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The summer after I graduated I would get to be a foreign exchange student. To live in another country, with another family, in another life - the idea had haunted me throughout my somewhat alienated high school career. I was never the tallest, the most attractive, or the most charismatic boy in my grade, and I always dreamed of the chance to try things again somewhere else, if only for a year. Canada had been my first choice of places to go to, of all the nations in the world. I was really into the Supernatural then, and Canada was full of it. Sure, other countries had their own Fey populations, but nowhere else were the Supernatural citizens so many and so varied. I had read that Toronto was almost a quarter Fey! The largest city I had ever been to, Detroit, barely had any Fey at all - just a few goblins too poor to go anywhere better. Supposedly, the United States had once been full of Supernaturals. During the heyday of the automotive revolution Detroit had even had an Elven mayor. But the wars had changed all that. When the U.S. and the Soviet Union had begun throwing curses at one another with no regard for the possibility of mutual annihilation, the Supernaturals fled. They fled the United States and U.S.S.R., of course, but they fled the European countries in between, and the Central American and Southeast Asian nations the superpowers were using as pawns. Like countless mortal boys and girls of seventeen and older avoiding the draft, they went to Canada. The wars had been over, or at least stalemated, for a generation - since the Nixon administration, actually, when that great man finally admitted that the conflict was unwinnable. We had all been rebuilding since then, and we hoped the peace would last, though there were always rumors of Soviet black wizards working in secret, the kind of paranoid James Bond attitude that had started the wars to begin with. Canada, though - Canada was untouched, unspoiled, and wild, thick with wild magic and magical peoples. The Seelie Court and its equivalents from other cultures had acted as a powerful bulwark against the depredations of war, defending their last home against incursions from without. It was only in the last decade, since the Berlin Wall was taken down, that they had begun opening themselves again to trade and tourism. And - cautiously - foreign exchange students. And I would get to be one! My parents had agreed, my grades had been good enough, and I had passed Canada's ethnic awareness tests. I knew a lot more about the Supernaturals than most people my age - more than most adults, actually. I was obsessed. Of course, it had begun with role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, Changeling, and Top Secret, but I had gone beyond that pop culture bullshit, beyond even popular but distorted ethnographic studies like Tolkien's. The material was there, if you cared enough to look into it, but most people prefer the fantasy to the reality. For example, the Orcs: the idea of brutal minions of evil was an evocative one, and they made great villains in fanciful movies like the Indiana Jones trilogy, which had Indy bravely keeping the Holy Grail out of the hands of Hitler's Orcish minions, or even older films like Casablanca. Whatever. Tolkien was nothing but a bigot. Orcs have their bad eggs like anyone else, but they aren't evil by nature any more than Elves are necessarily good - wasn't it an Elven lord that essentially started the first three world wars? In real life, even if Orcs did much of the brute work in the Holocaust, it was Humans giving the orders, Humans raping the prisoners, Humans keeping silent as other Humans disappeared in the streets, and Humans who jeered at the Jews and Gypsies and dissidents in the ghettos. But people don't like to face truths like that. Oh, parable is fine and dandy, but when you're dealing with real people, even ones almost no one sees anymore, that kind of simplistic good and evil mumbo jumbo is horrible. That's how wars start. We have Black History Month, but we never bother doing anything similar for the Fey. Why should we? There aren't enough left to make their votes worth responding to, and that's all politicians care about. So I was pretty passionate about visiting Canada. Canada was the one place on Earth where I could go and see actual Supernaturals living as they once did, probably better than they ever did, in a multicultural society where Humans, Elves, Orcs, Hamadryads, Centaurs, Piskies, Hobs, Valkyries, Dragons and everything else lived as one people. It was everything I ever dreamed of. *** The morning of my departure finally came, and my parents drove me to the Students Abroad office. The medium's name was Judy - she was a tall woman with deep brown eyes. We filled out the final paperwork and I was told who I would be. My heart raced. I would be a Supernatural! A Supernatural, they said, with the ordinary-sounding name of Alex Smith. I would live a year in a Supernatural's body, and the Supernatural would live as me. This was