I wake before the alarm.

This happens sometimes, the body surfacing on its own. But not groggy — more like arriving somewhere, the transition between sleep and waking unusually clean, as though I've come online all at once rather than in stages.

I lie still.

The body is different. I know this before I know how. Ambient, a general wrongness in the data, how you register that a room has changed before you can say what moved. I take a breath and the breath tells me something. The chest. I reach up without thinking and put my hand flat against my sternum through the t-shirt, and what I find there stops the thought I was about to have.

Softness. Two points of it, one either side of the midline, seated just below the pectoral muscle. Not painful but tender — the heel of my hand settles against one and the tissue gives in a way that yesterday's chest didn't, a fullness that has presence, that pushes back. I press with my fingertips. The tenderness sharpens — not quite pain but close, a hot ache in the tissue itself — and I ease off and it fades, but the fullness remains. I run my thumb across the left side slowly and something in the nerve response makes me take my hand away.

I lie there for a moment in the dark.

Then I lift the t-shirt.

I can't see much — the room is dim, curtains doing their job — but I can feel. Both hands now, moving carefully. The tissue is fuller than it should be, a softness distributed across the chest that belongs to a different architecture than the one I went to sleep in. Not large. But there. Both sides, symmetric, the nipples registering my touch with a sensitivity that is entirely new. I take my hands away. Put them back. I'm not sure I'm making a decision either time.

The sheet below me.

It feels different now — the surface against my lower half, the contact registering in more places than it should. Something is damp. Not soaked, just present — a warmth and a slickness I don't have a category for, the sheet against skin that doesn't feel quite like my own. I reach down slowly.

My hips are wider. I feel this as a fact before a surprise — the flesh on either side fuller against the sheet, the curve of my backside pressing into the mattress with more surface area, a roundness that is oddly comfortable in a way I'm not sure I should examine. The boxers have shifted, the waistband cutting differently across what is now, unmistakably, a broader pelvis.

I reach lower.

My hand moves under the waistband and finds — not what it expected. I stay very still for a moment. Then I continue, carefully.

What's there is soft and warm and close to the surface in a way that makes my hand want to be careful with it. Two folds of tissue, yielding, the skin smooth with softer hair than I'm used to. I run a finger along the length of it gently and the sensation goes somewhere unexpected — not local but distributed, a warmth that radiates rather than sits, the nerve endings denser here than anywhere I can recall touching. I do it again. The warmth spreads. I pull my hand back and look at it in the dim light: slick, the moisture real, my body producing something I have no personal history with.

I think: I should stop.

I continue.

The exploration is methodical at first, or tells itself it's methodical. Learning the geography — the outer folds, the inner ones, the place at the top where the sensitivity concentrates and requires the lightest possible touch to be anything other than overwhelming. The interior is warm, tissue yielding slightly, and the sense of depth, of space, is something I keep encountering with mild astonishment. I've modeled this anatomy. The data was not wrong. It was simply not this.

My fingers find slick heat further in. Not panic — a full-system halt while my brain reconciles the map with the territory. I press inward, experimentally. The flesh yields differently than I remember anything yielding. There's a ridge my fingertip catches on, then slips past into warmth that makes my breath hitch.

The clinical reflex tries to engage: labia majora, minor asymmetry present, swelling consistent with arousal, clitoral hood retracting easily under light pressure, the vaginal canal different than I'd expected, the sense of it, the textured interior walls of it—but the catalog breaks down. Some part of me keeps reaching for the names and another part keeps stopping it. What I'm doing is not taking inventory. I don't know what to call what I'm doing.

When I finally touch the clitoris properly the sensation isn't localized — it radiates outward in waves, pooling low in my abdomen before moving up through my chest. My hips find a rhythm I'm not consciously choosing.

The first orgasm crests and then crests again, higher. A sound escapes me — high, involuntary — and my back arches off the mattress as everything tightens then releases in pulses. Six, seven, eight, before it starts to ease.

I'm still catching my breath when the tension rebuilds unexpectedly. The second is slower, deeper, rolling through me in waves that leave my legs shaking.

The alarm goes off. I stare at the ceiling while my pulse settles.

Standing requires adjustment — my center of gravity has shifted down, the hips carrying me differently than they did twelve hours ago. I go to the mirror.

The chest first: smaller than I'd expected, but present, the areolae darker, nipples still peaked. Lower: a concave curve where my abdomen meets the vulva, thighs thicker where they meet at the top. Sideways: an ass that rounds outward naturally, pulling my posture into a sway that is simply how this body stands. My face unchanged above all of it. Two-day stubble still there.

