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had something to hide.
    And if she had to be a boy to do it, so be it.
    In the moonlight she stretched out her hand.
    What would a boy’s hand look like?
    She did not have any male friends—no truly close friends at all beyond Jack. She had had a few casual female friends at their boarding school, of course. Stella was the closest of those, but … Hard to have close friendships when you had an impossible secret. There was her cousin Tam, of course. But she hadn’t seen him for seven years, not since the day she locked away half of herself. No matter. She did not want to look like a fifteen-year-old boy.
    The moonlight picked out one of Jack’s figure studies and Dorie jumped up. Of course. Not these, though—these were recent. Not good to look even remotely like someone she could run into in the next day. She went to her roommate’s bedroom, where figure studies from her time in Varee were pinned to the wall—thanked her stars that Jack was not into modern art, but instead split her time between cartooning and beautifully rendered studies of people. She examined the latter until she found a largish pen-and-ink of a nondescript boy, fine-boned and thin. She studied it, thinking, there it is then. You lengthen the fingers, thicken the wrists …
    In the moonlight her right hand reshaped itself until it had a more manly heft. As Dorie, her nails stayed long and perfectly manicured no matter how she bit and broke them; now she forcibly shortened them back to the finger. She looked at that hand, memorizing it, and then she set about to do the other.
    It was hard, keeping the right hand changed while focusing on the left. She had done this years ago, but it was a tricky mental game, and she had not practiced in nearly a decade. She remembered from experience that if she practiced one particular look, it would begin to get easier to stay in the form without suddenly bursting out. But she did not remember how long it took to get that ease, and she could already feel the mental effort of holding one hand steady while she did the next, like a juggler twirling plates.
    Dorie finished the left hand and looked at them both. Once complete, it was not much more difficult to hold two hands than one. She could recognize the pattern for both, reversed, sitting lightly in her mind. She held on to it as she stripped down to do the arms, the legs. Every inch—yes, every inch—until she came to the face. She stopped and looked in Jack’s cracked mirror as she did that, sharpening the cheekbones, changing the shape of her nose and the thrust of her brow. In an odd way it was like sculpting, like her father used to do, except now she was the clay. She made her face less symmetrical than it usually was, a little rougher. She normally didn’t tan, or burn, but she darkened her skin a shade now to look more outdoorsy. Chopped off her hair and colored it black. She had tried physically cutting her ringlets before, but when they had grown back overnight she had given up on the idea. She had not thought to simply transform them, back long ago when she had had the power. Of course, it was going to take an effort. She could tell. Every nerve strung alive with the balancing act as she looked at the boy in the mirror. Like a string of dominoes—if she let anything flip back to girl it would start a ripple effect; it would all fall down.
    Carefully Dorie walked around the room, feeling her new center of gravity, keeping all her limbs intact. She felt as though she were a thin membrane holding back an ocean. She walked around until she was looking at the mirror again. Was that a boy who people would trust? Who the lab would accept? Was that a boy who could do things?
    A cynical laugh slipped out into the moonlit bedroom. She was a boy —that was enough. They would actually look at her references. They would believe her when she said she could climb trees. They wouldn’t tell her she couldn’t risk her pretty eyes in the field.
    There was a