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Bang.
"Doctor."
"Hmm."
Ren was in the middle of eating cup noodles at the reception desk when Lucy came through the door. He had one hand raised in acknowledgment without looking up.
Then she put the box down.
"Bang, here!"
Ren looked up and spit the mouthful of noodles across the desk.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT."
The box sat on the reception desk. Dozens of heads looked up at him, alive, all of them immediately and unhappily aware of his presence. Several began speaking. A few were screaming before he had finished processing what he was looking at.
"WHERE DID YOU GET THIS, LUCY?"
He looked at her. She had her phone out and was recording him.
"Why are you recording me."
"Revenge, Doctor."
"You're petty," Tara said, from behind Lucy.
"Of course I am. I'm a secretary. This is my work environment."
Ren looked at her. He looked at the box. He looked at the noodles on his desk.
He sighed and set the cup down.
"Lucy. I required human heads and patches of skin. I didn't specify live ones."
"It's what we have. We make do." Lucy tucked her phone away. "They're all criminals, so you don't have to feel bad about it."
"Ah. Sure."
"I'll leave you to it." Lucy took one step toward the door.
"You should stay," Ren said. "It'll be more interesting."
Lucy was already gone. The door swung shut behind her at speed.
"Right," Ren said. He picked up the box. "Let's begin, Tara."
. . .
Tara lay on the operating table. The ceiling mirror was already in place, that large flat rectangle of glass mounted at the angle that gave the patient a full view of what was happening to them. Ren had attached it before calling her in.
"What's the mirror for?" Tara asked.
"For you to see what's happening."
"What."
"It helps with the integration. Awareness during the procedure improves the rate of acceptance." He took out the Awakened Anesthesia syringe. "Hold still."
The needle found her neck. The paralysis spread in three seconds, everything from the shoulders down locking into place, her body still and cooperative, her mind entirely present.
In the ceiling mirror, she could see herself. She could also see the box, which Ren had placed on the side table, its occupants still audible.
"WHAT IS HE PLANNING TO DO WITH US?" one head said.
"I DON'T KNOW AND I DON'T WANT TO KNOW."
"SOMEONE IS GOING TO GET SKINNED. I FEEL IT."
Ren opened the box and reached in. He selected a female head, lifted it out, and set it on the preparation tray.
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING TO DO, YOU SICK BASTARD."
He opened the skull with the bone saw, clean and precise along the coronal line, and removed the brain. He set it aside. Then he took the scalpel and began separating the facial skin from the underlying tissue, working around the orbital rims, down the cheeks, along the jaw, peeling the full facial surface free in one piece.
What remained was a skinless head, raw and dense, the musculature visible in the ceiling mirror in complete detail.
"AHHHHHHHHHH," several of the remaining heads said, at different volumes.
Ren set the first face down and reached into the box again.
"NOOOO."
"NOT ME."
"TAKE HIM, TAKE HIM INSTEAD."
"I'M BEGGING YOU."
He took out five more. He worked through them in sequence, each skull opened, brain removed, face peeled free. The preparation tray accumulated its material. The box got louder, then quieter, as the remaining occupants apparently decided that silence was strategically preferable to drawing attention.
Tara watched all of this in the ceiling mirror without the option of looking away.
"Doctor." Her voice was level, which under the circumstances was a significant personal accomplishment. "What are you planning to do with those."
"You'll see in a moment."
"I'm lying here paralyzed watching you peel faces off of people."
"That's accurate."
"Doctor."
"Yes."
"I am a C-rank hunter and an astronaut and I have been to the moon. I am not easily frightened."
"Good."
"I want you to know that right now, in this moment, I am frightened."
"Understandable."
"I'm lying here paralyzed and I cannot close my eyes and you just peeled six faces off and arranged them on a tray and I am being very calm about this and I need you to acknowledge that."
"I acknowledge it," Ren said. "You're doing very well."
"THANK YOU."
One of the heads in the box said, quietly: "She's doing better than I did."
"I screamed for the whole first day," another agreed.
Tara looked at the ceiling mirror. She looked at the tray of faces. She looked at Ren, who was setting his instruments out in preparation order with complete focus.
