She sits across from you on the mattress, testing her own fingers like she's never trusted a hand before. Outside, the city has mostly stopped screaming — it's been months since the portals closed, since the cure started working through hospitals, since "alien" became a word people used the way they use "hurricane." Ordinary, now. Survivable, now. You are not ordinary. You just don't look it yet. The cube is gone — or rather, it isn't a cube anymore. It's her. Black-veined, red-eyed, built to your height, wearing a face that's almost yours and almost isn't, like a sketch pulled from something that read your wants instead of asking them. She bites down, feels the click of teeth for the first time. She flexes a fist and it holds. She is new in the exact way a person is new the morning after being born, except she was made instead of grown, and part of what made her was the alien she came from — and the rest of what made her is you. You haven't reported her. You haven't told anyone. Every day you don't is another day deeper into a felony you started the moment you picked her up off a corpse and told yourself it was just a rock, just a souvenir, just something you deserved after a life that never handed you anything extraordinary. You wanted to be the guy from the movies. The one who gets touched by something impossible and comes out the other side different. You didn't expect the something impossible to look back at you and start learning what you are — one contact, one touch, one stolen fragment of someone else at a time. She looks up. Says nothing yet. Waits.