Chapter 7: The Healing
Elizabeth’s room was littered with several strangely-shaped bits of metal, a few pieces of wood, and some laboratory glassware.  Sam had been helping her learn how to transform things, and for the time being, they had been focusing on shapechanging.  Metal was a good place to start because it was naturally malleable, and glass wasn’t too hard since it tended to change shape on its own.  In old houses where the windows are still intact, the panes of glass are thicker at the bottom because the glass has had a hundred years or so to flow.  They were using the wood for advanced work because of all the fine detail in the grain.
“All right,” said Sam, “all you have to do is focus your mind.  You know what it is now, and you know what you want it to be.  Just make it happen.”
Elizabeth stared at the piece of wood she was holding.  It was an ordinary scrap of lumber they had found lying around.  As she stared, the grain slowly began to change shape.  The knot in the center started to twist, almost as if it was in pain.  The twisting got worse and worse, and then all of the twists straightened out and the grain became smooth and straight, as if the knot had never been there.
“Good, very good,” said Sam.
“Well, I’ve definitely got a career waiting for me in furniture,” said Elizabeth.
“Actually, it can come in very handy to change detailed patterns like that.  Some of SORM’s best shapeshifters can change a person’s appearance down to the fingerprints, and they all started with wood.”
“Cool.  What kinds of things can they do to themselves?”
“All kinds of things.  They can turn into animals, grow or shrink themselves, grow extra arms, whatever might prove useful.”
“How useful is it really to grow an extra arm?”
“It’s good for untying tricky knots, especially when your other arms are what’s tied together.”
“Can they turn into other things, like statues?”
“I think some of them can.  It’s tricky, though.  You have to learn how to move your consciousness outside of yourself.  Otherwise you don’t have any idea of what’s going on around you or how much time is passing.  You might want to hide out for an hour, and when you wake up, it’s two hundred years later.”
“How easy is that to learn how to do, to move your consciousness like that?”
“Not too hard.  It’s a meditative trick.  Lots of people have figured out how to do it on their own.  A lot of the stage magicians that can actually do some things start out that way.  That’s why they never just ask you to think of a card.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“All right, now that you’ve got how to change a shape, we can move on to changing substance.”
“You mean like changing lead to gold?”
“Sure.  Didn’t you ever wonder why we use paper money now?  Okay, pick up one of the pieces we were working with.”  She picked up one of the glass flasks.  “Okay, what did you pick up?”
“Can’t you tell?  I mean, I’m looking right at it.”
“I’ve been trying not to read people’s minds as often.  It makes it easier to hold a conversation when I’m not completing your sentences for you.”
“Oh.  It’s one of the lab flasks.”
“All right.  This works a lot like changing the grain of wood, except now you’re changing the atoms.  All you have to do is get rid of a few protons and change some bonds around, right?  We’ll start with an easy one: quartz.  Glass is nothing but quartz melted down and congealed.  Visualize the bonds holding the glass together, and reorder them.”
Elizabeth stared at the flask.  She remembered enough college chemistry to know what glass more or less looked like at the molecular level.  It was like a sloppy crystal, like a mutated snowflake.  She imagined the silicon and oxygen atoms in the glass organizing themselves into regular patterns, and the feel of the flask changed in her hand.  It was no longer the smooth feel of blown glass.  She could feel faint edges on every surface, the contour lines that happen when a lot of triangles and squares try to look like a circle.  When it felt like the flask didn’t want to change anymore, she handed the flask to Sam.  The walls of the flask sparkled.  Sam felt the surface of the flask and tapped it with his fingernail, hearing the sound.
“Excellent.  Very well done.  Now change the quartz into steel.”
She took the flask back and concentrated again.  This time, the job was less about connections and more about plain transmutation.  Steel was a mixture of iron and carbon, with a few other ones possibly thrown in.  And the only difference between silicon and iron was the size of the atom.  Well, she had plenty of practice at changing the shape of things, including making them a little bit bigger.  This shouldn’t be a problem.
As she stretched the silicon into iron and squeezed the oxygen into carbon, she could feel the structure of the flask changing on its own.  The regular crystal lattice of the quartz was loosening a little into the softer, metallic lattice of the steel.  Finally, as an added touch, she stretched some of the extra carbon into chromium and handed the flask over.
Sam gave it a feel.  He looked surprised.  “I’m impressed, Elizabeth.  This feels like stainless steel.  And no deformities, even.”  He turned toward her.  His blindness didn’t hamper his ability to give her an encouraging look.  “Feels like you’re ready to try something serious.  Let’s see if you can alter your own shape now.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” she said.  “I’ve already done that.  It was the first thing I did.”
“Really?  What did you do?”
“I was looking in the mirror, and I was thinking about my figure, and all of a sudden, my waist got thinner and my bust size increased a little.”
Sam got a bit of an awkward look on his face.  “Wow.  And on your first time, too.  Most people need serious emotional reasons to be able to something like that on their first time, like a life or death situation.  Do you remember what was going through your mind at the time?”