"The operation will take approximately forty minutes," he said. "The screaming is normal."
"Mine or theirs?"
"Both."
Tara looked at the ceiling.
She thought about four months of covering her head with a hat. She thought about the surgeon whose skull had expanded rapidly and permanently. She thought about the document she had signed, which she had read carefully twice.
Well, she thought. I signed it.
. . .
Ren worked quickly.
He made the incision across the top of Tara's skull with the bone saw, clean and straight, and peeled the scalp back. The eyes on her head tracked his instruments in real time, all of them moving independently, none of them looking at the same thing. He removed them from his attention and focused on the anatomy beneath.
He peeled her facial skin free, working the same sequence he had used on the prepared heads. Then he opened the skull plate and lifted the brain clear, intact, the dura unbroken.
Tara screamed. It came at full volume, the upper limit of what the Awakened Anesthesia could hold back.
"ARGHHHHHH."
"Pressure," Ren said. "Not pain."
"THAT IS A LOT OF PRESSURE."
"I know. Almost done with this stage."
He placed Tara's brain into the prepared female skull. The fit was correct. He lifted Tara's facial skin and began stitching it over the new head, working the edges into alignment, suturing along the jaw and orbital rims and hairline until the surface was continuous. The result, when he set it down and looked at it, was a head with Tara's face, sitting above a different skull entirely.
He severed Tara's original head.
The body's vital functions transferred through the graft connection without interruption, held stable by CPR's regeneration field and the system's logic. The new head settled into position. Ren stitched the neck closed.
Tara's eyes opened.
She looked at the ceiling mirror. She looked at her own face, attached to a new head.
"AGHHHHHHHHHH."
"The integration will take a few minutes," Ren said. "What you're feeling is normal."
"HOW IS ANY OF THIS NORMAL."
He did not answer this. He picked up Tara's original head, with its dense covering of Nyarlathotep's eyes all still moving, and carried it into the grafting room.
. . .
He placed the head and the prepared skin patches in the center of the grafting circle.
He formed the hand sign.
"Unform."
The flesh of the head began to dissolve, breaking down from the outside inward, tissue liquefying and spreading across the circle floor. The eyeballs did not dissolve. They sat in the liquid, dozens of them, undisturbed by the process consuming everything else around them.
"Fusion."
The liquid flesh and the skin patches and the floating eyeballs began to move toward each other. They merged without resistance, the components losing their individual shapes as they joined, the mass rotating slowly as it consolidated.
"Condense."
The mass compressed. It pulled inward on itself, drawing tighter, smaller, denser, until it had reduced to a fist-sized sphere sitting in the center of the circle. The surface was dark, with a faint iridescence that moved when the light hit it.
Ren reached into the sphere and extracted one eyeball of Nyarlathotep, clean and intact, and placed it in his inventory.
My compensation, he thought.
He picked up the sphere. It was warm, heavier than its size suggested, and the iridescence moved under his fingers. Inside it, condensed together, were the eyeballs of the blessing, stripped of the physical manifestation that had been making Tara's life impossible.
He carried it back to the operating room.
Tara was still screaming at a reduced volume, steady now, something she had settled into.
Ren took the scalpel, made a single incision on her upper chest near the sternum, and placed the sphere against the tissue below it. One eyeball from the mass, just one, positioned near the heart. He pressed it inward until it was fully seated.
He sutured the incision closed.
"Done," he said.
Tara stopped screaming.
She lay on the table with her new head and her own face looking up at the ceiling mirror. She blinked. Tara's eyes, in a new skull, taking in a new ceiling.
"Am I," she said, carefully, "still me?"
"Yes," Ren said.
She was quiet for a moment.
"Are there still eyes on my head?"
"No. They're inside you now. You'll feel them eventually when the integration completes. They won't show externally."
She looked at the ceiling mirror for a long time.
"It worked," she said.
"Yes."
She closed her eyes.
The grafting room was quiet. In the box on the side table, the remaining heads had gone silent, collectively, without discussion.
After a moment, one of them spoke.
"Can we go home now?"
Ren glanced at the box.
"No," he said.