Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

to writhe, I managed to set aside the perfect joy of that moment long enough to let you go.

And then you looked at me. I saw you noticing the scabbing puncture marks on my new forehead, and it was as if I could watch the complexities of understanding move through you, step by step: realizing what was possible, then grasping that I had done it.

“Jackson?”

I couldn’t repress a toothy grin as I shook my new head. “Try again.”

“No,” you said, and repeated. “No, no, no, no.”

In my euphoria, I had not expected you to respond that way.

You stepped back in a shock that startled me. I heard the speed of your breathing; I thought I could hear your heartbeat across the widening gap between us. I watched your feet stumble, your mouth struggle to form words.

Sybil, you were revolted. I was wearing the perfect flesh, a vessel you knew so well, and still I repulsed you. In that moment I realized that it wasn’t my body that had repelled you before, but something inextricably bound up with my soul.

Your fear crept into me like a freezing cold. It snuffed out all my joy and clamped around my heart, and for a moment I felt sicker in Jackson’s body than I had in my hospital bed.

“Get away from me!” you screamed.

I stepped backward into the darkness. My ears rang and roared from the rush of my new blood.

“Get out of here, Luther! Never come back here!”

I turned and ran.

“Never come back!” you screamed.

I loved you, Sybil, and I love you still. Please believe me when I say I worshipped you, and I couldn’t imagine going against your wishes in those days. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t go against them even now.

I have nothing left to show for the year I wore Jackson’s flesh. All my triumph reverted to seething envy. Whatever strength he’d had, others were stronger. However handsome he’d been, his face in the mirror only unsettled me. However perfect his life had appeared through windows, everywhere I went as Jackson found me poor and alone; every new town was full of men who basked in the love of friends and family, wealth and accomplishment, and I watched them just as compulsively. So I befriended them and came to know them, and everything I learned only fed a strange hunger inside me until I could recognize it as the same yearning that had brought me to Jackson’s doorstep that first night.

It’s strange now to remember sloughing off Jackson’s body with such dread and hesitation, now that I never hesitate. I must have spent an hour staring at it, weeping over that empty shell with my latest pair of eyes. I was still so squeamish in those early days. Each new flesh I assumed felt like the last one I would ever need, but none lasted for more than a year before that irresistible hunger took root in me again; each new life satisfied me more fleetingly than the one before it. Eventually I could only admit that that hunger was not my curse. The hunger was me.

By now I have been every kind of man: men of every descent, rich men and laborers, priests and atheists, criminals and policemen, shy men and promiscuous lovers. I have learned countless skills. I’ve taught myself to memorize any mannerism, speak many languages in many accents, forge any proof of identity, and improvise every word I have ever needed to explain the incongruous gaps in my knowledge. I’ve lived flawlessly as more than one hundred different men, and I have been young for seven decades.

Yet I am dying. Again, after all this time, I can feel it. My flesh is perfectly intact—but my mind itself, by some mechanism I do not yet understand, is dying.

Sybil, you can help me. You’re the only one who has ever been able to help me. This is what I focus on as the patterning completes. I open my eyes, inhale deeply into massive new lungs, and recognize myself as the zeta copy.

Epsilon gives me an envious look as he cuts the bonds on my wrists.

“We should have interrogated the vessel further,” two of my copies murmur.

“It didn’t have her location,” I say. None of my copies speak in unison with me, and I realize: in this flesh, I feel fearless and capable. I’m the only one of us bold enough to say what we all already know. “We must find out. Then we must slow the Medusas down somehow. We’ll degrade their ability to follow us.”

“It will be costly,” the delta copy laments. “Some of us might be injured or destroyed.” I feel a momentary pang of pity for that copy of my consciousness, embodied as he is in such a frail vessel.

“This is why we have multiplied ourselves,” a few of us murmur in response.

“In expectation of a need for redundancy,” the gamma copy says. “To withstand danger and allow for more risk-taking.”

“We have no choice,” the alpha agrees. “This is our only chance.”

“This is it,” I remind us all, and hear them echo it in whispers, filling the darkness of the truck bed. I turn to the elderly delta copy and say, “Create a distraction.”

He looks at me, knowing exactly what I’m asking him to do. He exchanges glances with all of us in turn, visibly reluctant, as if he hopes one of us will countermand my order, but no one does. When we all step out into the night, he returns to the driver’s seat. The rest of us arm ourselves with what weapons we have and walk ahead in a line, toward the Medusan camp.

A few of them see us coming. They look up quizzically from their card games or their drinking.

“Bone?” one asks me. “Are you okay? What’s all this?” He squints—as if he knows instinctively that the man he expects to find behind my eyes isn’t there anymore.

Beyond him, a woman with a full