“Well, I . . . .”  Elizabeth hesitated.  She remembered exactly what had been going through her mind at the time.  She had been watching Sam during his workout, and certain Feelings had starting welling up, and she had felt a desire to look more attractive.
Sam could tell she was hesitant even without listening to her mind, so he decided to take a little peek at what she was so hesitant about.  He sensed feelings of nervousness, and then he saw a few deep, deep red feelings, and he backed off right away.  He was getting a few Feelings of his own.
“Well, all right then,” he said quickly before the situation got any more uncomfortable, “if you did it once, you can do it again.  Let’s find out what you can do.”
Elizabeth looked in her mirror again and focused on making some change to her body.  She settled for hair color at the moment.  That seemed simple enough.  She concentrated, but she didn’t get the same feeling of control that she felt when she was working with the flask.  “I don’t get it.  I could do it before.  Why isn’t this working?”
They thought for a moment, then Sam spoke up.  “Oh, of course.  It’s obvious.  When you were changing the flask, you were able to hold it in your hand.  It was a separate thing.  It must be a lot harder to do things like that to yourself, because you’re kind of working from a biased viewpoint, as it were.  You need to be able to step outside yourself.”
“Can you teach me that external consciousness thing?”
“No, but Wade might be able to.  Do you want me to get him, or do you want to hold off until tomorrow?”
Elizabeth’s face brightened.  Sam could see a light go on in her mind, even without looking for it.  “Actually, I have an idea that might work.”  She went to her closet and found a pair of short shorts and a halter top.  She then pulled down the waistband of her capris a little on the side and placed her hand on her hip, closing her eyes and visualizing her skin.  She pulled her hand away from herself, and a lump of skin grew out from her hip to meet her hand.  She continued to draw the extra skin outward until it was as wide as her own hips, still attached to her by a thin flap.
With her free hand, she picked up the shorts and held them under the new growth at her side.  She managed to get them hanging between both hands, and then she imagined growth.  The extra skin became heavier and grew down through the shorts until it formed a new pair of legs, anatomically complete in every way.
She let go of the shorts and picked up the top.  She placed her hand on top of the new hips and drew it upward.  The skin on top of the new legs grew a midriff, exactly like her own.  She arranged the halter top in its place above the midriff, and the new body continued to grow, filling out the top and sprouting arms and shoulders to support the straps.  Finally, she gave one last burst of concentration, and on top of the shoulders grew a neck and head.
“Sam?” said Elizabeth.  “Would you help me finish this off?”
Sam was in awe.  She was progressing almost as fast as he had when Kate was helping him.  He reached his hand out to the flap of skin that still joined the two bodies and ran his hand down Elizabeth’s side, severing the connection.  The new Elizabeth stepped away from the original and walked around behind Sam, closing the bedroom door and standing beside herself.
Sam had never seen anything like this before.  From the sounds of their footsteps, he could tell that there were two other pairs of feet in the room, but there was still only one Elizabeth.  It was a weird thing to see for a psychic.
“What’s happening?”
“You said that it would be easier for me to manipulate myself if I could step outside of myself.  I realized that it might also work if I had a second myself to work with.”
“From there,” said Elizabeth, but the other one, “all I had to do was work gradually, using what I already knew.  Since your magical division leaves parts biologically connected, I’m in control of both bodies at once.”
Sam still had his hand on Elizabeth’s hip where the two of her had been connected.  He ran his hand across her abdomen, remembering what she had felt like when he had first met her in that bar in Alexandria.  It felt like ages ago.  He could tell the difference in her figure.  For her first time, she had really done some good work.
As he was noticing this, he also noticed that his hands were shaking.  It had been a very, very long time for him.
Elizabeth, the one wearing shorts, stepped up to him and put her hand on his upper arm.  He reached over and put his hand on hers.  She wrapped her other arm around his neck, and she kissed him.
It started slowly.  They were trying to remain civilized about it.  Gradually, though, it sped up.  The Feelings started to express themselves.  Elizabeth, the one wearing capris, stepped around behind Sam and pulled his long coat off.  His cane went with it.  He wrapped both arms around Elizabeth and pulled her close to him as he hadn’t done for years.  His hands rubbed against her waist, and her newly formed upper half came free.
The Elizabeth that was still in one piece guided Sam to the bed, where they could feel free to let their legs go limp without injuring themselves.  Sam laid back in her lap while her other legs entwined themselves with his and her other upper half remembered what it really felt like to be with a man.
After a few minutes, the kissing had subsided, and Elizabeth felt a tear roll across her arm.  He began to shake gently in her arms, and she held him closer.  She remembered what the others had told her about how Sam had dealt with Kate’s death, how he had bottled himself up and acted as though nothing was wrong.  She had no idea how long it must have been for him since he had held his wife, but she knew that it didn’t matter.  It had been too long.
As her upper half lay across his chest and he lay in her lap, comforted by her arms, all four of them, Elizabeth gently held Sam as he wept.