The laundry basket was a dumping ground for odd socks and grass-stained denim until she saw it: a sliver of irridescent teal tucked inside Mark’s favourite jumper. It wasn’t a sequin. It was heavy, hard as a fingernail, and gave off a light odour of sulphur.

She checked Toby first. At five, he was a walking collection of scabs and bruises, but his skin was just skin—no patches of dry, diamond-shaped leather. Mark was next. She ran her hands over his shoulders that evening under the guise of a massage, searching for a rash, an itch, anything to explain the metallic discarded husk. He just sighed, leaning into his wife’s touch, oblivious.

“You’re tense, Jan,” he spoke softly.

Barnaby, their ginger tom, had seen the truth before she’d even admitted the itch. He didn’t look at her face anymore; his yellow eyes were fixed on her throat, tracking the measured, heavy throb of a heart that was beating far too slowly for a human. He’d stopped purring in her vicinity a week ago, as if he’d sensed the house no longer belonged to a person, but to a predator he couldn’t outrun.

It wasn’t until she was alone in the bathroom, the steam twisting around the mirror, that she felt the itch. It started at the base of her backbone—a searing, rhythmic heat. She reached back, her fingers sliding over something cold, sharp, and perfectly smooth.

She wasn’t finding someone else’s mess in the laundry. She was finding her own.

By dinner, the four walls were no longer a shelter; they were a crate. Every corner was a sharp edge, every doorway a narrow pinch. She had a sudden, claustrophobic urge to shatter the windows just to let the heat out, convinced the brick and mortar were shrinking around her expanding ribs.

“You’re barely touching your mash, Jan,” Mark said, pausing with his fork halfway to his mouth. “And you’re flushed. Are you coming down with that bug going round Toby’s school?”

“Just a bit of a turn,” she said, laughter erupting unwanted. She reached up to fan her neck, her skin prickling under the collar of her turtleneck—a garment she’d chosen specifically to hide the ridge she’d felt forming along her clavicle. “Maybe it’s an early midlife crisis. Hot flashes coming on twenty years too soon. Lucky me, eh?”

Her eyes glanced at the dresser, where Toby’s “5 Today!” birthday badge sat propped against a vase. It was a monstrous thing, the size of a dinner plate and coated in obnoxious silver glitter. She caught her image in the metallic foil of the badge; for a split second, her pupils didn’t look round. They looked like vertical slits of molten brass.

Mark started to laugh, but the sound vanished when Barnaby, their ginger tom, let out a low, throaty growl from beneath the sideboard. While she had been busy Googling ‘adult-onset eczema,’ the cat had already begun treating her akin to a forest fire. He didn’t look at the scraps on the floor; his yellow eyes were fixed on El, his spine arched. He wasn’t begging for chicken; he was standing his ground against… against what?

“What’s gotten into him?” Mark frowned. “He’s been skittish all day.”

“He’s just being a grump,” Jan lied. He wasn’t seeing his mistress; he was seeing an intruder. Her own voice sounded different to her ears—deeper, vibrating inside her torso.

Every time she moved, she felt the friction. The scales were no longer falling off; they were bedding in. They were pushing through the dermis, cold and unapologetic. Under the table, she clenched her fists. Her fingernails were sharper, harder, digging into her own palms with a strength that was less like muscle and more like hydraulic pressure.

She looked at Toby, who was busy painting a landscape in gravy, and then at Mark, the man who had known her since she was a “blank slate” orphan with no medical history and an unknown past. They were so human. So fragile.

“I’ll do the washing up,” she said abruptly, standing so quickly her chair scraped harshly against the lino.

She retreated to the safety of the darkened scullery, leaning her brow against the cold windowpane. But the glass didn’t stay cold for long. Her breath hit it, not as a mist, but as a faint, shimmering puff of grey smoke.

She pulled back her sleeve. In the moonlight, the teal scales on her forearm didn’t look like a disease. They looked like armour. She tried to rub them away, to claw at the edges, but the skin didn’t bleed. It simply hummed with an ancient, predatory energy.

The realisation hit her then, more poignant than the fear. This wasn’t a Choice. She had always tried to fit into the soft, calm corners of a domestic world, of that perfect family image, but the “blank page” of her heritage was finally being written upon in a language of fire and flint.

She looked through the doorway at her family—the golden circle of the dining room lamp, the everyday comfort of her husband’s laugh. She was still his wife, still Toby’s mother, but as the heat rose in her throat and the first flicker of an emerald light shone behind her retinas, she knew the metamorphosis was absolute. The woman who sorted the laundry was gone; something much older was taking her place.

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