Free Web NovelAaron didn't sleep well.
This was, all things considered, not entirely surprising. The mattress was genuinely excellent — soft in the right places, firm where it mattered, the kind of bed that under normal circumstances would have knocked him out within minutes. But his mind refused to cooperate with his body's clear preferences, circling instead around the image of Ariana's face when she'd leaned in close enough for him to see his own reflection doubled in her lenses.
You are going to want to hear what I found.
It wasn't a threat. It hadn't sounded like one, anyway. But it also hadn't sounded like good news, and Ariana's particular flavor of cheerfulness made it genuinely difficult to tell the difference between exciting discovery and mild biological catastrophe until she actually opened her mouth and clarified which one it was.
He'd checked on Alyssa before turning in — found her still in the bucket, fast asleep, floating with the serene contentment of someone who had found her calling in life and intended to pursue it indefinitely. He'd left her there. No point disturbing a happy mushroom.
Sometime around what his internal clock insisted was morning, despite the complete absence of windows or natural light to confirm it, the telephone rang.
Aaron answered before the second ring finished.
"Rise and shine, little brother!" Ariana's voice carried none of the gravity her parting words the night before had implied. If anything, she sounded even more energetic than usual, which Aaron had not believed was physically possible. "Breakfast first, or results first? I personally recommend breakfast. Bad news goes down easier with food in your stomach. Or does it go down worse? I've never actually tested that variable. Want to be my control group?"
"Results first," Aaron said flatly.
"Spoilsport." A pause, the sound of papers shuffling on the other end. "Fine. Get dressed and come to the lab. Same directions as before. Oh, and bring the mushroom girl if she's awake — some of this concerns her too."
Aaron frowned. "Why would it concern Alyssa?"
"You'll see! Or rather, you'll hear, since I'm the one with the clipboard. Hurry up, brother, science doesn't wait around for people to brush their teeth."
The line clicked dead.
Aaron stared at the phone for a moment, then sighed and went to retrieve Alyssa from her bucket, who emerged looking thoroughly offended at having her soak interrupted but brightened considerably at the mention of food being involved somewhere in the itinerary.
The lab door hissed open with the same dramatic, vacuum-sealed gravity as the day before, and Aaron slid through the gap with Alyssa perched on his shoulder this time, her small hands gripping his collar for balance.
Ariana was already waiting, seated at a long metal desk covered in printouts, charts, and what looked like several different colored folders organized with an obsessive precision that didn't match her usual chaotic energy at all. She had a steaming mug in one hand and an expression on her face that Aaron genuinely could not read.
"Sit, sit," she said, gesturing at the chair across from her without looking up from the papers. "This is going to take a minute, and I want you comfortable for it. Well — comfortable enough. There's no good way to deliver some of this."
Aaron sat. Alyssa hopped down from his shoulder onto the desk, peering curiously at the nearest folder with the focused interest of someone who couldn't read a word of it but felt morally obligated to look anyway.
"Should I be worried?" Aaron asked. freēwebnovel.com
"Depends on your definition of worried." Ariana finally set her mug down and pulled the top folder toward her, flipping it open. "Let's start with the boring stuff and work our way up to the interesting stuff. Sound fair?"
"No, but go ahead."
"Excellent attitude." She cleared her throat and adopted, for the first time since Aaron had met her, something that actually resembled professional formality. "Bloodwork first. Your blood density is roughly forty percent higher than baseline human, which tracks with what I observed visually yesterday. Iron content is elevated but not in a way that should be physically possible without causing toxicity — except it isn't causing toxicity, because whatever's carrying that iron isn't behaving like standard hemoglobin."
"In English?"
"Your blood is doing a human's job using something that isn't quite human blood anymore." She flipped a page. "Bone density: roughly sixty percent denser than human average, concentrated most heavily along the shoulder blades, spine, and forearms — which, conveniently, lines up exactly with where a creature would need reinforcement if it intended to, say, support a pair of wings and survive the stress of flight."
Aaron's jaw tightened slightly. He'd suspected as much, but hearing it stated as a clinical fact, written down in someone's careful handwriting, made it land differently.
