In general, character growth does not occur in a vacuum, assuming it happens at all. For that matter, when character growth does happen, it's usually far from being evenly across a cast of characters. All too often, one person's newfound confidence can come at the cost of another's resolve.

I thought of pulling my PortaCon out from my coat pocket and sending texts to Ani and Heggy—maybe even a videophone call or two—in a desperate attempt to further my case, but I decided against it. I didn't want to make things any worse than they already were.

I wiped my tears off on the back of my hand.

I'd already dismissed Alon's soul back to the cushy afterlife I'd prepared for him. Given how he totally stood me up when I needed his help with Ani, I had strongly considered downgrading his afterlife benefits plan, but—like with the text messages—I ultimately decided against it. I didn't want to stoop to his level.

"Are you gonna leave now, Mr. Genneth?" Andalon asked, sitting on the tabletop.

"Soon, Andalon," I said, "soon."

To be honest, I had an incredibly strong urge to delay my escape and departure. I didn't want those past two conversations to be the last interactions I'd ever have with Heggy and Ani. But then I reminded myself: it wouldn't be the last, not with all the wyrms here at WeElMed.

Suddenly, in the middle of all this, I remembered something bad. Something really really bad.

A shiver ran down the long, long way to the tip of my tail.

"Fudge," I muttered.

Though a perfect memory definitely has its advantages, I will say this: with all the information floating around in my head, it was frustratingly easy for me to let certain details recede into the background. Having a palace of information in your mind is fine and dandy until you have to contend with all the messes that you hadn't yet gotten around to organizing.

"What is it?" Andalon asked.

"The nukes…"

Closing my eyes, I sent a second self marching right into Vernon's soul crystal, demanding he tell me what was going to happen about the threat of nuclear annihilation he'd mentioned back when he'd first arrived at West Elpeck Medical.

I barely got ten words out of him. "It's outta my hands," he said. "Now leave me the fuck alone."

I recentered my consciousness in my body once more. "Great," I muttered, "just great."

"Mr. Genneth?"

"Tomorrow will be the third day since General Marteneiss arrived at the hospital. He came to WeElMed to investigate why we weren't swamped with zombies, remember?"

"Maybe?" Andalon said.

But there was no time for her cuteness.

"Well, he said the army was going to nuke the city to glass if he hadn't found a useful way to keep the zombies at bay by the deadline."

"Yeah, and it's you!" she said, in a decidedly chipper voice. "You're the one who can do it, Mr. Genneth!"

"Yeah, I have necromancer powers now, but it's nowhere near enough to stop all zombies everywhere."

"Oh."Andalon's expression fell.

I slithered over to the cabinets, opened a drawer, and levitated out a familiar black box with metal corners.

Andalon turned her head to look. "What's that?"

"My clarinet case."

"Clary-net?" Andalon asked.

I didn't even bother to correct her. "Yeah," I said, with a nod. "Clary-net."

She seemed especially interested in it, as she floated over to my side to watch, almost transfixed, as I tried to get my clarinet out of the case—emphasis on tried. I tried to use my powers to open the latches on the case's sides, only to end up gouging a small hole in the darn thing. My approach had been to concentrate a small plexus into two, thorn-shaped weaves and use them in tandem to puff out enough force on the buttons to either side of the case's handle that needed to be pushed in order to open the case's latches. Unfortunately, my force needles turned out to be far more powerful than I'd anticipated.

Broken bits of the box's material clattered onto the floor like pottery shards.

Apparently, there was a certain level of delicate maneuvers that my powers were still having trouble pulling off. It remained to be seen whether this was a feature of my psychokinesis, or merely an artifact of my relative inexperience.

No, I thought. No more putting things off.

Besides, it wasn't like I had anything better to do.

