"—What should I do?" Lark said, though, by the time the words were out of her mouth, she—not to mention Nina and I—were in the Vyx Network's labyrinth. To my relief, the walls had the same, vitreous, emerald look they'd had when and where Suisei had gone AWOL.

We stood in the middle of a corridor, and very much human. I was in my usual medical outfit; Nina had a vest and denim jeans combo that positively screamed "butch", while Lark was rocking a pink tube-wrap dress.

Basically, the mood was, "Girls' night out," and I was the third wheel, a role I'd played since time immemorial.

There was a portal in the wall only a couple of yards down from us. Seeing it, I sighed in relief.

"Thank goodness."

It was the very same portal Suisei had leapt into when I was last here, and I knew it because the high-tech alien buckler that fired those exploding spikes—a shield Suisei had been wielding the last time I saw him—rested on the floor, tilted against the wall right beside the portal, exactly as he'd left it.

Lark's eyes widened in shock as she realized where she was.

"Oh shit." She did a double take. "Is this…?"

I moved my glasses down and pinched the edge of my nose. "Yes," I sighed, "this is the Vyx Network."

And then things took a turn for the awkward.

"Does Lark have to be here?" Nina said, giving Lark a cross-armed glare.

The singer returned the gesture in kind. "I don't like your tone, little missy."

I had a bad feeling about this.

I looked both of them in the eyes. "Is there a problem⁠ I should be aware of?"

Nina tilted her head in Lark's direction and grumbled. "Dudes shouldn't dress up as women."

I muttered a curse beneath my breath. "Oh pumpernickel..."

Bending forward, Lark pointed at herself with vim. "For your information, this body you see that Dr. Howle gave me is 100% woman. Nobody's dressing up as anything they're not."

"That just makes it worse," Nina said, with a roll of her eyes, at which Lark sputtered in indignation.

I let out a very audible groan. "I don't have time for this⁠!" I rubbed my face, and then repeated my words for emphasis: "I don't have time for this…"

"Well, if Little Miss Bigot has a problem," Lark said, "I'll be happy to leave. Just send me back to your body, Dr. Howle."

I fretted and whimpered. I shook my head. "It's not that simple." I glanced at the portal down the hallway. "We're in the middle of the Network. To the extent that I understand it, I can only return to my body if I get booted out, or if we're in the section of the Network corresponding to the Vyx ship I melded with, and, unfortunately, we're nowhere near that part of the Network."

"Why the hell not?" Lark asked.

I pointed at the portal. "I was aiming for that portal!"

"Can't you just dip out, send me back, and then jump back in?" Lark asked.

"I don't know!" I said, stepping forward, shaking my arms. "I don't want to risk—"

From the distance, there came a sound of crashing glass.

"—Fudge! The AVUs are coming!"

And just like that, my purely imaginary heart rate spiked.

"What does that mean?" Lark asked.

"It means there's no time!" I ran to the portal. "C'mon, let's go!"

Lark and Nina quickly followed behind me. I waved Lark and Nina in, grabbed the explodey-spike shield, and then jumped in.

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Nothing—not even being turned into a wyrm—could have prepared me for what lay on the other side.

The next thing I knew, everything was wrong, and whatever wrongness you're imagining, it isn't half as wrong as what I felt.

It was a sensory barrage, pure and simple. There was also a great deal of yelling and flailing about, which only made things worse.

I was on my belly in a shallow, lukewarm puddle. I also seemed to have two bellies. Of everything that I could have focused on, the sensation of the fluid lapping at my underside and the tips of my lower limbs did the best job of catching my attention.

Of all the bodily senses, in many ways, touch is the most immediate. In humans, vertebrates, and anything reminiscent of a vertebrate, the body's sense of touch tends to dovetail with its proprioceptive faculties. More than just providing a means to detect and discern our immediate surroundings, it furnishes us with a constant awareness of how our bodies' various structural pieces fit together. For human(oid)s, that meant having your legs down below, your arms at the sides, your torso in the middle, and your head above your neck and shoulders, where it ideally belonged.

I was not currently feeling anything remotely like that. Having spent a good deal of time as a variety of different entities, I knew from experience just how far my current form was from the one I'd been born with.