better than I had ever hoped. To not only talk to Fey, but to be one. I smiled broadly, trying not to embarrass myself with how happy I was. Judy had me undress and lay down on the couch in the transmigration room. She began to chant and burn incense and I was told to repeat the name Alex Smith with her. After a time, it was as if the room was flashing on and off like a light switch and then my soul was wrenched from my body... I woke up in an office very similar to the one I had left. I looked up at a bearded Human face, blinking in the bright light. The face smiled. "Hello, Alex," he said. "I'm Joe, your Students' Abroad contact in this country. Welcome to Canada!" I looked down at my new body. My skin was stone gray, and square and blocky as if it had been carved from concrete. Yet it was warm, and obviously flesh. My arms, legs and chest were thin and slight, like a young child's. The light was very bright. "Joe," I said, "Can I ask what I am?" Joe blinked in surprise. "You weren't told?" I shook my head. "I was given three different destinations before they finally put me in this one," I said. "I think this was a last-minute kind of thing. All I know is my name, and that I'm a Supernatural being of some sort." Joe nodded. "Sometimes it's hard finding exchanges. There's still a lot of mistrust between Canada and elsewhere, something Students Abroad is trying to help correct. You're a Trow, Alex. A female Trow, about fourteen years of age." My body felt hot suddenly. A female? I squinted downward - I didn't see any breasts, but I definitely felt different between my legs. I hadn't expected to be a girl - all the previous potential host bodies were male. All the literature they had given me had implied same-sex transmigrations. What was I supposed to think about this? Did it make me gay? Effeminate? I had the same almost sexual thrill that the idea of cross-dressing and sex-changing had always made me feel, the thrill I had always tried to avoid. I took a breath: there's nothing you can do about it now. It was hard enough to find this body. Think. What do you know about Trows? Well, gray skin. They lived underground. The men were supposed to be immortal until their sons came of age. What about the women? Some of them were powerful sorcerers. Didn't they turn to stone in sunlight? They were related to Trolls and dark Elves. "What... what can you tell me about myself?" I asked. Joe nodded patiently. "You're Alex Ann Smith. Your parents are Linda and Jonathan Smith, though your father is dead. You have an older brother, Jake, who works as a legal assistant in Winnepeg. You're starting your first day of high school in a few days. Your pet dog's name is Tiger." "What about Trows? Will I turn to stone in the light?" Joe looked at me as if I had said something extremely stupid. "Of course not - what kind of Fey would choose a form like that? You are more light-sensitive than Humans, but your much greater night-vision makes up for it." Huh? "Wait... Supernaturals choose their forms?" Joe made a disgusted noise. "Americans! Yes, you choose your form. You're really pure magical energy, but the energy takes the form of a solid body that reacts slowly to changes in the local mythic field, and in your own mind. That's why Brownies look so different when they turn Boggart and why the ancient Tuatha were able to dwindle into tiny creatures like Leprechauns. For the Fey, physical form is mostly a matter of custom, and convenience." "Why would anybody choose to be an Orc, then, if they have to face so much prejudice?" "Why should they change millennia of heritage for the sake of bigots? But you're right, in a way - there aren't nearly so many Orcs as there used to be. So many of them have become Goblins or Knockers, for the sake of their own well-being." "What do I eat? How long do I live? Have... have I gone through puberty yet?" "Look, I don't actually know a lot about your specific form. You'll get much better answers from your new mom. Come on, get dressed and I'll take you to meet her." My mind was swimming. I could be anything I wanted! That is, if I learned to control my new body. But why not? I could be a glamorous Elf, or a mighty Giant! Or a Dragon! Even my sex could be changed, probably. Couldn't it? My new clothes were, thankfully, pretty butch. Shorts, oversized T- shirt - only the underwear was strange. Strange in shape, anyway, but fairly basic white cotton. No bra. I looked in the mirror, turning out the light to do so. In the darkness, my new body seemed to glow with a deep luminosity. My face, which seemed broad and plain, though somewhat cute in its way, became beautiful in pitch dark. Everything did. Linda Smith - 'Mom' - was in the waiting room, where my own parents had been in another life. "Hello," she said shyly, a noticeable British accent adding flavor to the word. "Hello," I said, equally shy. "Mom." Her expression grew sad. "You sound so different... hello, new Alex. I hope you're happy here." "Me too," I said, and smiled. "I mean, I'm sure I will. Be, I mean. I'm sure I will be. Happy." During