So, I spent a couple minutes testing out force-thorns of varying intensities on one of the sofa cushions. My tests spat up bits of stuffing from holes my magic bit into the cushion, the fluff floating back down like cotton balls and snow. By the end, the cushions looked almost as bad as a Green Death victim, but, on the upside, the psychokinetic button pressing motions I was making on the plains of ruined upholstery were now nice and soft. With a little extra work, I even managed to figure out how to exert finger-soft touches of force wherever I wanted, sofa cushion or not.

It was a nice little accomplishment, and I would have very much liked to be proud of it—and myself—but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I didn't feel like I truly deserved it.

The real winner was my wyrm memory.

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When your memory was so good that you could perfectly recreate any previous attempts at will, figuring out the right way to do anything was a matter of trial and error—effective, but neither elegant nor glamorous.

Working carefully, I used two force thorns to push down on the buttons and open the latch, and then levitated the case onto the ruined sofa.

I slithered over and flicked the box open with the tip of a claw.

Andalon watched with rapt attention.

I turned to her with a smile. "May I present… my clarinet."

She gasped softly. Hesitantly, she reached out to it—once again, transfixed—only to retract her hand. She blinked for a moment, as if coming out of a trance, and then began attacking me with a barrage of questions about what clarinets did, where they came from, who made them, how they worked, what this did, what that did, only to interrupt her own bombardment with spurts of wonderstruck coos as I used my psychokinesis to assemble my clarinet mid-air. The instrument's individual pieces were just big enough for me to move them around by enclosing them in spherical levitation plexuses. Once it was fully assembled, I floated my clarinet down to rest beside its case, on one of the few parts of the sofa that my experiments hadn't blown to bits.

"A clarinet is a musical instrument," I said. "We use instruments to make music."

"Music?" Andalon asked.

As my hands no longer had the right size or shape to operate my clarinet the best I could do was to use some force thorns to gently compress the keys to open and close the tone holes.

I wept.

"Is that music?" Andalon asked.

Chuckling, I shook my head. Some spores came out as I sniffled.

"No, Andalon." I sighed. "That's not music."

With but a thought, I hyperphantasized into being a clarinet better suited to my changing body, hallucinating it into existence through sheer strength of will. It was a carbon copy of the clarinet on the sofa, only scaled up in size, and completely immune to the corrosive effects of the spores in my breath. Granted, I was still short two fingers on each hand, but since this was all imaginary, I didn't need to let that stop me.

"A one and a two and a three," I said, giving my usual start-off phrase.

And then I played.

I merely imagined myself blowing on the tip of my equally imaginary clarinet, as doing any actual breathing would have filled the room with caustic spores. I began to play the slow movement from Gallstrom's F minor Clarinet Sonata, using my six available fingers to push down on as many of the hallucinated keys as I could and letting my thoughts do the rest, including piano accompaniment.

The second movement of Gallstrom's first clarinet sonata lasted for about five and a half minutes long, and during those five and half minutes, time itself came to a pause, briefly calmed as it drew close to listen. It wasn't a passionate eruption nor a rousing anthem, but it didn't need to be. Instead, it was simple, and homely, with the warmth of a crackling fire and the smile of an old friend. This kind, gentle music always brought to mind a walk down the beach in the golden hours of afternoon, the piano accompaniment calmly plodding—low, high, low—like footsteps on the sand. The melody was a feather in the wind, wandering wide through its gentle lilting: down a step, a slow twirl, a rise back up, another twirl, and then a spacious leap as the breeze blew it high over the sea, only for it to drift back down to earth with slow and tender grace.

Gallstrom's music was famous for its lengthy phrases. It took the better part of a minute just to get to the opening melody's end, and of that, I managed to get forty seconds in before I was simply too overcome with emotion to continue any further. Both the music and the clarinet in my hands quivered and dissolved as tears trickled down my face with my runaway feeling. Eventually, I just shook my head and waved all the fantasies away.

Where I was going, I wasn't going to be able to take my clarinet with me.

And then Andalon said something that touched my heart: "Wh-why did you stop?"

"What?" I said.

