Even without the benefit of wyrm-level memory, the trip back to the surface was not one I'd soon forget.

I took the stairs. It wasn't a difficult climb—the old metal steps gave me plenty of friction to push off of with my underbelly—but, nonetheless, my progress was still slow.

Unbeknownst to me, I'd taken the scenic route.

There was a wyrm-tree in the stairwell. It was hauntingly beautiful. The wyrm had been mid-air when it had arbified—flying down through the center of the stairwell. Its body had grown longer, with heads branching out from the central trunk and sticking out elsewhere, here and there, breathing out spores. The trunk continued downward, plunging into the ground, where it sent out roots that, even now, were probably prying their way deeper and deeper into the building. The columns of spores drifting down glinted softly in the golden luster of the tree's many eyes.

It was kind of hard not to stare.

I ran one hand over the railing as gently as I could, while bracing myself against the wall with my other arm.

With any luck, Merritt was still on the first floor of the garage. Before I could do anything else, I had to make sure she was okay. I took the exit to the garage once I reached the first basement level.

"What the heck…? I muttered.

The door was wide open, blasted off its hinges by who-knows what.

And the hallways…

Angel's breath…

They were quite a sight.

I got gawked at by the survivors as I slid out onto the hallway; the patients, the soldiers, the healthcare workers. At first, I thought they were staring out of fear, but a look down the hall told a different story.

I wasn't the only person in the world; they were overwhelmed by all that had happened, just like I was.

The hospital's halls were overgrown by fungal wood, much like the hallways in the cursed space where Andalon and I had confronted the fullness of the fungus' darkness. Just from where I was at the moment, there were two wyrm-trees in view, one down the hallway to my right, the other down the hallway to my left. A bonsai master would have approved of the artful sculpture of their branches and trunks. Their roots crawled along the walls and floor, subsuming the bodies of the dead. Bioluminescent prominences grew up from the interwoven corpses, lambent in the dawn's early light.

Almost as startling as the wyrm trees was the mush, to use Ani's word for it. Somehow, Andalon hadn't just arbified the misbehaving wyrms, she'd also caused the fungal creatures to… unflesh. Whatever eldritch biology had been holding the things together had just given up the ghost, leaving piles of mush scattered along the floors. The way some of the mounds were scattered, I could tell that the creatures that had left them must have started falling apart mid-motion. They'd passed their momentum to the threads, lumps, and chunks that they'd become.

It took all my self-control to keep from rushing at the mush piles and flinging myself onto them, or them onto me. It left me feeling like a dog who'd just spied a fresh bowl of his favorite kibble.

If I ever managed to get a pet in this or any other life, I'd never deny them food again.

Every fiber of my being told me that the mush piles would satiate me, and then some. But… I remembered my family, and their plight, and that thought was enough for me to fight the urge.

My time as a doctor was over, and my humanity was getting ready to follow it out the door. But… before I did that, I wanted to be a father one last time. With the battle now over and &alon's arrival immanent (or so I hoped), once I put my affairs in order—once I fulfilled my last promises, and said all my goodbyes—I'd head downtown, for a long-awaited family reunion.

Still, it wouldn't do for me to let myself go hungry. Keeping my appetite in check was in everyone's best interest. So, instead of giving in to the urge to immerse myself in one of the piles, I used my powers to lift up a (human) arm-sized segment of kibble and float it into reach.

It smelled like Paradise.

I shivered with pleasure as I downed it, bite after bite. It was sweet and tangy and chewy, like the best combination of fruit and jerky the imagination could ever conjure. For a sweet-tooth like myself, it was positively divine. My tongue, mouth and throat tickled as my flesh reached out with its many tendrils and cilia and integrated the biomass into my own. The kibble flowed through my neck and chest in rivulets that I could feel. They crawled up the sides of my neck and onto my head and settled in place beneath my ears.

I needed to get to a mirror, stat!

Fortunately, I wasn't far from the garage; the parked cars that hadn't been totally wrecked would provide me with plenty of side-view mirrors in which to gawk at myself.

I made quick time, reaching the entrance to the first level of the garage in about a minute. The glass double doors had been totally destroyed. Their shattered pieces were scattered across the garage's tiled floor in the entrance's vicinity. The fragments tickled and crunched as I slithered past them.

For a moment, I felt terribly dizzy. I nearly swooned.

Was my inner ear being affected?

Eh, I'd find out soon enough.

Slithering up to a half-wrecked car, I ripped off the nearest side-view mirror and held it up to my face.

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Here, I made the mistake of looking at the sides of my head.

"Oh no…" I muttered. "Please… no."

Obviously, it was only a matter of time before I started growing extra eyes. Fully changed wyrms had six, after all, and I was short by four. Even so, knowing that it had to happen didn't make the happening any less unnerving, especially once I realized exactly how this part of my transformation was going to go down.

At this point, my ears were little more than fruit rinds sticking out from the sides of my head. I peeled them off, revealing a single luminous golden orb on each side of my head, surrounded by splotches of violet-black flesh, almost like flower petals. A throbbing in my head left me dizzy and dazed. Fistfuls of synesthesia danced across my senses. I tasted the sound of metal and smelled the color electric.

Things were being… rewired.

Slowly, I brought a finger up to one of the orbs. Faint, ripple-like motions quivered across my second sight. I moved my finger closer.

Closer.

The side of my head twitched with muscles I didn't know I had, and probably hadn't had until a moment ago. A fold of flesh swept down from the orb's top as the same side of my second-sight went dark. Resting my hands against the mirror and bringing my face close, I could only stare in revulsion as I blinked my new eyes' eyelids open and closed. I could do one at a time, or both at once.

On. Off. Off. On.