the car ride to my new home, she told me about her daughter's life. "Alex - the old Alex - often felt long periods of depression. There aren't any other Trows in this part of Canada - maybe not anywhere. We were never very common, and so many were killed in the war. She felt like an outcast." My nose wrinkled in confusion. This wasn't like the multicultural Canada I had fantasized about. And it didn't make much sense. "Why should that matter? Couldn't any kind of Fey be a Trow? Or anything else?" My new mother gazed at me with disapproval. "Could be, maybe, but taking on another shape betrays our ancestors. Ethnic pride is very important to the Children of Magic; our traditions are all we have to define us. Without them to keep us stable, we'd dissolve away to nothing." This was a completely different side of things, and maybe it explained the weird stuff I'd read about Supernaturals like an aversion to iron and crosses, or even backwards-turned clothing. They relied on their traditions, no matter how silly they were, to keep themselves solid. Of course, some of them did change - maybe there were rules even for that? I was reluctant to bring it up with Mom - she obviously didn't want to talk about it, and I definitely didn't want any bad blood between us. I felt enough like an intruder already. "So," I said, changing the subject, "Alex - the old Alex - she wanted to escape?" Mom's gray face softened. "Yes. She thought living as a Human among Humans would be easier for her." Poor Alex, I thought. Good luck being me. "Hopefully it will be," I said encouragingly. "In the meantime, I'll treat her life well." *** Flash forward to the first day of school. Mom had me costumed in the improbable peasant's dress with the heavy hooded cloak Trow girls were supposed to wear during the rare times they left their homes under the hill. In the old days, that was almost never - females were rare enough among Trows that men often had to carry off Human women and Trows tend toward seclusion anyway. Of course, we were in Canada now, and Canada had a public school system that the Seelie Court supported. Things that used to lurk under beds their whole lives were now being bundled up and sent to learn with every manner of being. It seemed to me to be hypocritical that I could wear regular clothes when I was out shopping with her or whatever but I had to dress like an outcast from the twelfth century when I was among people my own age, but she had an elaborate justification that defined the local neighborhood as a Trow community - even though it wasn't - but defined the high school as a foreign city. How many of these rules were really necessary? Any of them? I didn't want to dissolve. Maybe when I met other Fey, they could explain things to me. So there I was, on a school bus, my face and long gray hair hidden in a thick cowl. The light in the bus almost blinded me anyway, so I was stumbling around into other kids, and they were swearing at me and calling me names. "Sorry," I said. "So sorry... excuse me! Coming through!" I could surely alter my eyes to make the light a little less intolerable, couldn't I? This was ridiculous. If I bumped into things only half as often, I'd still be a Trow. At least until I could get a pair of sunglasses - Mom wouldn't even let me bring those. "No one can see my face anyway!" I protested, but she was as unyielding as rock. I tried to visualize the sunlight going dimmer. "Light go dim, light go dim," I chanted to myself. "Lightgodim, lightgodim, lightgodimlightgodimlightgodim." Nothing happened. Damn. I felt a seat cautiously and decided that it was probably empty. "Is this seat empty?" I asked. "Hello?" "No," said a young male voice. "I mean, can I sit here?" I tried. "I guess," came the reply. "What's wrong? Can't you see?" "I'm sensitive to light," I explained. "Are you an Orc?" my neighbor asked suspiciously. "A Trow," I said, sitting down. "Like Drizzit?" He was talking about a popular character from a fantasy book. In Canada! "A Trow, not a Drow. Drows aren't anything like they are in those books anyway, unless people are deliberately altering themselves because they're Drizzt wannabes. Trows are kind of like Trolls, but much more Human in appearance." It was more complicated than that, but it would have to do as a simple explanation. "So why the hood? You hideously ugly in there?" "No!" I said, annoyed. "I look fine. It's to protect me from the light, supposedly, though it's really to protect me from the eyes of males. Females are rare and valued in my culture." Shit, that sounded arrogant. "Look, I have no idea what would happen if I took off my hood. Maybe I'll dissolve. Maybe I'll turn to stone. Maybe I'll be fine. Do you have any idea how these things work?" "Only one way to find out," said my seatmate, and he ripped off my hood. "Gaaah!" I screamed, and shielded my face from the light. Think, I told myself. You're in a Trow city. You're in a Trow city. Trowcity trowcitytrowcity. I looked up cautiously through the glare. I didn't seem to be melting or anything. A humanlike face