REWIRE, The Gold Stone Girl, book 3, Prologue - Holometabolous

I am soup. Not consomme´, or broth, or even bisque. I’m the texture of things that have been boiled down into each other, thickened by evaporation into a potage. A brew that carries the flavor of the old me into something new. My body died. It was attacked by the same sort of juices my stomach uses to digest food. It would not be far wrong to say that I ate myself from the inside out in a process called histolysis. Not all of my original tissue was destroyed. Some of the old me will pass on to my new self. Though not much.                                                                                                                        

In insects there are collections of special formative cells which lie dormant, cells which have played no part in the insects larval life. I have them too. These groups are called imaginal buds or histoblasts. Maybe they’re the source of my dreams. The histoblasts supervise the building of the new body I must make out of this soup, or die in the attempt. It’s the same biochemical process that turns insect food into body parts. This rebuilding process is called histogenesis. I have no idea how I know these things, but I do. 

When the change starts I know that something is seriously wrong and I also know that I have no way to stop it from happening. A hook covered appendage, a cremaster, pushes itself out of the skin on the back of my spine like Bourko’s arm, but dark spindly and spiny. I’m screaming. It’s as if an alien were trying to get out of me and it’s succeeding. The insect arm embeds itself into a glue-pad of fine silk, which it secretes onto the rock ceiling without asking my permission or needing it. Then I’m dangling by the alien arm attached to my back, my feet kicking.                                                               

Maybe I’m an alien like Bourko.   

I have a second to process the situation, the women staring at me hanging from an arm I didn’t know I had, before Reggie inflates like a balloon around me. The same way she protected me from the ball of flames that time we killed. This time all of my epidermis goes with her, like a snake shedding its skin. Only I don’t have another set of scales underneath. It’s gross. I’m like something found under a rock, something slimy with pulsing veins. I’m teeth chattering cold and scalding hot all at once and I’m moaning.  
Reggie seals the larval me up inside her and then I disintegrate. My gastric juices are turning me into soup. Why was I worried about being eaten alive by the Night Mare when in the end I do it to myself? Suffice it to say that I am liquid. Except for these tiny discs made up of embryonic matter floating on top of the me-soup.
The discs suddenly go into overdrive consuming nutrients from the soup. The tiny discs have divided many times growing and proliferating at breakneck speed. I can feel it happening. It’s not totally uncomfortable. I’m getting used to it. I’m becoming something new. How long it will take and what I will be are unanswered questions.                                                                                                                    
 It’s me making all of this happen. I know that. The me that’s thinking these thoughts. That me has to figure out how to accomplish the rest of this process. I’m not sure what that means but I feel hopeful. I wonder if soup can hope? If so, I hope that this is a safe place for what’s happening to me because soup can’t stand and fight. Soup can’t even run away to fight another day.

Now I understand why no one wanted to explain this change to me. What could they have said but, you’re going to be soup? Who would have believed it? Certainly not me.