Adele sat upright in bed, going into a sneezing fit. She’d dreamed that something had been tickling her nose, and now she felt like something was stuck in it. She knew it was still nighttime because it was cold, and the freezing air made her sneeze all the more.

Finally she finished, sniffled, sneezed again and rubbed her nose on the shoulder of her nightdress, when all of a sudden she stopped.

Something was wrong with her nose.

Adele brought both hands to her nose, sniffling again, and felt the tip of it. What she felt was protruded and leathery, like the nose of one of her father’s hounds. Her mouth, too, jutted out just beneath it. She felt at her face for some time, unafraid but unsure of what this meant.

She patted the bed beside herself until she found her plush rabbit, and held it close. “What do you think, Mr. Thomas?” she asked. “Is this just part of growing up? I don’t recall mum’s face feeling like this … ”

Adele thought for a moment. “I sound like I have a cold,” she said.

She attempted to purse her lips, then tried out a few faces, just to see how they felt. The activity made her sneeze again, and she sniffled.

The cold air was getting to her. She shivered and held her bare arms for a second, trying to warm up. Then she threw off the covers and swung her feet onto the cold floorboards, before feeling her way to the door. “Come on,” she told Mr. Thomas, holding him in one arm. “Let’s see if mum’s still awake.”

The hallway outside Adele’s room was just as cold. She walked slowly, keeping one hand on the wall until she reached the stairwell. Then she held tight to the railing as she descended the staircase. The steps were huge to her tiny feet, and she did not want to fall down.

She heard the wind whistling outside the front door when she reached the landing. But she also heard the fire going in the sitting room, and hurried to the door.

Adele put her hands on the freezing brass doorknob and turned it, then pushed the door open and stepped inside. The warmth of the fire tickled her nose, and she bit her lip to keep from sneezing. It tasted strange. “Mum?” she asked.

No one replied, so she tried again, before she heard the crinkling of paper from a magazine. “Adele?” came her mother’s voice. “What are you doing still up? Didn’t Miss Winslow put you to bed already?”

“Mum, I’m sorry, it’s-”

“You’ll have to speak up, dear. I can barely hear you.”

Adele tried to speak up. “Mum, I need you to look at something for me!”

“Well, alright, then. Bring it over here.” Porcelain scraped against porcelain, from behind the back of her mother’s favorite chair, as Adele hurried around to the other side of it. “Whatever’s the matter with your voice? You aren’t coming down with something, I-”

She screamed. And Adele screamed too, as the cup that her mother had been holding shattered onto the floor and splashed her feet with hot tea. She jumped, and backed away from the shards.

“Mum! What’s wrong?” Adele asked.

Her mother only kept screaming.

Now Adele was starting to cry. “Mum, please tell me what’s wrong!”

A door opened, out in the hallway. Adele ran, leaping over the spill and bumping into the wall along the way, then wrenched the door open and collided with her nurse, Miss Winslow, out in the hall. Adele buried her face in her nurse’s nightgown, sobbing in terror.

The nurse guided her back towards the doorway. “What’s wrong with ye, child? Have ye broke somethin’ of yer mum’s?”

“Her face!” Adele’s mother cried. “Look at her face!”

Miss Winslow tried to tilt Adele’s head up towards her, and Adele obligingly looked upward, tears still streaming from her eyes. As soon as she did so the nurse stepped away and uttered an oath, leaving Adele clutching the folds of her dress.

Adele let go, overcome with despair. “Please, tell me what’s wrong!” she cried. “I don’t know what I did wrong! I … ”

She started sneezing again. And she kept sneezing as Miss Winslow hurried her up to her bedroom, shoved her inside, and then shut and locked the door. She could still hear her mother sobbing downstairs.

Adele crumpled to the cold, hard floor, crying and sneezing and shivering, holding her stuffed rabbit tight. Finally, when there were no more tears left to shed, she climbed up into her bed, then crawled under the sheets and lay still until she fell asleep.

The next morning Adele lay in bed for a few minutes, examining her nose again. She wasn’t sure, but she thought it felt a bit different from last night. And when she held her arms, she thought that the hairs on them seemed fuzzier somehow.