I turned to face her. She sat on her knees, atop the table, leaning forward in rapt attention, her darling face marred by tears.

Andalon looked like she was almost as upset as I was.

She croaked. "Why did you stop, Mr. Genneth? It was so beautiful."

I bit my lip, struggling to smile instead of weep. "I'm… I'm glad you appreciate it, Andalon." I nodded. "It really is beautiful."

"But why does it make me sad?" she asked. "It makes me so sad. Why?"

"Because beauty is fragile. It's a taste of something precious. We… we cry because we'll miss it when we're gone."

But then, she started to sob.

"Please don't stop, Mr. Genneth. Please, please don't."

"Andalon, what's wrong?"

Why was she reacting like this?

"The music…" she said. "It feels like home."

"What?"

Another shiver ran down my spine.

"It's… it's like I already know it," she said. "It's close, so close. But it's not there yet. Why not? Why can't it be finished?"

"I… I don't understand."

And then she threw her arms around my chest and hugged me.

"Mr. Genneth!"

I held my hands behind her back, holding her incorporeal form as best as I could.

Yet again, I felt as if I was at the precipice of a mystery whose answer I might never know.

My claw tips phased through her sky-blue hair.

"Hopefully, once &alon arrives, things will get better," I said.

She looked up at me. "You think so?"

"I certainly hope so," I said.

"But what about now?" she asked. "What do we do now?"

"Now, we're going."

"We're going?"

"Yeah," I nodded, "we're going." I let out a shuddering breath.

"Where?" she asked.

"Someone's going to have to teach the wyrms to learn how to fly and use their powers to protect the city from the nukes the military will soon be dropping onto our heads. And, beyond that, someone needs to check out the Godsdial."

Having seen the silver-eyed wyrms fly—both in my mind, and out in the Garden Court—I had no doubt that flight was in my future.

"Until Ampersandalon gets here," I said, looking her in the face, "I'm pretty darn sure it'll help to have a small army of flying wyrms at our disposal."

Andalon clasped her hands together and brought them close to her chest. "Wyrmeh!" she said, whispering in excitement.

And just like that, she was sunshine all over again.

I put my clarinet away; I had to get ready to leave.

"How are you gonna get out?" she asked.

"Well, I do have a breath weapon now," I said. Pursing my lips, I focused on that tube down in my esophagus, ready to make a concerted effort to produce a big stream of spores, but I decided against it at the last minute. (I was starting to sense a pattern, here.) Instead, I released just the slightest puff and green from my mouth and nostrils.

I turned to face one of the walls. "I think I can use my spore breath to corrode a hole through the wall."

"And then what?" Andalon asked.

"Well, I'd escape, and without triggering the alarms on the doors and windows."

"What is an alarm?"

"It's a thing that goes woo very, very loudly to let people know that something bad has happened."

"Okay, so… you go through the wall, but… isn't it a long way down?"

"Wyrms can fly, can't they?" I asked.

"You're sure you can do that, Mr. Genneth?" Andalon stared at me with a distressing lack of confidence.

"I'll have to do it, eventually, so I might as well start now."

"What if your breathy-breath isn't enough to make the wall all hole-y?"

I scratched one of the lumps on my neck. It felt weird.

"Well… I guess I could always just eat my way through, if I had to."

Truth be told, I would have rather avoided having to sample some wall á la mode, but a wyrm's gotta do what a wyrm's gotta do.

To my surprise, there was an unexpected knock at the door, though that surprise was immediately pushed off the board by an even bigger one: my visitor was none other than Dr. Jonan Derric. And just when I thought things couldn't get any more surprising, reality pulled a fast one on me and sent a third surprise my way.

After spending a moment staring at the jagged hole I'd busted in the door, there was a pointed beep, and then the door to Staff Lounge 3 swung open, inward without the slightest trace of an alarm going off.

Jonan stepped inside without a hitch.

Needless to say, this latest development left me somewhat confused.

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