As I lay there, dazed and confused, fumbling to push myself up from the puddle and the silty earth beneath it, I realized I could taste the puddle. And my body was the mouth. Specifically, way in the back, at the end of a dangly bit, and also at the ends of my limbs, though not as intensely as at the end of the aforementioned dangly bit.

Fricassee me, I think I had eight limbs. Maybe nine. You would have thought that would have come with too many toes, but no.

Things flexed about, scissor-like. Short things. Pincered Vs.

Scratch that: I did have fingers and toes: they were like pincered Vs, and studded the tips of my wiry, jointed limbs like something you might find on a spider or a fly. I tasted the puddle where my legs' ends touched it. The sense of taste came from the point of contact, with just a hint of tanginess, like a glass of water with a drop of lemon juice in it.

Note: throughout all this, I was "seeing" things, but let's not rush.

Flexing a bit more, the dangly bit was at the end of something not unlike a tail. If I had to describe it, it was like a scorpion's tail, stinger included.

Waves of refreshment seeped up from where my body touched the puddle, in a manner not unlike—and yet also completely unlike—how it felt to swallow a drink.

In the process, I noticed I seemed to be breathing from the sides of my body. Insects had holes in their bodies through which they breathed. Spiracles, that's what they were called.

Oh God, had I turned into a bug?

My too-many arms reached for my face.

Fudge.

Nope. Nope nope nope.

I was getting a lot of sensations from my face. I did not like them. They were frighteningly un-facelike. Faces weren't supposed to feel like upside-down umbrellas, with a twitchy bunch of bundled-up sticks—of various lengths—twitching at the center.

I think those were antennae.

The only part that felt even remotely normal was my bow-tie, which had somehow made the journey along with me.

I never was getting rid of it, was I?

Anyhow, taken as a whole, my neck and torso were really the only parts of my body that felt even remotely like what they ought to have felt like. Raising them up, I held them straight, trying to get a look at my surroundings. Doing so revealed a disquieting reality: I had no eyes, and yet, I saw.

The best comparison I had would be to the ear-eyes I'd developed in my wyrm body, but even that hardly did it justice. As a wyrm, I could see the sounds I heard, in addition to seeing the things that I saw. Here, though, there simply was no distinction between sight and sound, and the breakdown went in both directions. And that was just the tip of the sensory iceberg.

I saw in a way that surpassed any notion of color. There were so many different hues, far more than even a wyrm's eyes could detect. The result was that everything blurred together, as if reality had punched a hole in the color saturation ceiling and burst out through the other side, in an entirely new kind of monochrome.

My sound-sight had a grainy quality to it. The static made everything seem to move.

I was in some kind of gully. Its walls were dark silences that rose up to either side of me. A rift of sky was visible between the walls. It was a swirl of colors and textures, and silvery lights crackled in its heights. In places, the silver light leapt across the sky like crooked blood vessels. Somehow, it had a smell to it, both savory and sweet.

Was this what Merritt's synesthesia was like, I wondered? Or perhaps, an autistic's sensory overload?

Then, behind me, I saw two spidery things, along with their screams.

"What's going on?!" Nina yelled.

"What the fuck is this!?" Lark said.

I scuttled back as I turned to face my companions.

Their words were light. It was like a photograph with a long exposure. The light swirled in expanding, fragmenting whorls that rippled forth in a longitudinal pulse. Some of the waves bounced off the gully's walls and went up into the sky, where they got lost in the noise. Others phased through the gully's silt around us, instantly vanishing from view. And, somehow, as I saw them, I heard them, even recognizing them as Nina and Lark's voices.

It was very trippy, as Slick might have said.

More importantly, seeing my companions, I finally realized what we'd become: we'd turned into the mantis creatures I'd first encountered in the Lantor Incursion alongside Kreston.

I did the responsible thing and told them to calm down. As I spoke, I tried not to think about the fact that I did so without a mouth. Oddly, the way that my words spilled from my head in slowly expanding waves felt grounding. It was not unlike the sound-sight of wyrmsong billowing from my snout.

I could hardly believe I was reaching for my wyrmliness for the comfort of something familiar.

So it goes, I suppose.

Like with Nina and Lark, I could recognize my voice, though it sounded grainy and tinny, as if I was speaking through an antique telephone.

I spent a minute looking at my companions and myself, and comparing what I saw. The more I looked, the better sense I got for my own anatomy. Bit by bit, I started to build back my sense of proprioception, even if it was an alien variation on what I was used to.

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