form beneath it toppling backwards. The captain who had doubled over had fallen onto the graveled path. Both shades seemed to dissipate, their forms dissolving into motes of dust—or something dark and powdery as dust—as they lost their hold on physicality.

Then one of the remaining guards picked up the peaked cap and truncheon of the captain, put the cap on its head, and barked “You’ll have to come with us!” Two more identical shades with blue overcoats, mustaches and truncheons stepped out from a side path that led into the hedges.

“Not good, not good!” Reshy muttered.

Joe scowled, shifted his weight into a defensive stance, and exhaled a low grunt that ended up sounding more like an angry cat’s moan. This damn body, he thought. Even if it’s supposed to be balanced for agile movement, it’s just too damn jiggly. Dysphoria washed over him again.

“Come on then,” he snarled, and motioned to the shades. They complied.

As the first of the shades grabbed Joe by the wrist, he rotated his hand using an Aikido counter, stepped to one side and threw the shade over his knee, driving his instep into the thing’s crotch for good measure—just in case these creatures had nuts to kick.

The shade went sprawling, but Joe had already turned to the next attack, a shade bellowing and aiming an uppercut directly for his head. Joe caught it in midair with a block that shook the doll body’s frame; he heard a cracking sound from his forearm just as another shade thrust its truncheon at him.

Joe slipped away from the charge like a matador avoiding a bull; then ducked another punch, flipping backwards into an instinctive handspring, a move he hadn’t realized was in this body’s arsenal. He arced his spring to the side and landed on his feet just as a maid swung a rake at his leg. He blocked it with a raised shin, the blow once again making an unexpectedly heavy impact, but with a complete absence of pain.

Then a guard on his other side jumped towards Joe’s back, trying to take him down. The moment the shade contacted his shoulder, Joe froze in place.

Suddenly, he couldn’t move, just as surely as when the doll body hung trussed up in the workshop where he’d woke up. Some kind of energy was passing through him, like an electrical current, running through the maid and her rake into Joe, then out through the shade at his shoulder. Both shades froze as well, and a humming noise filled Joe’s hearing.

He could barely hear Reshy yelling. “Joe! What’s wrong? Joe!!” He saw the other shades closing in, but his vision grew hazy, and he still couldn’t move. More of the shades grabbed hold of his limbs. The gardens swam into blackness.

***

Joe shot up, gasping. His body was working again and seemed to be intact. He was sitting by the metal stairs that led up to the loading bay at the edge of the garden. What the hell?

“Don’t ask me why, but they just… picked you up and dumped you back here.” Reshy was right nearby, atop a small pile of stones. “You were out for about ten minutes… whatever they did to you, it was temporary.”

Joe clutched his head, brushing the blue hair out of his eyes. “Felt like they hit me with the kind of stun gun they use on elephants. They shocked me with… I don’t know what.”

“Probably some sort of magical circuit.” Reshy kicked a rock off the pile. “Makes sense if we’re assuming these shades are all part of the testing process for puppet bodies. Wouldn’t do to damage the merchandise unless it’s seriously defective.”

“So… I just have to convince them I’m not defective.” Joe got to his feet. In the distance, he could see the very first shade he’d encountered—the gardener, still working in a flowerbed. “How do I do that? Clothes that aren’t falling apart, bow and curtsy? Play a role? I mean, what am I even being tested for?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Reshy. “Something that fits into their routine behavior, I’d expect?”

Joe carefully lifted Reshy to his shoulder and moved towards the gardener, shushing the little sack doll with a motion of his finger. He waited for several minutes before the dark figure moved away, apparently following another section of its routine. They crept along, trailing the gardener and doing their best to keep out of sight; Reshy perched atop Joe’s head and hissed quietly when another shade was approaching them from behind. Fortunately, the magical automatons, whatever their advantages in combat, didn’t seem suited to keeping watch; Joe had to duck into the bushes a few times, but managed to follow the gardener until he spotted his target.

“Just as I thought. The equipment must come from somewhere.” He pointed at a wooden shed in a hedged corner, where the gardener was just lifting a stack of clay pots. After the shade had moved off again, Joe slipped inside and found what he was looking for: a plain work shirt and a pair of overalls, gray and rough-spun like the gardeners.

“Finally, some clothes that aren’t skin-tight.” Joe began the uncomfortable process of peeling away the torn shreds of leotard and hose that barely served as garments through the last two fights. Reshy hopped down, then turned to observe, but Joe stopped.

“Could you… uh, turn around?”

Reshy cocked her little head to the side. “You embarrassed about getting naked? It’s not even your body, and it doesn’t have anything I haven’t seen before. Hell, it doesn’t have plenty of things I have seen before, like nipples.”

Joe grimaced. “I just… it’s hard enough just existing in this body. Being stared at makes it worse. If I could avoid looking at myself, I would.”

Reshy obligingly turned around. “If it’s so bad, you can always turn the dial up a notch.”

Pulling off the rest of the leotard, Joe stared in dismay at the smooth expanse of his perfectly smooth, rounded breasts. “I thought I could get used to this, but I can’t. Still, I don’t like the idea of synchronization, or whatever, making me feel more comfortable. Like getting shot up with a pharma cocktail, or something.” He pulled on the shirt as quickly as he could, then grabbed the overalls.

“Suit yourself,” said Reshy. “As long as you can handle it. Wait… you’re seriously going to pass yourself off as a gardener?”

Joe adjusted the straps of the overalls, then finished buttoning the shirt. The outfit was a comical fit—loose and baggy in some places but stretched tight over the doll body’s curves in others; the result looked like the costume of a teenage girl dressing up for Halloween. He grabbed a cap off a hook and returned to the gardens. Reshy toddled after him, and he remembered to scoop her up.

“Here goes nothing,” he said. “But nothing’s all we’ve got.”

***

Five minutes later, Joe sat up at the base of the stairs again, gasping for breath that his body didn’t need. “What the fuck was that?”

Reshy was in his lap, lounging. “You got shocked into a temporary shutdown… again. I don’t think you saw the one coming up from behind you. And the gardener disguise? Obviously a total failure.”

“What gave you that idea?” Joe rolled his eyes. “The fact that they all started yelling about improper attire again? Or the guard who took a swipe at me before I could even protest?” He got up. Just have to try again…

“I hope you have a better idea than trying to fight an endless swarm of souls programmed to test and overwhelm you. But if you don’t, I do…”

Joe shook his head. “I already know what you’re going to say, and I don’t like it.”

Reshy shrugged, lifting her little burlap hands skywards. “Time to become a maid.”

“Goddamnit,” said Joe.