No! I was supposed to have an entire week.

  Nix stood before her mirror and searched her body up and down for any mutations beyond the feathers. Her hands slid through the plumage, relieved that there was no inklings of a nub yet, but also horrified that all her feathers had come back this quickly.

  Thankfully, it looked like it was only her feathers that had grown in, but that was a poor alleviant to the fact that her feathers had grown in.

  Her hands balled into fists. A bunch of feathers caught in her grasp, and she was so, so tempted to tear them out. To hope that doing so would return her to how she was only a few minutes ago. But she’d already done so once.

  Tearing out feathers hurt.

  Almost more than breaking an arm.

  Well… not actually, but it hurt enough that she couldn’t will herself to tug. Despite how much she disliked her mutations, they were as much a part of her body as her hair or fingernails.

  She just had to ignore the fact that those two things would soon not be a part of her while the feathers would remain.

  How does touching my name hasten the changes?

  Never in her life had she heard of interacting with a name. The closest was evolution, which supposedly gave you options for a direction you wanted to go. But even that wasn’t anything like this.

  Nix had altered her body simply by gazing into her name.

  A name evolution was a leap. A consolidation of your very being that occurred all at once. And it was supposed to be very obvious when you were doing so.

  What Nix had experienced was different. Her names hadn’t been ready to merge into one; they wanted to open up. It was the complete opposite of an evolution. A fragmentation of her curses that only pushed the physical mutations to manifest faster.

  Unless… this was actually the fault of her Feat.

  She wanted to toss such an idea to the skitter-spawn. This achievement was the only part of her that wasn’t cursed. She loved it.

  But she’d never felt her names act the way they did until she’d received this Feat. And when the final description of a name mentioned sight, or see to some variation, it was either expressly literal, or it meant a type of analytical perception. Considering that, it wasn’t a leap to say her Feat gave insight of her own names.

  The problem was… Nix had no way of proving this wasn’t just some strange aspect of cursed names. If it was the Feat, then it would be possible to use it on normal names too… but Nix didn’t have any normal names. She couldn’t dig into anything that wouldn’t make her sprout wings or let her hair decay into mould.

  She still didn’t like to think what those four other limbs would have been. The monsters of the black hole gave some rather worrying hints.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Nix strode across the room and tossed herself in bed. Robe and all. It would be only a few hours before the others began waking, and she really should be getting some rest.

  I can control my mutations.

  It was a startling thought. She didn’t have full control over them — unless the Feat suddenly allowed her to pack her names back together and revert her changes entirely — but she now had some level of will over what happened to her own body.

  Sure, it wasn’t the way she ever wanted to progress, but the very thought that she could influence her mutations was elating. Unlike last time, she wasn’t bound by whatever pace fate wanted to twist her body. If she ever wished to — for some forsaken reason — she could grasp her names and unleash the full brunt of her mutations upon herself.

  It horrified her how exhilarating the thought was.

  This was an entirely new path she could take. Instead of hoping for some lucky name addition or an evolution that will change her fate, she could unpack her cursed names and find what they hid. Find the meaning that not even the onomastician could see.

  While Nix was sure that many of her mutations had been severed or locked away simply because the cultists were cruel, it was true that some provided real weapons to Nix. Her acidic saliva being the prime example. If any of her mutations provided even half the capability to kill or wound as her spit had, then she truly had to consider whether throwing herself into the mutations was really a horrible thing.

  As it was, she had no power of her own. Under the effect of curses since birth, her body was weaker than any other her own age. She had a four-part name, but she was weaker than many single-part kids that had yet received their ceremony. These mutations… they provided an option that she might not be able to avoid. Not if she wanted to ever reach the heights necessary to take on the cults.

  But if she did go down this path, it was no different than painting a target on her back. The cultists would discover her as soon as she could no longer hide the mutations. They might raise her absolute weakness, but relying on her mutations alone to fight the cults was impossible. Her saliva had already proven completely ineffective.

  Still, the very fact that the option was there was a relief on a scale she could hardly believe. Enough to counteract the depression of suddenly growing a plumage.

  A thought occurred to her: does inspecting all her names have the same effect? She’d only touched her new additive, Oth. Would the effect be the same if she tried to open Ine, or even Nix? It was something she would have to test the next time she initiated the ritual.

  She would also need to see if she could unravel Zylth. Even if it didn’t unwind, that didn’t mean the Feat wasn’t the source of analysis. An eye couldn’t see itself without a mirror, after all.

  From the comfort of her bed, she glanced towards Little God, who stared from the corner of the room. It’d been silent ever since her outburst in the bath. Back to how he’d been in years prior. Nix didn’t know why she’d expected it to say something now.

  That whole thing with K’tan and all the questionable reactions going on around him was a far more pressing matter, Nix decided. She needed to figure out what was going on. Dan, and the other kids seemed to know something, so she would need to do what her past self never would have dared, and actually approach them.

  Nix had to stifle the slight fear that rose at such an idea. They were kids. Even if she’d not actually been able to live her life, she still had seven years on any of them. Why would she worry?

  For now, she would focus on what she could do: aim for a name evolution and learn what all the other kids knew. Her cursed names… she simply couldn’t touch them. Not now. Maybe not ever. The one thing that would assure time would repeat was for the cults to discover her mutations. If she didn’t touch them, she had at minimum six months. But if she tempted fate for the promise of some small biological weapons, that period of safety would collapse.

  She was happy to have another path before her, but it wasn’t something she would use. Not while she still had her freedom.

  Today had been a long day. A long, but great day. While not everything was perfect and her future remained uncertain, so much had already changed. And to Nix, that was more than she could have asked for.

  Her fate had already deviated. She just had to make sure that deviation continued. There was still plenty of time.