"The wings," Ariana continued, glancing up at him, "are not fully developed. Based on muscle attachment points and the bone structure I could measure without you murdering me for cutting into your back, I'd estimate they're at roughly thirty percent of mature size. They're growing. Slowly, but growing."
"How slowly?"
"Hard to say with one data point. I'll need a follow-up in a few weeks to chart the rate. But based on the density of mana saturating your tissue—" she flipped another page, tapping it with her pen "—I'd guess faster than you'd expect. Possibly much faster, if you keep doing whatever it is you've been doing that's been accelerating your growth. Fighting, apparently, based on what your girlfriends mentioned."
Aaron said nothing. There wasn't much to say to that.
"Now," Ariana said, setting the folder aside and pulling out a different one — this one a vivid shade of orange that practically demanded attention. "Here's where it gets interesting."
"It wasn't interesting before?"
"That was the boring interesting. This is the actually interesting part." She opened the folder and turned it so Aaron could see the contents — though most of it was diagrams and notations he had no hope of interpreting. "Your eyes. The structural similarities I noted yesterday line up almost perfectly with a known classification, except for one detail that's been bothering me all night."
"Which is?"
"The pigment pattern doesn't match any single known bloodline. It's a hybrid. Layered, almost — like two different inheritances stacked on top of each other rather than blended into one." She leaned forward, and even behind her sunglasses, Aaron could feel the intensity of her focus sharpen. "Brother, I don't think you're the product of a single mutation, bloodline integration, or demonification. I think you're some combination of at least two. Possibly more."
The room went quiet.
Even Alyssa, perched on the desk, had stopped poking at the folder and was looking between the two siblings with the wide-eyed attentiveness of someone who understood that something important was being said, even if the specifics were beyond her.
"That's not possible," Aaron said slowly. "Is it?"
"It's exceedingly rare. I've read about maybe three documented cases in the entire archive of this facility, and all three subjects were—" She stopped herself, visibly reconsidering her next words.
"Were what?"
"Were heavily monitored by people significantly less friendly than me," Ariana said carefully. "Which is exactly why I'm doing everything in my power to keep your name off these papers, brother. What you are is valuable. Scientifically. Strategically. To certain people, dangerously valuable. And I'd rather you stay my annoying little brother than become a line item in someone else's research budget."
Aaron studied her for a long moment, trying to gauge how much of that was genuine concern and how much was Ariana simply protecting her own exclusive access to an interesting specimen. With her, the two motivations seemed to exist in a permanent, tangled knot that he doubted even she could fully separate.
"And Alyssa?" he asked. "Why does this concern her?"
Ariana's expression shifted, and for the first time that morning, something like genuine curiosity replaced the clinical calm.
"Because," she said, turning to look at the small mushroom-capped figure on her desk, "while you were getting your blood drawn yesterday, I ran a secondary scan of the lab itself. Standard procedure, background readings, nothing targeted. And your little friend here registered some readings on my equipment that I was not expecting."
Alyssa straightened, suddenly looking considerably less relaxed than she had a moment ago.
"What readings?" Aaron asked, an edge creeping into his voice.
"Relax, brother, nothing harmful. But the mana signature radiating from her is denser than it should be for a creature her size and species classification. Either she's been exposed to something that's altering her biology, or—" Ariana tapped her pen against her chin, considering "—she's simply been growing faster than mushfolk typically do, and nobody's bothered to document why."
"I grew because Sir Aaron fed me good things!" Alyssa piped up indignantly, clearly unwilling to let her own development be reduced to a mystery without input.
"See, that's the kind of detail I need," Ariana said, immediately swiveling toward her with renewed enthusiasm, pen poised over a fresh page. "Tell me everything. What did he feed you? How often? Did you notice growth before or after specific meals?"
Alyssa, despite her earlier irritation at having her bucket time interrupted, seemed entirely won over by the prospect of being interviewed directly, and launched into an enthusiastic account that Aaron only half-listened to, his mind still caught on the words layered, like two different inheritances stacked on top of each other.
He looked down at his own hands. Ordinary, by appearance. Nothing about them suggested the complexity Ariana had just described sitting underneath the surface.
Whatever he was, he was beginning to suspect even Ariana didn't have the full picture yet.
And that, more than anything else she'd said all morning, was what actually worried him.