Miss Winslow came by to take Adele out and help her attend to her toilet, then locked her back in her room afterwards. A few minutes later she came back and set a dish with her breakfast on it on the table in the corner. Adele checked it, and found toast with jam and egg, and a basket of fruit. She quietly ate her breakfast, then sat in the chair underneath the window, leaning against the windowsill.

After awhile, she heard the sounds of a motorcar pulling up into the driveway. Adele pressed her face up against the cold window, trying to hear what was going on outside. She heard someone climb out of it, and exchange words with her mother, but he did not sound like her dad.

Afterwards the front door opened, and they stepped into the sitting room. Adele got up from her chair, and quietly went over to her bedroom door. The door to the sitting room was closed, so she could only hear the tone of their conversation, and not any actual words. But her mother sounded distressed. The man she could barely hear, but she thought he was trying to reassure her.

Finally the door opened. She heard them bid each other goodbye; then the front door opened, and the man left. She heard her mother shut and lock the front door, then start to pace up the stairs.

Adele ran back up to her window seat, hands in front of her face. When they touched the chair she pulled herself up to it, and sat down and clasped her hands in her lap as her mother unlocked and opened the door.

Adele waited for her mother to say something, but she did not. A shiver ran down Adele’s spine.

“Mother?” she asked, polite but scared.

“Yes, child?”

“W-what’s wrong with me?”

A sigh. “You’ve come down with a serious disease, Adele.”

“Is it serious like the mumps?”

“More serious.”

Adele squirmed. “I don’t feel sick … ”

“You’ll have to take cod liver oil again.” Her mother’s voice was shaky. “And Doctor Swan has written you out a prescription, which you will have to take as well.”

“Is it my face, mother?” Adele felt at her face again. “Is that what the illness is doing?”

For a moment there was no sound. Then Adele heard her mother choke back a sob, and it froze her heart inside of her. “Mum, don’t cry!” she pleaded. But then the door was shut and locked, and Adele broke down into tears again as her mother’s footsteps went down the stairs.

She heard Miss Winslow say something to her mother, and strained to hear what it was. But all she could hear was her mother yelling: “First blindness, and now this!”

Miss Winslow said something more quietly.

“Calm down?” her mother exclaimed. “How can you say such a thing? She could die from this, and there’s nothing that we can do!”

They said some more things after that, but Adele could not hear them. She felt like her whole body had frozen, and the only things that could move were her beating heart and the tears that were left on her cheeks. Everything else in her room was still and quiet, and the shouting she heard coming from downstairs no longer made sense anymore.

The rest of that day was a blur.

After that, the days started to blend into each other. Adele stayed locked in her room the whole day, except for trips to the bathroom, and no one ever came up to her room except to serve her meals or make her take medicine.

The medicine was sharp and foul-tasting, and Adele hated it. It left her whole mouth and her throat burning. She thought it might be because of the medicine that her food was starting to taste bland … the corned beef tasted like mud, and the toast tasted like shingles. But the fruit that they left her was sweeter than ever, and she found herself devouring it.

The dogs were her only entertainment. No one let them into her room, but she sat by the window whenever they were let out and listened to them play in the yard. She thought she could hear where each one was, and she remembered their warm noses and happy, affectionate natures. Adele wished they would let her play outside again, but knew it would do her no good to ask. So she just imagined herself running barefoot on the wet grass, holding onto a dog’s collar, then being nuzzled from behind and falling over and laughing before getting her face licked.

Every morning Adele checked herself all over to see what had changed. Her nose and mouth weren’t doing anything anymore, but her ears had started to move, and they felt more floppy and rounder. Her whole body was furry, and her feet and lower legs felt sort of like a dog’s back legs, but with fingers on the ends. Adele could feel them, and could just barely manage to do things like take hold of the sheet covers with them.

She wondered if she was becoming a dog, and if that was what had everyone worried. The thought struck her as strange, but she didn’t see why everyone had to be so upset about it. There were plenty of other dogs in the house, and it wasn’t as though she had stopped being herself. Adele knew that she looked different on the outside, but she still felt the same on the inside. Just worried and bored and frustrated.