was laughing at me. "Look," I said. "I'm new at this. I'm a foreign exchange student, and..." "Oh," the face said. "Hey, I'm sorry. My name's Hao. What's yours?" "Alex," I said. "Hao, you wouldn't happen to be Supernatural, would you?" "As a matter of fact," he said, "I am." Hao explained that he was a Vietnamese animal spirit. I shuddered to think what his family must have been through - Vietnam, along with Cuba, was one of the first battlefields of the war, and the Supernaturals there were pummeled the longest before the Seelie Court finally airlifted them to Canada. There were lots of Vietnamese refugees in the United States, but of course no Fey. Hao himself was very cheerful, eager to show tricks he could do like turning into a fox. "Not on the bus!" I said, slightly afraid he would bite me or something. My new dog Tiger had done that the first few times I'd tried to pet him, though he seemed to be coming around. "So Hao," I said hesitantly, "What's the deal with all the rules we Supernaturals are stuck with? Which ones can we break?" "Whatever we can," Hao said. "I mean, the real taboos are an essential part of your form. Nucklavees are physically unable to cross fresh water, for instance, even if they wanted to - it's like hitting a wall for them. There are bridges with pools of stagnant water built underneath them for their benefit." "So you mean that if I was really unable to take off my hood, it just wouldn't have come off?" "It would have been part of your head." "You pulled on it! Ow!" "Hey, quit whining. It didn't hurt, did it?" "Yes! You pulled some of my hair too, you fucker!" I hit him. He laughed at me. "So can we change our forms?" I asked him after he calmed down a bit. "Could I become a forest hag, or a Vietnamese animal spirit?" "Sure," Hao said. "But you'd have to obey all the rules of your new form. And there'd be one less Trow in the world, if that bothers you." "Can I invent a form? For example, a breed of Trow with less sensitivity to light and purple hair?" "Nope, sorry. You've got to find an existing legend to latch on to." "Can't I make up a legend?" I asked. "If you make it up, it's not a legend; it's just a story. It needs to affect a lot of minds to be a legend. Hey," he said. "How old are you, anyway? You don't look old enough to be in high school." "Trows age slowly, I'm told. How old do I look?" "Seven," he laughed. "Maybe eight." "Fuck," I said. And I hit him. *** The first day of school was awkward. Lots of squinting, and I really did stand out. Oh, there were lots of kids with stranger features than mine: big-headed Dwarfs and Goblins, bestial Barguests and Yeth hounds, tall Oni and tiny Atomies. And there were some who even had hoods that were actually part of their heads, like the Bluecaps and Redcaps. But they seemed... acclimated in a way I wasn't. It wasn't just the strange currency and unfamiliar music and TV shows. Everyone seemed to know who everyone was and what they were. They were part of the culture, not just the cultures they inherited from their parents, but Canadian culture, that bizarre melting plot of the natural and Supernatural that's been brewing in isolation for the last twenty years. Of course I was a stranger, and so I couldn't expect to learn everything about Canada or even my body. But I had the impression that the old Alex had never done much better. Nobody seemed to know or understand what a Trow was. They kept calling me a Hob or a Duergar. There were two Duergar boys - mischievous Scottish Dwarfs - who kept altering the size of things to trip me up, which was too easy to do with my daysight. I think they may actually have been flirting, which made me uncomfortable. I don't care if I was their height: I was obviously prepubescent, the sick fucks. I mostly sat in the back of the class and tried to stay invisible, something that's not a natural Trow ability (though we blend with stone pretty well). If Hao hadn't come to talk to me every once in a while, I wouldn't have talked to anyone. On the bus ride home, a few bitches and assholes gave me a hard time about my clothes, and made a few harsh remarks about my appearance. "Are you a midget in drag?" a Human girl with silly hair asked me. I snarled and retreated into my cloak, unable to think of a reply. *** Since I was unwilling to confront my mom, I smuggled some normal clothes underneath my traditional ones the next day. When I got to school, I went into the bathroom to change. "Look, it's the Square," said a girl with short black hair and, I think, acne. "Doing a strip tease for us?" "Sick," said a taller girl with brown hair. "She's a lesbian!" "Get over it, cocksucker," I told her. "But don't worry, I'd hump a dog before I went near your filthy cunt." "Sick," said the tall girl, "She said she'd hump a dog! Get the fuck out of here, dyke." She pushed me toward the door, my dress still half- unfastened. With a flash of rage, I pushed back. She slammed against the wall with a sickening thud. I didn't realize how strong Trows were. "Ah!" she screamed. "I think that little gray dyke bitch