I could swear there was something buried deep in my childhood that Mr. Trousers was reminding me of. Like, the act of following a pair of quasi-disembodied pants through a now-dark forest was triggering some latent cultural reference. There was a myth that involved something similar, I was certain of it. I definitely remember a children's book. There was totally a children's picture book with someone following a walking pair of pants. Or maybe the pants were following someone. I'm definitely not just losing it. Point is, there was some kind of story that the scene dredged up from the dustiest, most untouched corner of my memory. It also gave me Irish vibes for some reason. A picture book adapting an Irish folk tale? Ha, watch me be onto something, but it's actually Polish or some other random shit.

  I was getting way too distracted. I needed to get a better grip on my Anathemaness before we reached wherever Mr. Trousers was leading me. Going by what I could hear, that wouldn't be long at all. The first order of business was to do something about my claws and whatever was going on with my face. I surely looked far too monstrous at the moment, even without being able to get a proper look at myself. I'd need a good reflection for that, and for that, I could always resort to painstakingly spitting up a small puddle of liquid metal, if need be.

  I wasn't going to waste my time on that if I could just shift it back, though. I really knew way too little about chameliums, but the little I did know included two critical things—first, I was reasonably sure they normally didn't have anything that could pass as human flesh. I did, though, which was both weird and encouraging. The second thing was that they were among the more shapeshifty variants of Anathema, which was also encouraging. Combined, it gave me hope I could morph back to something more superficially human.

  To that end, I started with the claws, because it was easier to see what I was doing that way. The material resembled a low carat, burnished or brushed gold—not what I'd ever expect for a weapon or tool. I tried flexing it, testing what kind of restriction it might have put on my range of motion. The result was that it didn't. Individual segments of the unfamiliar metal would scrape and clink against each other, but they'd never get stuck. I was a little suspicious that it was somehow adaptively changing shape as needed, but I couldn't tell for sure. Well, here goes.

  Feeling a bit silly, I willed the stuff to turn back into my regular, pretty little human hands.

  The surface of the metal rippled. It was like the stuff had turned liquid, and oh god it feels weird it feels tingly and gross what the hell! The worst part of it was that the icky sensation didn't come from feeling the liquified metal squirm against my skin—it came from the metal itself. I began to feel a pressure where it touched my hands and arms, like it was trying to squeeze itself straight through. I was about to stop, afraid I was about to inadvertently mangle myself, when over the course of a single second it all just popped through. A weird tingling raced up both arms—both absolutely and unremarkably human arms—and then the pressure vanished.

  I shook both of them out a little to get rid of the feeling and also make sure. The last bit was similar to what it felt like when a blood pressure cuff started deflating, and I was not looking forward to repeating the process with whatever the hell was going on with my face. Suck it up, Alex. You don't want to go walking around looking like you get your salted nut mix from the hardware store, do you? I did the same thing again, willing the metal stuff to give me my face back. Now that I'd seen how it worked with my hands, I also focused on the idea of it squeezing itself back inside—as disturbing as the idea might be.

  I think it worked. The only difference was that it felt like a lot of it went straight to the inner parts of my mouth and stuck around there. Please tell me that doesn't mean I'm gonna be sporting a full grill from now on. Ignoring that particular possibility, the only thing left to do was check how it affected my voice. I hoped the whole church organ filter was gone now, too.

  "Testing, testing—god fucking damnit."

  I still sounded like I was breathing steam through twelve dozen different windpipes, and all of them were made of brass. Trying to will my voice back to normal like my hands or face didn't have the same effect, and I realized I'd need to take a different approach. Obviously, I couldn't act like it wasn't a problem, nor was I willing to pretend like I'd had some injury that made me go mute. That being said, I still had an idea—and rather ironically, it came straight from the specific nature of my weird-ass Anathema voice itself. It was time to milk every ounce of worth from my eclectic and tangential knowledge in the field of signal processing.

  It was even less relevant to my own materials science studies than Sidekick's backyard chemistry stunt, but there were a large number of niche things I'd picked up superficial knowledge in from too many hours of wiki surfing and long-form video content. It was only a matter of time before at least one passing interest turned out to be useful for something, and in this instance, I'd lucked out. I was pretty sure all those 'pipes' were just harmonic overtones of whatever base pitch I was speaking at, and turning that into words was a matter of frequency formants for the vowels and time domain dynamics for the consonants.

  But the specifics didn't really matter, because I had no intention of consciously controlling fifty different frequency partials every time I wanted to say hello. What did matter was that it seemed like I was capable of mimicking normal human speech by effectively synthesizing it through fiddling with the organ stops in real time. That was kind of crazy, and there might be a ton of potential there to mimic completely impossible sounds—but right now, I sounded like a shitty clockwork robot because I was just bad at it. And the solution to a problem like that was practice.

  Bummer.

  "Testing again—ugh. Maybe I can lean into it a bit for now? Heavenly choir of angels type thing?" I tried shifting my voice higher—which turned out to be disturbingly easy—and making it a bit more reedy. I don't think anyone has ever wanted to have a 'reedy' voice, but in this instance, it was in the context of sounding less like a bunch of flutes. "So how's this? Benevolent and celestial?" It still had a blatant inhuman character, but I could work with that. I can play it as part of my Star Guardian gambit, right? Guess I'm about to find out.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Mr. Trousers and I had returned.