As crazy as it was to say it, this was not the first time I'd had to contend with having more than one pair of eyeballs. Whenever I dopplegennethed myself without decoupling the different copies, I'd see through all my heads simultaneously. But that wasn't what was happening here.

Opening and closing my second pair of eyes, I discovered they didn't work like I'd expected, especially given my experience with my doppelgenneths. Instead of seeing the world through multiple sets of "windows" at the same time, eyeballs numbers three and four were providing me with an extra layer on top of my usual vision, a lot like my wyrmsight, actually. Though, my wyrmsight, it didn't show me aura and other magical energies.

No: they showed me sound.

I saw sound, and it was everywhere! This layer of sonic vision was made of colors that weren't colors. And even though I saw both layers simultaneously, each one was as clear and distinct as if I was seeing them laid side by side. The new layer was wider than the one I already possessed, though it did have a rather big empty spot in the middle: namely, the space occupied by my head.

Sounds rippled across the hallway like the dappled sunlight at the bottom of a swimming pool.

"Fudge…" I groaned, and the sound bounced off the walls, echoing like waves seeping into sand—and I saw it as much as I heard it. The soughing morning breeze was a gentle vibration on my second layer of vision.

When my ear-eyes were closed, I was pretty much deaf; leaving them half-open, meanwhile, put everything into whisper-mode.

Unfortunately, I could not resist sticking my ear-rinds into my mouth and sucking on them. They melted into the roof of my mouth, dissolving like hard candies, and leaving a pleasant tingling sensation in their wake.

In case of further transformation, I waited several seconds, but nothing seemed to happen.

"Does that mean it's over?" I mumbled, only to immediately close my eyes and sigh in resignation.

No, something had happened.

Up until now, the transformation had spared my voice, but no more. Though it wasn't a big change, and I still sounded almost exactly like myself, my voice now had a noticeable spread of tones behind it, like a couple breathy harmonicas or an auto-tuner that was out of whack. It added a slightly "electronic" inflection to my speech—or, at least, that was what it sounded like to me.

Setting the mirror down on the car's half-melted roof, I slithered toward the Undergreen galleria. With most of the galleria's roof having caved in, the hospital's central courtyard was basically one giant hole, through which I had an unobstructed view of the fronts of the Central Wing, Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics buildings rising up like mountains.

Beast's teeth…

The view was a fever dream made real. Wyrm-trees sprouted from the garage and the galleria's sunken ceiling, their spore-spewing branches groping at the dawn. Some were rooted in the sides of buildings, while others grew in clusters high up in the air, and were linked to the ground by slender trunks that seemed to have dripped down to the ground, like melted candle wax. A breeze was blowing, lifting spore currents over the rooftops.

There were two wyrm trees inside the garage proper. One was near the middle of the level, branched out far and wide, while the other was coiled around a support column, with upper branches that broke through the ceiling and into the ground floor of the General Labs building. I could see GL's hallways through the cracks.

As for the mush piles, the garage held even more than the hospital did. Whole cars were half-drowned in the stuff. The garage's two wyrm trees grew wider as I slithered forward, subsuming fungus kibble from the nearby piles.

The view would have been impressive enough on its own, but my new ear-eyes added another layer of depth to it, literally. I could see the sound as its echoes bounced off the garage's walls and ceilings. Vibrations shivered around the wyrm trees' branches; speech came out of mouths in plumes, like translucent steam.

It was definitely somewhat disorienting to process. Fortunately, after a bit of experimenting, I found I could erase the extra chaos easily enough: I just needed to imagine that I couldn't see them, and—presto!—my hyperphantasia took care of the rest.

Quite useful, that.

I pondered using the same trick to make my voice sound unchanged, but I decided against it. I figured the loss of my voice would be less if I experienced it step by step, instead of mounting a futile effort to deny it through willfully self-induced auditory hallucinations.

Fraught though I was over Andalon's disappearance, the sight of what we—the good wyrms, collectively—had accomplished helped assuage some of my worries. My surroundings were proof of our efforts, and of &alon's incredible power. Even if Andalon herself was currently out of reach, the difference we'd made was on display for all to see.

I guess I was just going to have to do that hardest of all things: wait. Wait for answers from Andalon, I mean. There was no way in heck I was going to leave Pel and the kids waiting.

"I'm coming," I muttered. I let the words fill the air like a prayer. "Just hold on."

Speaking of the "good wyrms", most the transformees who'd fought on our side against the fungus and the silver-eyes had congregated around the big wyrm-tree in the middle of the garage, though a few loners were hanging out in the ruined galleria. I saw a lot of happy transformees, excitedly feasting on all the free food. And from the sounds, you'd have thought we were having a convention for brass players and woodwinds.

I guess the mush piles were like wyrm kibble.

I saw Karl, and Ibrahim, and—

—Angel, I saw Yuth! Yuth! And she wasn't silver-eyed anymore!

"They did it…" I muttered.

I was definitely going to have to ask how they'd managed to pull that off.

But, I didn't see Merritt with them. I was about to slither up and ask when I decided to take another look around and—

"—No way…" I let out a shocked whisper.

&alon be praised!

By some miracle I absolutely didn't deserve, my beloved red L85 Rescue was intact, and totally unharmed. Merritt had coiled up beside it, lying on the tiled floor with her eyes closed.

"Merritt?" I said, and then yelled, "Merritt!" as she lifted her forepart and blinked her eyes open.

We slithered toward each other.

She was okay! Fudge, she was okay!

I don't know what I'd have done if she'd become one of the silver-eyes, or worse, one of the wyrm-trees.

But as I slithered toward her, I realized I had company.

Geoffrey was stirring.

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