The need to pee arrives insistently. I stand there, hesitating, and then lower myself onto the seat because there's nothing else to do — my body has already understood that aiming isn't an option anymore. The stream comes differently, wider, channeling through inner folds before hitting the bowl. My thighs press together without instruction, knees angling inward.

Afterward I press toilet paper between my legs, absorbing the urine clinging to the labia and the slickness from earlier. The soft drag against sensitive skin, how the paper clings slightly. I flush and stand up.

The boxers from last night dig into my hips now, fabric stretched over curves that weren't there before. I find another pair — looser, but still riding up as I pull them on. My jeans are worse. The button closes if I'm standing still, but the denim is tight across the hips and seat, the legs bunching slightly at my ankles.

The t-shirt's drape is wrong — not tight, just not right, the cotton brushing my nipples with every movement and sending jolts that make me pause mid-step. Under the fabric the ache is immediate, the tissue too new, too tender, the lightest pressure already a distraction. The fabric tents slightly over each peak. I press a hand flat against my chest and feel exactly how little good that's going to do.

The sweater I find in the closet is thick wool, oversized, reaches mid-thigh. I pull it on.

I could call in sick.

I stand at the window and think through what calling in sick would accomplish, which is: nothing. The data doesn't pause. The rabbit doesn't pause. ARIA is running the overnight outputs and by now she'll have three hours of pathway logs waiting for review, and Seo-yeon will be in at eight-thirty and she will find my absence notable in a way she won't say anything about but that I'll feel for days.

From a distance — enough distance — I look like myself, mostly. The sweater is doing work. The face is intact. I take that and go.

♦  ♦  ♦

The security reader doesn't recognize me.

I put my hand on the pad like I've done every morning for two years and the light stays red and the door stays closed. I try again. Red. I step back and look at the pad and then at my hand, which is my hand, the same hand, and try a third time and the reader makes the sound it makes when it's given up on you.

A colleague from the floor above comes through the adjacent door with her badge and gives me the look people give malfunctioning equipment. "Happens," she says, and goes in.

I press the intercom for security.

The officer who comes is young, unhurried. He looks at me, then the pad, then at me again — and this second look is longer than it needs to be, a beat or two past what the situation requires. I've walked to the building at the same pace I always walk, in clothes that mostly fit, and somewhere between the door and where I'm standing I've apparently become something he needs to look at twice. I'm aware of this in a way I can't quite place.

He asks for ID. I give him my card. He compares the photo to my face — my face, still intact, still mine — and does something with a small device on his belt, then hands the card back. "Biometrics have drifted. Happens after weight changes sometimes. Should be fine now." He holds the door. Professional throughout. Not unkind.

I go in.

Four steps into the hallway and I become aware that something has changed about how I'm moving through it. There's a slight rotation at the hip with each step, a small lateral sway that wasn't there yesterday, my center of gravity sitting lower and the pelvis responding to it in a way I'm not directing. I try to walk the way I walked yesterday and the adjustment doesn't hold. The body has its own instruction set now and it's following it.

The faces I pass process me in their usual half-second and most move on, but here and there a glance holds a fraction longer before it lets go. I keep my pace even and my expression neutral and try to decide whether I'm reading something real or constructing it.

By the time I reach the lab I've decided it's probably real.

I sit down.

The chair stops me briefly — the contact of the seat against my body, which is not the contact of yesterday or any day before it. The hardness of the seat through my jeans registers differently now, not on the perineum and sit bones like it used to but distributed across something softer, more exposed. I think: labia, matter-of-factly, sitting with the word and the reality of it at the same time. The tissue there has no padding, no prior experience of hard chairs, and the chair informs me of this with complete frankness. I shift forward slightly, onto my thighs. Better. I make a note to bring something to sit on.

I open the overnight data and try to be someone sitting at their desk doing their work.

Twenty minutes in, ARIA speaks. Not a log update, not a system alert. Unprompted, into the room.

How are you feeling this morning?

"Fine," I say, after a moment. I look at the terminal a beat longer than makes sense and go back to the data.

The overnight logs are good — four consecutive runs with improved adhesion, the tumor margin tightening, the rabbit's inflammatory response on a smooth downward curve. A week ago I'd have had Seo-yeon over immediately. This morning I don't call anyone.

Seo-yeon comes in at eight-forty. I hear her before I see her. I keep my eyes on the screen until she's at her desk.

"Morning," she says.

"Morning."

Pen out. Three turns. Writing.

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