  I have to admit, the scene before me was not even remotely close to what I'd expected. A tactical goon squad had surrounded sidekick and Rambo, but they were pointing their weapons out, not in. Rambo was standing around, exhausted and clearly unsure what to do with himself. Sidekick was on the ground nearby, cradling her head and breathing way too fast. She looked like she was about to be violently sick.

  None of that was particularly weird. The weirdness came when Mr. Trousers ambled up and joined the goon circle, and the rest of them just shuffled around to make room like it was the most normal part of standard goon circle operations. None of them showed any other signs of reacting—probably because at least half of them were also visibly deceased. Is this what Sidekick's power is? Corpse minions? There were also a few dead Anathema nearby, including at least one skinner. I chose to hang back and observe for a moment.

  A wise decision, because the second something burst out of the bushes on the other side of the circle, all five tactical zombies twisted as if on strings and opened fire. I didn't see what it was, but it must have gone down, because they all twitched back to their former positions in sync. Well, all except Mr. Trousers, who'd never moved in the first place. Can't blame him. What was he supposed to do, walk over and step on the enemy's toes?

  I decided it was time to make my entrance. Steadying my breath, I double-checked that my metal claws hadn't returned, then found a decently thick tree to stand behind in case calling out made Sidekick's minions go trigger happy. Alright, here we go. Heavenly choir, remember? "Hey! It's me!" A bit late, I realized none of us had ever learned each other's actual names. I was still just calling those two Rambo and Sidekick, after all. "Please don't uh, shoot me?"

  There was no response. Peeking my head out between two branches, I saw that Rambo was staring in my direction. The armored goons hadn't really reacted, but the ones on my side of the circle had also focused on my tree in particular. It was admittedly not obvious, as I couldn't see their eyes and they weren't aiming straight at me, but I could read it from the way they'd all angled themselves. Slowly, I stepped out from behind the trunk.

  I was really expecting to get shot, but that didn't happen. The corpse guard hadn't moved at all, and Rambo had relaxed a bit. As for Sidekick—did she even hear me? As far as I could tell, the young woman had barely reacted. She wasn't even looking in my direction—or at anything, really. "Uh, I'm gonna come over now." With slow, deliberate steps, I walked up to the circle. A few of the dead guys pivoted towards me but didn't make any aggressive moves. I took that as the only kind of invitation I was going to get, and stepped through.

  I wasn't really sure what to do or say, now that I'd made it. My plans didn't cover this part. Do we just stand around here until something else happens? That sounds super boring. Thankfully, Rambo took that decision away from me in the bluntest way possible. "Your voice sounds really fucking weird, man. What's the deal with that?"

  I opened my mouth to answer, already running through a couple different ways I could approach selling my story as having just bonded with a Star Core. Since Sidekick wasn't paying attention to anything around her, all of my attention was focused on testing the waters with Rambo—and that's why I was caught off guard when the real Star Guardian answered for me. "It's because she's not human."

  Oh shit. I didn't immediately run—or attack—but I was prepared to. The only reason I didn't was because I didn't know if Star Guardians counted as human either. I knew that regular Guardians did—there were fancy tests that could detect latent or concealed Anathema, and those had a higher false-positive rate on Guardians.

  I wasn't the only one who'd gone tense. While I did my best not to show it, instead presenting as vaguely confused, Rambo looked ready to kick my teeth in. And I didn't doubt that he would try, depending on what the other woman said next. I just hope you're not as good with handling mutant chameliums as you are with skinners. I hated to admit it, but part of me was starting to look forward to the possibility of a fight.

  "What do you mean," he ground out, never taking his eyes off me, "she's not human?"

  For the first time, Sidekick looked up at us. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears, and her eyes were distant. They regained focus as she stared up at me, and her vacant look began being replaced by something that looked weirdly—expectant. Then her eyes narrowed.

  My legs tensed. Something heavy pooled around my shoulders, and it felt like steel cables were drawing tense all throughout my limbs. Say it, bitch. Let's see if a few dead bodies are enough to save you.

  "Not human..." her eyes widened, and I could feel my claws ready to burst back out of my skin. "A Star Guardian! You're not human, so you must have bonded with another Star Core! Like me."

  I—wait, what? I was so ready for a fight that I completely forgot the entire point of my plan. I almost laughed. That was way too fucking easy. I started to clear my throat, then thought better of it. God knows what kind of alien sound that would have produced. I felt the steel cables go slack, and instead of striking with metal claws—I extended my hand. "Uh, yeah. That." Stop sounding so lame. You need to sound cooler than that. Releasing her limp fucking hand, I tried again. "So—ready to go fight a bunch of Anathema, or, uh something?"

  Good job, Alex. You sounded way cooler there.

  But my fellow Star Guardian just nodded. "Yeah." She didn't sound very confident. But she nodded again, and her voice was firmer this time. "Yeah, I am."

  I didn't bother to hide my stupid grin this time. Things couldn't have started out better, and it was about time I turned our misadventures into the start of a very, very good day. For me, at least. It looked like Sidekick and Rambo were pretty much set to survive as well, now—but one look around our personal protection circle, and it seemed clear the same couldn't be said for anyone else. Alright mysterious kidnappers, you've had your turn.

  Now, it was showtime.