broke my arm!" I ran, holding up my dress as best I could. People pointed and giggled. They finally found me hiding in a supply closet. I was watching the way the brooms and mops shimmered in the darkness and when they opened the door I hid my face from the light. *** By the second week, I had resolved to learn how to change my form. Life as a Trow was too intolerable, no matter what Mom thought of me. At the very least, maybe I could be a male Trow, and have a certain measure of freedom. Male Trows could dress however they wanted, and they could date girls of other species. I wouldn't have the "lesbian" stigma hanging over me, either - I was shocked at how intolerant Canadians were about that sort of thing. But there had been no gay-friendly sitcoms or queer-rights movements in Canada, not with the Fey as influential as they were. Supernaturals were acutely aware of tradition and traditional gender roles, it seemed. There were occasional rogues like Coyote spirits and shapeshifting Pooka who changed their sexes with regularity, but no one really thought of them as having genders anyway - they got called "it" a lot and no one trusted them. The principal hinted darkly that if any of the rumors about me were true, I would be expelled. What would they think of me if they knew I had a male mind? What would they think if I turned up in school with a completely different body, flaunting tradition and social mores? And how was it even done, anyway? I timidly asked some of the Goblins in my classes if they had ever been Orcs, and I got insulted glares and complete silence. Even Hao seemed uncomfortable with the direction my questions were going, as if it threatened his masculinity because I acted like I wanted some of my own. How the hell was the old Alex adjusting? I wonder if she - if he could teach me anything. He would understand. Students' Abroad didn't encourage communication with your old life, on the grounds that this was supposed to be a completely separate experience. They had had trouble at first with clients who seemed unwilling to put their old cultures behind, living in an almost delusional state. That's why we went exclusively by our new names. Even Mom discouraged it: "You're Alex now. Don't confuse the issue any more than it already is." Mom's a bit of a delusional herself. It was as if, rather than risk feeling sad over her daughter's first extended time away from her, she refused to admit she was gone at all. I hoarded some money together and tried calling my old number from a payphone, but all I got was a message saying the number was no longer in service. I tried several times, with the same result. What had happened? Had we - had they moved? Without telling me? But how could they? I hoped they were all right. So I had to figure things out by myself. I tried visualizing myself as a male Trow. "I'm a male Trow," I said to myself, "Male Trow, maletrow, maletrowmaletrowmaletrow." Nothing happened. What did a male Trow even look like? There were pictures, of course, of my brother and father, but I had never seen them in person. "When's Jake coming to visit?" I asked one day. "He should be here around Exodus Day," Mom told me. "We're going to have a dinner, and watch the parade. Won't he be glad to see you?" "Probably," I said, and went up to my room. I thought about being alone. It wasn't that I was incapable of making friends, but I wasn't supposed to let outsiders into our lair. I had wondered at first about how Mom managed to go to work every day dressed as normally as she did, but of course she was a widow, and entitled to special privileges. Until she remarried, she had almost as much freedom as a man would: she could even invite strangers over, and I'd have to get dressed in my ridiculous Trow girl suit and hide from them until they left. She couldn't date non-Trow, though: only men could do that. "What are you doing Exodus day?" I asked Hao one day. I was talking to him and his friend Stephanie, a Human who had learned to tolerate me. She even lent me her clothes sometimes, not that I could wear them in public. I could wear sunglasses, though, and they were a huge help. I remember that back in the U.S. teachers would discourage me from wearing shades in class, but here they understood. "Just relaxing," said Hao. "Chilling, not doing much of anything. I'll probably play computer games. What are you doing?" "I get to meet my brother. I've never seen him before. I don't even know if he's aware that I'm an exchange student." "You've got to be an exchange student," said Hao. "You're too weird to be anything else." "From what I know about the old Alex, I'm not so sure." "I knew her," said Stephanie. "Kind of. I mean, no one knew her very well, but I honestly haven't noticed much of a difference. You seem more relaxed around boys, though: did you have a boyfriend in the United States?" "No," I said. I didn't say anything else. They looked at me suspiciously, but held their tongues. *** Exodus day came quickly. It was September 10, not too far from Memorial Day in the U.S. Mom and I waited at