Maybe they were afraid that they’d catch it from her, she thought. Adele wasn’t sure why they’d be so upset about that, either. She imagined her mother taking Doctor Swan’s medicine, and giggled. Didn’t the whole house come down with the flu earlier? What was so diferent about this? Adele remembered her mother saying that she was afraid that Adele would die from this, but by now it didn’t seem real to her.

Then, one day, the pain started.

It started one night when she was tossing and turning in bed, trying to get to sleep and realizing she couldn’t because her back was sore. Adele turned over and lay on her side and forgot about it, but the next morning she tried to stand up and her back was so stiff that she fell over. She spent that whole day leaning forward in her stiff wooden chair, wanting to get up and move around but still too sore to do so.

That night wasn’t any better. And the next morning when she tried to feel around to see what had changed, she cried out in pain when she prodded her back.

It brought both of her parents up to her room. Her dad had long since come back, and she stood at attention as he took charge of the situation. “Show me where it hurts,” he told her.

“M-my back,” Adele said.

The ears on top of her head perked, and swiveled to face him as he walked around her. Then she heard him stop, and the breath caught in his throat. “Clarissa,” he said, “do you see this? What’s happened to her?”

Now she heard her mother walk around and kneel down in behind her. She unbuttoned the back of Adele’s nightdress and put a hand on her back, and Adele could feel her mother’s cold hand, and her back bulging and swollen behind her.

“What do you suppose this is?” she heard her father say, as he leaned in a bit closer. “Is this where … ” Then he poked at her back, and the pain shot all the way through her. She cried out, and collapsed.

When Adele woke up, she was laying flat on her stomach on top of her bed. Her mouth was dry and tasted like cotton, and her arms and legs were splayed out to either side.

Indistinct voices sounded around her. Her head was still ringing, and it hurt when she tried to move it. As soon as she did so she heard footsteps coming towards her, and her mother’s voice saying something. But she couldn’t tell what it was.

She heard Doctor Swan’s voice, and it was clear and distinct because it was so unexpected. “We need to lance it to let them out.”

Adele heard her mother sound taken aback, and call her father’s name as though she were asking him to agree with her. But she did not hear her father’s voice.

Then she felt something on the bed next to her. A second later there was a cold hand on her back, and she realized that it was still bare.

Then there was a sharp pain, firey and jarring and making her wake up partway. Adele was still just barely conscious, and she gritted her teeth and clenched her hands as the pain traced its way down her back, unable to do anything else.

Then her back exploded, a horrible pain that lasted a split-second and was followed by blessed relief. She heard her mother’s oath, and she felt something warm and sticky around her, especially on her back. But what she mostly felt was the things that had been inside her back, that felt like two tiny, warm, sticky arms. Adele could feel them attached to her, and she stretched them out luxuriantly, not caring what had just happened and just glad that the pain was over.

She heard her parents and Doctor Swan talking, and felt warm, damp rags washing her back and running over the bed. Parts of her back still felt sore and raw, and she winced when they were touched. She also winced as the rags went over her new “arms,” because whoever was doing it didn’t seem to know how to handle them, and kept squishing and twisting them in ways they did not want to go.

Adele tried to pull her “arms” back, but the hands holding the rags were insistent, and she heard her mother’s voice chiding her. Her mother took her time cleaning her off, and Adele muttered something to her. Then finally, everyone left, and Adele let her wings settle next to her as she blissfully fell back asleep.

When Adele woke up, it was nighttime.

She knew it was nighttime because it was cold. The cold had woken her up. She was still laying on her stomach without her nightdress, and her fur was thick but not thick enough. She shivered, and rolled onto her side.

When she did so, she felt her folded wings like a blanket behind her, and felt one of them press into the bed. It was uncomfortable, so she sat up. One hand pressed onto a dry, crusty spot on the bed beside her, and Adele realized what had happened. It was still strange to her, but she did not question it. She didn’t have any reason to do so.

Outside her window she heard an owl’s hoot, and her ears perked towards it. Then she heard the chittering of bats, and something about them sounded familiar … like a voice that she’d heard but forgotten.

Adele grabbed her stuffed rabbit and ran over to the window seat, hands in front of her, before leaping on top and perching on it, hands and foot-fingers splayed out. She pressed her nose up to the cold glass and listened. The bats’ chirping sounded melodious; more musical than anything she’d ever heard.

