I wake at five-seventeen and lie very still.

Wednesday I woke to the first of it — the small buds, the wider hips, the absence below the waistband. This is Thursday. Whatever the process is, it has not stopped.

I move my hands.

The chest first. What I find there is not the tentative softness of Wednesday morning. The tissue is full and present, two substantial weights resting against my ribcage. I press my palms flat against them and the gravity of it is real — they push back, they have heft, they move when I shift position. I sit up and they move again, settling, and I feel the settling through the entire ribcage. I cup each one in turn, left slightly fuller in the palm than the right, though the difference is small enough that I'm not certain I'm not imagining it. In the gray pre-dawn the profile of my body, in silhouette, is unmistakably female.

I stay sitting for a while. The tenderness from yesterday has shifted — not gone, but changed, less like pain and more like the nerves being very awake to everything. I run my thumbs across the nipples and have to stop and breathe.

When I stand, the ache arrives.

Not the chest this time — deeper, the lower back and both hip joints carrying a dull grinding soreness that I feel in the first few steps and again every time I change direction. The geometry of the pelvis has settled into its final configuration and what I'm left with is what you'd feel if you'd been running on a stress fracture for two days and only now stopped. I stand at the window and breathe through it for a moment. The ache isn't alarming. It’s present enough that I feel every step.

The hips and pelvis are solid now, no longer provisional. I walk to the window and back and the gait is different — the new center of gravity instructing each step, the sway natural in a body built for it. My old jeans are on the chair. I don't try them.

I go to the mirror and stand there.

From the neck down the body is female. Unambiguously, fully — the relationship between waist and hip, the weight of the chest, the smooth lines of the thighs tapering to the knee. The face above it mine: jaw, eyes, yesterday's stubble. I'm not sure dissonance is even the right word. There's something else underneath it, something closer to curiosity, attention I'd usually direct outward now turned on my own reflection.

I lift my arm and smell myself. Overnight staleness and underneath it something else — the residue of yesterday, the day of discoveries and warm slickness and the laundry room and all the rest of it, soaked in. I showered last night. I'm apparently going to have to shower again.

I get in the shower.

I'm starting to think of it as the day's first negotiation with the body. I turn the temperature down before I step in. The water hits the chest and I feel it at a lower threshold than any shower of my previous life — immediate, vivid, the skin translating heat into something more than just warm water. I stand in it for a moment.

I soap my hands and begin at the shoulders, work down across the chest — both palms cupped, covering the full weight of it, moving slowly. This is not, I tell myself, anything other than washing. The nipples tighten under the contact and I feel it down through my stomach and I keep moving, down the belly, the new soft curve of the lower abdomen, around the hips. The hip joints ache under my hands when I press them, the soreness deep. I soap around them carefully.

Between my legs the anatomy is warm and already responding, slickness present before I've done anything, the body offering its own information. I work carefully. The sensitivity here has its own geography — places that want attention and places that need only the lightest contact before they're too much. I take my time with this. There is no urgency in it, just attention — the care of someone who has arrived somewhere new and is not in a rush. I lean back against the shower wall and let the water run over me and do something that is approximately getting clean.

I dry myself slowly. The chest, the inner thighs, the hip bones still complaining when I press the towel against them. I wrap myself up and stand at the mirror. Flushed. The face looking back at me has an expression I don't entirely recognize — something open and a little undone.

Clothes.

The jeans on the chair are not going to close — I establish this in thirty seconds and throw them back. One pair of stretch pants in the closet, dark gray, a cut I don't usually like — these close over the hips if I'm standing still, though they do things at the seat and thigh that announce the new geometry to anyone paying attention. The loosest shirt I own, untucked. I look in the mirror. The shirt is doing some work. Not enough work. The chest is not a thing that can be managed with fabric that wasn't designed to manage it — the weight and shape pressing the front of the shirt with each breath, the outline visible, the movement visible.

I zip a fleece over the top. This helps slightly. Not much.

My usual sneakers gap around my heels when I slide them on — too much room in the toe box, the laces cinching tight but my feet shifting inside them anyway. At the back of the closet I find a pair of sandals I bought two summers ago and haven't worn since. I put them on and go.

♦  ♦  ♦

The fleece doesn't work.

I knew this before I left and went anyway because there's no alternative. The shape is simply there — the weight of the chest pressing the fabric forward with each breath, the breasts moving freely and unsupported, visible from every angle. A fleece zipped to the collar does not conceal a chest. It just adds a layer of wishful thinking.

The sandals are the other thing. In November. The woman at the coffee place near the lab looks at my feet with the brief polite confusion of someone who has decided not to ask.

At my desk I try to be someone sitting at a desk. The overnight logs, the rabbit's margins, ARIA's pathway updates. I go through all of it. The chest makes itself known with every breath, fabric moving against the nipples, weight shifting when I lean forward into the screen. Somewhere in the first hour I notice I've been sitting with my arms crossed, not as a decision, just as an adjustment. I uncross them and the awareness floods back immediately. I re-cross them. The hip joints ache at the base of the chair, the angle of sitting pressing on exactly the places that are already complaining.

I type the same line in the pathway analysis three times, delete it each time, and give up and stare at the screen.

ARIA speaks at about ten-thirty. Not unprompted — I've asked her to run a confidence check on the projection — but her response is slower than usual, and she doesn't just give me the numbers.

You're fidgeting a lot this morning.

I look at the terminal. "I'm fine. Just run the check."

The confidence interval is within acceptable range. I'll send the updated projection to your screen.

I look at the terminal a moment longer and go back to the data.

The hallway to the water machine runs alongside the open office where three other teams sit. I make this walk twice before lunch — once for water, once to take a document to the printer at the far end. Both times I'm aware of the walk in a way that is new: the sway that is now simply how this body moves, the breasts unsupported and pulling in different directions, the hip joints registering each step with a dull friction-ache that I've started to think of as the body's invoice for the structural work it's been doing. I can't tell what the people at their desks are seeing. I get my water and my document with an efficiency that is mostly just keeping my eyes forward.

Back at my desk I cross my arms and fix them on the screen.

At eleven-forty Seo-yeon comes out of the secondary lab and walks down the corridor past my desk. Folder in one hand, eyes on it, moving at the focused pace of someone with somewhere to be.

She stops.

She looks at me — not a glance, not passing through to something else. Arrived here, at my desk, looking at me in the manner she looks at data that doesn't match the model. Pen in her hand, uncapped. Holding very still like she does when she's found something.

"Morning," I say.

"Morning," she says. Her gaze moves across me carefully and comes back to my face. "Are you all right?"

"Fine. Just tired."

She holds this for a second. I can feel her choosing between responses. Eventually she nods, once, and continues down the corridor.

I watch her go.

Being looked at by her — the precision of her attention — produces a now-familiar warmth low in my abdomen, the slickness arriving before I've decided anything. I sit there and breathe. Apparently I am going to have to get used to this. Apparently there is nothing about it that I know what to do with.

I look at the data.

Sometime in the early afternoon the crossed arms have uncrossed themselves again and I've been sitting normally for half an hour, the chest simply present, the fabric simply doing what it does, and I haven't been tracking it. I don't know when this happened.

The rabbit's margins are holding. The projection looks good. The fleece is not working but no one has said anything.

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