the airport for Jake's plane to arrive. I was, of course, bundled up in my crap, and sweating like the dogs of Hell. I kept going to the drinking fountain to slurp down water, and then to the bathroom to piss it out again far more than is healthy for anyone's kidneys. At last his plane arrived. Mom was positively aglow with excitement, but I saw him first. I'd seen his picture a hundred times, but never in person. Still, he was unmistakably a Trow, the first I'd ever seen beside Mom and me. He looked young, eighteen or nineteen, but from Mom I knew he was in his thirties. He was around six and a half feet - no, over two meters tall, with slate-gray skin and butch-cut gray hair. He reminded me of a living pillar of rock. We waved. He waved back. "Hey, girls!" he said cheerfully. "Happy Exodus!" "Hey, baby," Mom said fondly, and gave him a hug. "Hi," I said, standing back and waving. "Trying to be cool, are you?" he said. "You're not escaping me, Alex," I got swept up in a massive hug. "Um, did Mom tell you I was planning on becoming a foreign exchange student?" I asked him. "Yeah! Yeah, too bad that didn't work out." Shit. *** I concentrated on Jake. I glared at him. I tried to make my vision eat into his flesh. I tried to see him from the inside out. How had the medium done it? "Make me Jake," I whispered. "Makemejake, makemejake, makejake, makejake, makejakemakejakemakejake." Nothing. So do Supernaturals choose their forms or not? If they do, then I can be less sensitive to light. I can be male. If the legend chooses their forms for them, why don't we turn to stone when we see the sun? Is that how Dad died? Why wouldn't they tell me? And what was Joe gibbering about? Was he just an ignorant Human? *** Stephanie has been trying to get me to try out for the Quiddich team. I swear, the Canadians are obsessed with that sport. "'Cmon," Stephanie said. "You know you're strong. We need people like you on defense." "I'm not much of a jock, Steph." "Bullshit: you've just never given it a chance. Anyway, it'll give you a chance to change out of those clothes." It would do that. But what would I tell Mom I was doing? No! No Quiddich subplot! End this madness now! "You look conflicted," said Stephanie, in her fake English accent. "Would it sweeten the pot if I said that J.K.Rowling would be hosting the opening festivities this year?" "The famous sports writer? Well, ah... no! Absolutely not! You're destroying what little suspension of disbelief the readers have! I mean... fucking Harry Potter Quiddich?" "Yeah," said Stephanie. "You're probably right. What if it were just soccer, with flying balls?" "I guess..." I said uncertainly. Would Canadians call it soccer? "Great! I'll see you at try-outs!" She left before I could protest any more. *** I was in English class when we heard the news. The World Trade Center in New York City had been destroyed by terrorists. The Americans were blaming a rogue Arab hiding in Soviet-held Aghanistan. They were talking war. World War Four. When the year was up, would I have a country, even a body left to go back to? *** Mom assembled Jake and me into the living room. She had an important announcement, she said. Going to mention that I'm not really Alex, are you Mrs. Smith? "Jake, you're doing well. Soon you'll get your degree and be a full- fledged lawyer. Alex, you're growing up so fast. I can't believe you're already fourteen. I wasn't much older than you when I married your father." "God," I said, unthinking. Then I felt a sharp pain in my mouth, like the burn you get from drinking coffee too fast. I keep forgetting that the names and symbols of the Church hurt us. "Sorry," I said. Mom and Jake looked a bit shaken themselves, but they decided not to make an issue of it. "Well," said Mom, "I was actually going to say that it's time to think about getting you engaged, Alex." What?! "Mother!" I shouted, "Can't this wait a year?" She looked at me with sober eyes. "Alex," she said, "This has to be..." "I'm not Alex!" She looked stricken. Jake looked shocked. "I know that," she said at last. "Not the old Alex, anyway. You're not as obedient, nor as unhappy. You have experience that I kept from her, and you're using it to do things she wouldn't do." Jake continued to look shocked. "You mean - the exchange program..." "Something happened there," she admitted. "Was it an exchange of souls? Do we Fey even have souls? Does anyone? Or did they just rearrange your memories? You're exactly like the old Alex in so many ways. You even convinced your brother." Now it was my turn to be shocked. I hadn't considered that possibility. Who am I? Mom continued. "Whatever happened, the future of the exchange program, of the United States itself, is in doubt. We can't count on the future, Alex. We have to act as if whatever was done may not be undone. "A Trow girl needs to be married before she can start ovulating. And - let's face it - we're not very likely to gain any converts, here. We need a breeder." No... "It doesn't have to be right away. The engagement can last several years, at least. But it has