She tried to mimic them, just like she’d playfully barked at the dogs before her mother had told her to stop. And the same song came out of her throat …

… and bounced back into her face.

The bats outside seemed to pause for a moment, and so did Adele, blinking in confusion. She’d felt the song on the tiny furs on her face and neck, and inside her large, rounded ears. And it’d felt like there was something in front of her. She wasn’t sure what that meant.

Adele tried it again. And this time she felt a picture in her mind, the same way that she had imagined the feelings and sounds of the stories her mother had read to her, before she had become ill. It was like feeling without touching; knowing that there was a flat pane in front of her just by singing at it.

The window.

She turned around and sang a short, clicking song at her bed. Now she could feel all of its lumpy textures, and even the backboard and the wall in behind it, and the nightstand which had things set up on it still. She knew how far away it was, and could even tell that she’d left the covers a mess.

Adele had to catch her breath when she realized that. A grin slowly spread over her face, and deep in her throat her voice box started vibrating, a happy song that was even higher-pitched. As she did that she found that she could feel everything in front of her, everywhere that she looked, and could even turn her head and feel what was in front of it.

She jumped down from her chair and did that for as long as she could, marveling at the sensation, amazed that she could now walk without having to hold out her arms in front of her. Was this what it was like to see? Adele got dizzy just from turning around every which way, feeling the whole inside of her room including the ceiling. Then she took a deep breath, and the feeling stopped until she started her song again.

Adele jumped up and down, clapping her hands and flapping her wings happily. The air currents swept her off her feet, and a second later she found herself on the floor across the room, rubbing her sore elbows. “What was that, Mr. Thomas?” she asked, and turned her head to face the chair where her stuffed rabbit was. “Did I … ”

Her hands reached out and felt the leathery wings on her back, as she realized what they were. And as she heard the chirping of other bats outside, she knew what she had become, as well.

“So that was why mother was so afraid,” she said, elbows and knees still smarting. Every time she’d heard bats described, she’d been told they were ugly creatures that got caught in people’s hair. And when she’d first recognized the chirping outside, and been told that it was because of bats, she’d always imagined them being like wasps or mosquitoes.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Adele protested, and screwed up her face in dismay as she stood up and tried to reason things through. “Mosquitoes aren’t furry,” she said, and walked over to Mr. Thomas and picked him up. “And they don’t have faces like dogs. I feel more like a dog than a mosquito, so I can’t be as ugly as one of them, can I?”

She held her stuffed rabbit so that he could see outside, and pressed her face to the glass. All of a sudden she wished that she were on the other side of it, or at least that she knew what it felt like. She wanted to be let out of her room, to play outside again, to have fun wrestling with the dogs and to actually be able to run …

To run. Without holding her arms out in front of her, running smack into trees and tripping on roots.

To fly.

Adele grinned again. “If this is because of my illness, I do hope that I never get better.” One hand went to her mouth. “But what if I am better now, and this is what I’ll be like from now on?”

She turned her head to “look” down at her stuffed rabbit. It said nothing. Then Adele looked back out into the room, and recognized something she hadn’t before: The door had been left open.

She walked through it confidently, feeling excited and happy and extremely hungry. On the landing she could hear the fire going in the sitting room downstairs, and she did not even have to hold on to the handrails. “Come on, Mr. Thomas,” she whispered. “Let’s go ask mum and dad if it’s okay to go outside again.”

The world was a comforting mass of darkness, which was slowly becoming lighter. Sasha knew he’d been having dreams inside of it, because he was still worried that he wouldn’t be able to find enough platypus eggs to make an omelet. Somewhere in his muddled head he knew that that’d been a dream, but it seemed more real to him than the strange lights and colors outside.

He could tell, just barely, that there were people moving about him. People in white uniforms moving around him, writing things down on a clipboard, crouching next to him and doing something he couldn’t see. He saw one of them pull a needle out of his arm, and stick in a new one. And he couldn’t feel pinching of his skin, but he felt the icy coldness, and it made him shiver.

