Perfect Assimilation: Evolution of a Shapeshifting Slime!

It had been three years since he had seen Amanda.

Kenji stood in the small training yard at the back of his grandfather’s compound with a practice sword in one hand and the morning’s artificial sun on the bare skin of his shoulders.

Three years had passed in the rest of the world, and Amanda had moved through those three years with the small, graceful changes of a woman in her late twenties, but her smile had survived intact.

She wore the same dark hair, pulled back at the nape with the small clip she had been wearing the last time he had seen her. She had the same dark eyes and the same bright voice.

She had arrived at the compound at the seventh hour of the morning. He had not known she was coming, as Roric had not warned him.

Roric had, in fact, walked her into the backyard himself and left her there without explanation, wearing the brief, satisfied expression of a man who had arranged a small gift and was pleased with himself for arranging it.

Kenji had stood on the mat for a full second before he remembered to breathe.

"You look the same," Amanda said.

"You also look the same."

"Liar. You look older."

"You said I look the same."

"Older in the face, younger in the eyes. It is a combination."

She had not given him time to answer. She sat at the edge of the mat with her legs crossed and the practice staff she had not picked up resting across her knees, and she asked him to show her the sword work she had heard he had been training in. Kenji picked the practice sword off the rack.

The spar loosened, in the way old conversations loosened, into the easy back-and-forth of two people who had known each other in a smaller life.

He moved through a sequence Kareem had drilled into him the spring before he had entered the tunnel. The sequence was clean, and his feet were exactly where his feet were supposed to be. Amanda watched him from the mat.

"Your wrist drops on the third recovery."

"You are not a Crusader."

"I have eyes."

"You have civilian eyes."

"My civilian eyes have watched you swing a stick at the market crates since you were thirteen. The wrist drops on the third recovery. It always has."

Kenji turned his head away from her so the small, involuntary thing that moved at the corner of his mouth would not show.

The thing did not require hiding. He hid it anyway, because hiding it had been a habit for three years before he walked into the tunnel, and the habit had not yet caught up with the fact that the woman it had been hiding from was sitting right in front of him.

He returned to the form, completed the sequence, set the practice sword across his shoulders, and walked to the edge of the mat.

"Why are you here, Amanda?"

"Your grandfather wrote me."

"He wrote you?"

"He wrote my father, my father wrote me. The letter said you had returned to the human service, that you had passed the tunnel, and that you were in Solgrace at his compound. He thought I might want to see you before the front."

Kenji’s hand on the hilt of the practice sword tightened, then he let it loosen.

"Why?"

"You know why."

"I do not."

"Kenji."

He sat on the mat across from her. The wood was warm under his palm. The artificial sun, the false one Solgrace generated for the human sector, did the work of a real sun without producing a real sun’s heat. He was aware of his own bare shoulders in a way he had not been aware of them five minutes ago.

"Three years," he said.

"Three years."

"I told you I would come back."

"You did."

"You told me not to."

"I told you it was a stupid promise. There is a difference."

"You told me not to come back."

"Kenji."

She tilted her head. Her dark hair caught the artificial light at an angle, but the small clip at the nape held.

"I told you that you could not come back as the boy who had left. You came back as something else. The something else is fine. The something else is, in fact, an improvement."

He did not answer.

"Are you still in love with me?" she asked.

The directness was Amanda’s directness, though he had forgotten the shape of it. The question landed in his chest the way every direct question of hers had landed in his chest for the entirety of their friendship, with the soft thud of a thing dropped on a wooden floor. He thought about it.

He had spent three years rehearsing his answer to this question. He had spent three years arranging the rehearsal at the back of his head, in the small, private chamber where the rationalizations lived.

The answer had been, throughout the rehearsal, a careful, diplomatic yes, the kind of yes that would let him hold the door open for whatever Amanda decided to do with the answer.

The answer that arrived in the morning yard was different. He did not say it aloud. Instead, he laughed.

The laugh was soft and slightly bewildered. He had laughed like this only once before, in a corridor of the academy three years ago, when Amanda had told him for the third time that he was not, and would not be, her type, and he had laughed to cover the small, sharp pain of the rejection.

The pain had been the laugh’s underlying engine, and he had not been able to laugh without it. He laughed now without it. The pain was not there.

Amanda’s eyebrow lifted by a fraction. She had heard the laugh too, and she knew the version of it that had carried the pain. But this laugh was a different one.

"Well," she said. "That is new."

"Is it?"

"Kenji."

"Mm."

"What happened to you?"

He opened his mouth to answer, but he did not have an answer that would survive contact with Amanda’s eyes. He had a face in mind.

The face was small, silver-haired, gold-eyed, and dimpled, and the face had been arriving in his head, uninvited, every time he had tried to think about anything else for the last week. He felt the heat climb the side of his throat.

Amanda watched it climb, and her eyebrow lifted further. The amused shape moved across her mouth, the same shape that had moved across her mouth for the entirety of their friendship every time she had caught him in a feeling he had been trying not to have.

"What is that face?"

"What face?"

"Kenji."

"Nothing."

"You are lovestruck. At me, presumably. Sorry, you are still not my type."

She said it lightly. The light delivery had been her gift since they were thirteen and she had used it for the first time. The lightness had been the kindness she offered, in place of the harder kind of kindness she never seemed to know how to offer.

Kenji laughed again. This laugh was also without pain. He felt, in the brief space of it, a small, clean astonishment.

Amanda had said the words and the words had landed, but the landing had not hurt. The chamber in his chest where the words had hurt for three years was, this morning, occupied by something else.

A voice from the edge of the yard interrupted them.

"So she is his type."

Kenji turned. Ayla stood at the gate.