to happen soon. What if something happened to Jake?" "Mom... no... incest..." "Forget your stupid Human ethics. Your biology isn't like theirs. Even if it were, you two might be the last two surviving members of our species. You have to marry." Jake was nodding solemnly. I felt like I was drowning. "What... what if I convinced someone else to be a Trow girl?" "Find someone willing to make a lifetime commitment to a race almost no one's ever seen?" "Mom! I've barely seen..." "No, listen to me." She seemed to take in something of the essence of the planet into her body. Shorter than Jake, she seemed a mountain. "I'm not going to lose my entire race because of your childish..." In desperation, I took a wild stab. "The sun does turn Trows to stone, doesn't it?" Mom and Jake blanched. "The form has to follow the legend. The legends say the sun turns us to stone. The Nucklavees have to obey their legends, no matter how much it inconveniences them and everyone else. Our own customs don't matter - it's only the legend. "You told Joe to lie to me about that, didn't you? You didn't want me to know." Nobody said anything. I was on the right track. "We aren't Trows, are we?" Nothing. "What are we?" I looked at my body's mother. She looked at the ground. "Humans," she said. Okay. Wasn't expecting that. But I waited. "We set up a business in the States. We put some ads out. Jake cashed in some favors with some of his connections, and they did enough to make the outfit look legitimate." "You bitch..." "With the clients' willing participation, we could transfer their souls to our bodies. With Human souls, we can stand the light. It still blinds us, but we live." "You filthy whore - what did you do to my - to his parents?" "They're dead," said Jake. I tried to tear him apart with my hands. He effortlessly stuffed me into a trunk. *** The memories came rushing back. All the way back to being born, I remembered all of Alex's life. All of her frightened, lonely years, kept hooded like a hunting falcon to avoid being petrified like her father had been, like all her species had been, one by one, faster than they could reproduce in this new, unfamiliar land. Why had they kept them from me? Because they knew how upset I was. I'd told them I'd never go along with their plan. Soul-stealing... Not soul-switching. Soul-stealing. Fey have no souls to switch. So when they got me my Human soul, they left its memories intact. They used them to bury my own memories, and convince me I was him. To keep me in ignorance, but still functioning. They didn't need my mind, only my womb. And a soul. Once a Trow girl gets engaged, her ovaries start to kick in. She goes through puberty, rapidly becoming fit for breeding. If she never gets married, she never grows up. I remembered everything. Two completely different lifetimes. I started to cry silently in the luminous dark. What next? Find another victim and steal another life for me to remember, now two lives to forget? How many souls can a body of pure magic hold? I still felt a perverse loyalty to the Trows. I wanted to carry on the line. But not with those people. My mother and brother had to die. *** After they let me out of the trunk, I was just as sweet as can be. I gave my brother a big kiss on the lips. I gave my mother a hug. "I'm sorry, Mommy," I said. "Knowing both the Trow and Human worlds now, the world of endless war and the world of friendly darkness, I'll do whatever I can to preserve our race." They were skeptical, but I meant it. No divination they could muster would show otherwise. We set the wedding for six months from then. I set some conditions. I would wear the clothing of a normal Canadian teenager in public in exchange for performing all the appropriate bridal rituals with Mom. I would be an ideal fiance to my husband-to-be if they let me engage in extracurricular activities at school. I wouldn't tip police off about the activities of Students' Abroad if they let me have an equal say about the direction of my life, regardless of my sex. I would allow myself to be almost constantly pregnant if I was allowed to raise my children the way I saw best. Reluctantly, they agreed. *** Trowish bridal rituals are complicated. Mom and I must have sewed thirty wedding dresses together. Then there was the Baptism of Darkness in the cellar. And the Kiss of Flame. And the gynacological frenzy that was the Opening of the Womb. Good God. I don't care how it feels to say that; it's worth it. Holy shit, too. *** I made the Quiddich - I mean, football team. Football, yes: we kick enspelled balls around through the air. They're round and covered in black spots. As Stephanie predicted, I'm good at defense. *** I'm growing taller, too. People are starting to notice. And I'm growing boobs. No one accuses me of being a midget in drag. I'm not in drag, anyway - I dress how I want. *** In the rest of the world, the fighting has begun in earnest. The news says that Detroit has been hit by a blight that strips flesh from bone. Those poor Goblins. *** I enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces. High-school