Everything was numb. His mouth felt like it was crammed full of cotton. He couldn’t feel his tongue, and he didn’t think he’d be able to speak. He saw strange, colored lights in the distance, and realized that they were the picture on a TV screen, up on the wall. He made himself focus on it ’till his eyes watered, and afterwards he was finally able to see the newscaster. But there was something else in front of his eyes, something large and oblong which took up a lot of his field of vision.

Sasha looked down gingerly and tried to see what it was, but could not. Then something occurred to him, and he looked up.

There, above his hospital bed, was the mirror that’d been there before he’d been wheeled into the operating room. And in the mirror was a pale white, hairless face, with pointed ears and a long wolf’s muzzle. It was swollen, and there were bandages on it.

Sasha grinned drowsily, baring his teeth, and his tongue lolled out the side.

One of the nurses took his muzzle in her hands and held it open, before placing something on his tongue and making him swallow it. He barely felt anything, and didn’t put up a struggle. He just kept looking at his face in the mirror.

A few minutes later he was back asleep again.

The hospital had a separate room for people who were recovering from or preparing to undergo a trans-species procedure. It was kept dimly lit throughout the day, although Sasha could see the bright daylight outside in the cracks between the curtains. The nurses kept him on painkillers and made him take sleeping pills at odd hours, so that was the only way that he knew what time of day it was.

That, and the curtain. At night it separated him from the room’s only other occupant: A sickly-looking boy with almond eyes and dark brown features, who couldn’t be more than 10. His head had been shaved, just as Sasha’s had been, and he got even more attention from the nurses than Sasha did. When they came to take care of him during the daytime he smiled at them and asked them questions, and they smiled back and told each other how cute he was. Because of him, they had the TV tuned to educational shows for most of the day, but whenever he got the remote he put on anime instead.

One day, Sasha was feeling coherent enough to turn his head and ask the boy a question during the commercials. "Hey … " he tried to say, although it came out more like "Hrh … "

The boy looked up. He was sitting up in bed, playing with toys.

Sasha moistened the inside of his dry muzzle, and tried again. This time he only slurred a little. "Whuush your name?"

"Aiden," he said. "What’s yours?"

It took Sasha three tries to get his own name right. The boy giggled. "That’s a girl’s name!" he said.

"Yesh," Sasha said, and tried to smile.

"I saw you before you came in here," Aiden said. "How come you’re an anthropomorphic wolf?" He did not trip over the word.

"Well," Sasha said, "there’s two waysh to become one … either you’re born that way, or you pay the doctorsh to make you into one. Guesh which one I chose."

He grinned, and Aiden grinned back. "How come?" he asked.

"Alwaysh wanted to be one." Sasha looked up at the mirror again, one arm behind his head and the other hooked up to the IVs. The bandages were off of his head now, and he could see the scars clearly. They’d be visible until his fur grew out.

"Aren’t you worried that people will look at you funny?"

"Hey." Sasha turned to look at him again. "I don’ look at them funny for bein’ ugly, hairless apes."

Aiden giggled again.

"So how come you’re … uh … " Sasha’s mind went blank all of a sudden, as the IV’s timed painkillers were released into his system. " … y’know?"

"Trans-species?" The boy perked up. "It was my parents’ idea."

"Your mom and dad want you to … "

"Yup."

"Seriously?" Sasha tried to sit up, and his stiff muscles protested.

"Uh-huh." Aiden watched.

"And you’re okay with that?"

"Yup." He nodded, then looked back up at the TV. The commercials were over.

Sasha sat there a moment and thought about what it must be like to have a family that was supportive of his decision. His had disowned him when he’d told them about it; there had been a huge argument, and he hadn’t heard from his parents or sister since. At least he still had his friends, he thought, as he started to become drowsy and laid back down … at least he still had his friends.

They came to visit him one day two weeks later, during his physical therapy. Sasha was happy to see them, and showed off. He’d opted to have synthetic muscles installed, to replace the mass that he’d lost during pre-op chemotherapy and retroviral infusion, and even with only a thin coat of fur he thought that he looked rather handsome. He suspected his friends thought as much, too, even though they were laughing and being sarcastic.

After they left, he found that he’d pulled every one of those muscles, since their nerve endings hadn’t been formed yet and he hadn’t been able to tell how far he was pushing himself. He spent the next week trying to lay still, unable to feel his aching muscles but knowing that if he moved them too far he might tear them apart, and have to have them surgically replaced. One time he reached for a cup of water on the nightstand, but his arm had simply refused to work and he’d knocked it over. Aiden had pressed the button to call for a nurse.

A week or two after that, almost his date of discharge, his friends snuck him out of the hospital. He still had trouble pronouncing some words, and they had to help him walk sometimes. But he felt alive and full of energy, and was tired of just doing exercises. The people at the front desk had looked surprised, but they waved to him and wished him good luck.

He couldn’t remember what’d happened next. He remembered that there had been drinks, and pizza, and more pizza and drinks. He remembered making wild boasts to his friends, and pointedly calling a moustached man in a Stetson an "ugly, hairless ape." Sasha had been taller than him, and had been itching to start a fight. But to his surprise, the man had mumbled something and backed down, and he and his family had left the restaurant.

He remembered staggering back into the hospital, the nurses intercepting him and shooing his friends away. He remembered being helped back up the elevator, into his room next to Aiden, and collapsing into his bed. Now he was wide awake looking up at the ceiling, darkness outside the crack in the curtain, and realizing that something was wrong. What was it?

His stomach lurched. Oh yes, he thought … that was what.

Sasha threw up, over and over again, and the noise woke Aiden up. He said something, panicked, but Sasha couldn’t hear him because he was busy throwing up. Pretty soon after that the nurses came in, and by this time Sasha was glad they were there, because his stomach was twisting itself into knots but all that would come up was blood.

The nurses said lots of things to each other, and Sasha couldn’t hear what they were saying because all he could do was feel pain. They pulled at his arm, but his arms were wrapped tight around himself and his hands were clutching his sides, digging in with his claws, trying to make the pain stop. But they kept pulling, and he finally lashed out, and the nurse fell and knocked something big and expensive over.

After that they forced a mask onto his muzzle, and he started to cough blood into it, too. But a few seconds later, that did not seem to matter. The world became black, and quiet.

Sasha’s release was postponed by a month. He barely knew what had happened; could barely think, could barely sit up. He was pretty sure that they’d operated on him, because his midsection stung like razors every time he coughed. And for the first few days he had to cough a lot, so the pain would become unbearable.

At one point, after a violent coughing fit, he started whimpering uncontrollably, tears running down his face. And Aiden had come over and watched for a moment, before placing one of his toy cars on the sheets next to him.

Things hadn’t seemed so bad after that.

Sasha began to get better, to be able to sit up again, to have the bandages on his stomach removed. He began to talk to the nurses, to ask for things to read, to use his phone to respond to messages from his friends. He began to look at the light coming from between the curtain and the windowsill, and to think what it would be like once he finally stepped outside as his now-finely furred self.

And he began to look over at the opposite bed with concern. Because while he was getting progressively better, Aiden was getting progressively worse. The boy was taking all sorts of medicines and was barely coherent anymore, only lifting his eyes when his favorite anime came on. He didn’t talk to the nurses anymore, and he didn’t reply to Sasha when he talked to him. He just lay there, looking up at the wolf with a glazed-over look on his face.

Sasha felt terrible for him, and decided to keep talking to Aiden anyway … partly to try to get a response out of him, and partly because he was feeling lonely and needed someone to talk to, even if they didn’t respond. He told him what it was like working for one of the country’s largest banks, and how his boss had been totally against his decision but would have to hire him back, thanks to the anti-discrimination laws. He told him what it’d been like seeing a natural-born anthropomorph, and reaching out and touching his fur and realizing he was alive, and how that had affected him and had changed his whole life.

He talked about befriending the anthropomorph. About going to the conventions together and meeting his current friends, who’d been supportive of his dream to become an anthropomorph himself. And he told Aiden how much he would like life as an anthropomorph … how he’d be able to see, and hear, and smell things that he couldn’t before, and out-wrestle anyone, and how awesome his friends would think he was. And he thought Aiden smiled at him, but he couldn’t be sure.