students can do that as an extracurricular activity; the Fey like their warriors trained at a young age. That was the hardest thing to get Jake and Mom to agree to, but I assured them that the wedding was still on. I would be pregnant on schedule, and then I would be on leave indefinitely. In the meantime, they agreed to let me live my life the way I wanted. So I'm training. I figured out the secret of changing my form. It's like Hao said, you've got to know the legends. All of the legends of the race, and then you can become one with them. I've been collecting stories, stories from all the Fey I meet. The army has Orcs in it, even the Uruk-hai who fear not the light of the sun. More people should hear the stories they have to share. But the stories I want are older than Orcs. *** Hao and I have started dating. It's a secretive, surreptitious thing - dark make-out sessions in the utility closet or on the roof at night. Mom fills me full of Trow legends of the birth and history of our race in preparation for the wedding. Afterwards, I hunt down Hao and tell them to him. In return, he tells me the stories of the fox people. They're fascinating, but the stories I want are older than foxes. *** In the school library, in my room with the lights turned out, even in the utility closet - wherever I can get a moment of privacy I fill my notebook with charts and columns of comparison. I'm looking at the oldest parts of all the stories I hear and I'm looking for common elements. I'm tall, now. I'm well over the Human average for a woman. I've got breasts more than worthy of any other fourteen year-old. I've got a social life, friends, activities. I've changed a lot in the past few months. And I'm going to change more. I've almost found enough myths. My Human soul feels a vicious joy. *** They say that once there were Giants roaming the earth. They say that Frost Giants crawled out of the primordial mist. They say that Gaea once spawned monsters in her rage. They say that Tiamat spawned armies of demons to wreck vengence on the gods. They're all wrong. The monsters who lived in the time before time, the ones that nearly destroyed the gods themselves, they were far more horrific than anything Humans can imagine. Only the legends of the Supernaturals come close to the truth, and even they're watered down. Mom, your little girl's growing up. *** They're really starting to notice me, now. The scouts at our soccer games, my superiors in the military, they all know that I'm faster, stronger, better than anyone else. They're all starting to fear me. I continue to play the dutiful future bride at home. Next month is the wedding. We've already rented the hall. But even they don't give me any shit anymore. We play the game my way. Inside me, something is growing. Or hatching. Unfolding. I won't be able to keep it in my skin much longer. *** I stalk the night itself. I eat the stars. I swallow the darkness and leave nothing remaining. The Smiths are naked, defenseless. I swallow the Earth from beneath their feet. They have no power, now, not that they ever had anything that could stand against a Primordial One. Police come to investigate the commotion. I devour them all. It doesn't matter how many come - like that petty young thing Kali, I can swallow an endless amount of blood. I kill, and kill, and kill. I eat everything I have to eat. At last satiated, I coil behind the Moon and go to sleep. *** A return to anything resembling Human consciousness is a long time coming. Has it been years, decades? Memories reemerge: it's only been six months. Six of the most important months in world history. Something wiped out the governments of the Soviet Union and United States. Then, when they reformed, something wiped them out again. And again, until they finally gave up. They found that smaller states survived, when they didn't make war on one another. And so the fourth world war ended in another stalemate. But the Supernaturals are cautiously coming back into the world they abandoned. There have been Fox spirits spotted again in Asia; Orcs defiantly applying for jobs and founding their own companies in Europe. I woke up on a hospital bed. I look down: I'm obscenely pregnant. In legends, the angry sorceress sometimes ends up giving birth to those she swallows. *** Hao has agreed to become a Trow for me. Together we're going to start the race anew. We're not the only ones. There are others like me: disaffected youths who took other forms to escape the cycle of imprisonment and petrification. With our example, they're coming back. There's a new legend circulating among us, the story of the Trow who ate the sun and spat it out again. No one has to fear it anymore. My Human soul is gone. I don't think it could bear to be a Primordial One. I hope it's in a better place. I hope it's joined its original family. I have three children already. I've named them Linda, Jake, and Jonathan. There are more coming. We're going to raise them right. I lay in the darkness and gaze at their tiny bodies and faces. How they glow!