Towards the end of Sasha’s stay they let him get up sometimes, and walk around the hospital. He had an idea for where he wanted to go, and he told the nurses about it and they thought it was wonderful. That was how he got to visit the children’s ward.

Sasha remembered what it’d been like to see people dressed up in costume like they were anthropomorphic animals, smiling and waving and hugging each other and little kids. He remembered hearing the people who did things like that talking about going to hospitals, and visiting children who’d come down with terminal illnesses, and putting smiles on their faces.

He wanted to do it too, as long as he was in a position to. And make them smile, and laugh, and ask weird questions he did. Some of the children could barely look up, or had to start coughing in mid-sentence, and those were the sad ones because he knew there was nothing he could do for them. But others were more cheerful, and would wave or even run up and hug him as soon as he entered the room. It made Sasha’s heart melt.

Suddenly he no longer cared who was ugly and hairless and who wasn’t. He was just happy to be alive, both because he’d come so close to dying and because he got to be around the greatest people ever. And he would look in the mirror and see someone else, and realize he liked being this someone else. He was acting the way that he’d wanted to act, but had never allowed himself to. And it was the most fun that he’d had in his life.

Every day before he went out to visit the kids downstairs, he would try to get a smile out of Aiden. Today, though, he was still asleep. Sasha just tiptoed around him, and went down the hall towards the elevator.

When he came back, there were nurses rushing into and out of the room. They were bringing a crash cart inside, and giving each other orders.

Sasha watched, in shock, unable to realize what’d happened. He tapped a nurse on the shoulder and asked "What’s going on in there?"

"We’re trying to save that boy’s life." Her face was grim.

Sasha wanted to step inside and see what was going on, but there were too many people in there. All he could do was stand in the hallway and watch, and try not to get in anyone’s way. Sasha had never thought of himself as religious, but he couldn’t help but pray that someone would save Aiden.

Finally he heard what sounded like Aiden choking and coughing. His ears perked, and he looked up. Then he heard the boy gasp, and let out the most horrible, anguished sound that he’d ever heard, trailing off into nothing. And the activity inside stopped.

For a second, Sasha did not know what that meant. Then he saw one of the nurses hang her head, and another begin crying, and he felt like his insides had frozen up.

He didn’t cry at first, because he couldn’t believe what had just happened. Then he remembered the pain that he’d had, of his insides tearing apart the night that his friends took him out; and, later, after the operation, the pain like his coughing would burst himself open. And he imagined that ten-year-old feeling that pain, and that pain getting worse and worse, and Aiden begging it to go away until finally something just gave.

That did it. Sasha began to cry too. And he remembered how morose Aiden had been the night before, and wished he’d said something to the nurses about it. He should have seen! He should have said something. He should have gotten one last smile out of him. He wished that he had.

He stood there in the hallway numbly watching people file out of the room … doctors muttering something about malpractice insurance, nurses hugging and reassuring each other. They hugged Sasha, too, and let him know that they did their best and that it was okay to cry. And he did, all over again.

Finally there was just one nurse left, when Sasha went back in the room. She was standing over Aiden, and the way the curtains were drawn Sasha could not see his face. All he could see was the lifeless lump under the covers.

"I’m sorry," Sasha said.

"We all are." She didn’t look up.

"He didn’t even get to find out what it’s like … "

"What what’s like?"

"What it’s like to … " Sasha coughed, and tried not to cry. He couldn’t talk about that. "What happened to him?"

"His body rejected the human organs." The nurse’s voice was a monotone. "We tried all kinds of therapy, but nothing was working on him. And so his organs stopped working on him, and he just gave out and died."

"Wait … " Something about that didn’t sound right. "His body rejected the human organs?"

"This boy was hatched as an anthropomorphic dragon." The nurse looked up at Sasha. "His parents were bred to fight in the People’s Golden Army. When they moved here, they asked their son if he wanted to become a human. And he said yes."

The nurse finished writing something down on her clipboard. And Sasha could only stare, down at the lump on the bed that had once been a dragon.

"We’re going to move you to another room," the nurse said, as another one entered the room. "Almost time for your discharge anyway. Come on, come with me."

She walked out, and Sasha walked out with her, looking over his shoulder until the door was out of sight.