I woke slowly, with the st echoes of vivid dreams dissolving into tatters and drifting away, lost in everyday thought.

  I’d reached the heart of this Quincunx site, I knew that, and I’d solved the puzzle, and there’d been that tiny sun filling me... no wonder I’d passed out.

  How long had I been unconscious, with Serru waiting?

  I twisted around, and pnted both forehooves on the thick rug I was lying on. That at least offered some traction while I heaved the rest of me up all the way to all four hooves. I gave myself a quick patdown, tugging my long tunic back into pce properly where it had bunched up under my arms and across my breasts. I still had the bright blue-trimmed-yellow backpack Serru had given me, resting in pce against my upper back, and it seemed intact; a cursory check on the contents showed no obvious damage.

  The room around me looked much the way it had when I’d arrived, except that the surface of the central table was now empty and smooth.

  With some care on the too-slick marble, I made my way back to the archway with the bead curtain.

  As I approached, the rock tilted again, offering me a downward slope to the passageway out. I gnced back over my shoulder a st time, certain that I couldn’t return.

  That was okay. I was done here, right? I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was something I was forgetting that needed my attention, but it wasn’t here. Probably it was nothing at all, just a bit of anxiety over the irrevocability of leaving here without any clear answers yet.

  I took the rough rocky slope one careful step at a time, with three hooves always securely anchored—I didn’t remember coming in being so dangerous, but maybe it was just adrenaline and anticipation. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I finally stepped back onto the passageway floor, which might have stone beneath but the surface was hard-packed dirt that I could at least get some decent traction against. I had to keep my shoulders hunched and my head bowed to clear the ceiling, and several times had to go lower yet, something else I didn’t recall from my trip inwards, but I was more interested in reaching the open air and finding Serru.

  Outside was much better. I didn’t feel cramped and custrophobic anymore. The world was bathed in the light of all three moons at different phases, the three of them averaging out at a slightly more lic-blue tint than I was used to but not by much, and the sky sparkled with stars. The bird songs were different at night.

  At least I didn’t need to worry about which way to go: the track was right there, unmistakable even by moonlight. Uncomfortable pressure in my bdder prompted me to take several steps away from the path, spread my hind legs farther, and release a considerable volume of liquid onto the ground, before I started out at a walk. Since my stomach informed me that it needed attention as well, I fished a bar of travel food out of my bag to eat while I moved. As my muscles warmed up after an unknown period of inactivity, I accelerated to a brisk trot, enjoying the drumbeat-steady rhythm of my hooves on the road and the breeze against my skin.

  I saw no one as I wound my way back to the pilrs marking the Quincunx site. I even left the track a few times to check down in crevices, just in case my erstwhile patient had made it a short way and colpsed, but he must have made it back to the surface and out of the area. That didn’t make that feeling of having forgotten something important go away, so apparently that wasn’t it. Why couldn’t random little anxieties be more clear about what they wanted?

  I reached the fork in the road, and followed the tter towards the shelter Serru had indicated before.

  Shelters always seemed to have a garden and fountain, based on my limited sample, and this was no exception, but it was more eborate than most. A ring-shaped hedge, of sorts, was broken at four points to allow access to the fountain in the centre, where water fell through a spiralled series of basins. Each quarter of the hedge had a central tree with that yellow-green apple-like fruit, fnked on each side by a trio of red berry bushes, and other pnts grew between the bushes. To one side, several log benches and a round wooden table with simple stools offered a pce to rest without going inside.

  The structure itself was the usual square cob building with rounded corners, with doorways offset to the left to keep wind from blowing straight through. The roof that extended well past the painted walls wasn’t thatch, though—it was metal and parts of it gleamed like gss. I circled it slowly, curious, using my lumina stone to see. The walls were painted to show a full day-cycle: a brilliant sunrise in red and orange and copper, a bright clear day, a vivid sunset in pinks and purples, and a night sky with the triple moons and stars.

  Nearby was a second building, a much smaller rectangle, and it had the standard thatch roof; it had two doors side by side in one long side, each with a sign I didn’t recognize next to it. I didn’t try the doors. It was of less interest to me than the shelter.

  The inside looked pretty much the same as the one we’d stayed in the first night, though we’d avoided them the two nights since to keep from needing to socialize. I just didn’t feel like I could handle that and Serru was sympathetic. It had the same clean ft hard-packed dirt floor, the same kind of half-bath in the corner and a trough with rings, several of those rough bunks. The firepit, however, was off to one side rather than in the middle. The same pair of emergency buttons glowed gently on the wall near the toilet.

  The floor was brightly painted with a swirling spiral design in many colours. It made no sense to me. Looking up, I saw only metal rafters and moonlight through coloured gss panels within the metal.

  There was one tent inside, not far from the firepit. I checked the tter; it had burned down to only a few embers.

  The sky was growing paler, with a hint of pink and gold along the horizon, reminding me of the hexagonal tile puzzle. I was reluctant to wake her so early, and she’d be up soon on her own.

  So I gathered some wood for the fire, though I had to cover quite a lot of ground to do so, and filled my water gourd with fresh water from the fountain. I couldn’t put it on to boil, since I didn’t have anything in my bag that would allow for that, but it was probably just as well since it might boil dry before Serru woke up. Besides, I didn’t have any of the tea she liked for breakfast with berries and bread.

  I spent the time wandering around and gathering pnts and fungus that she’d told me were useful to her. Reaching the ones on the ground, and that was most of them around here, felt oddly difficult: I had to bend one foreleg and drop to my knee, with my other foreleg spyed at an awkward angle. I paused to evaluate, but as far as I could tell, I was intact and healthy. My back wasn’t even compining. I shrugged, put it down to whatever had been nagging in the back of my mind since I woke up, and went on with my collecting, trying not to go too far from the shelter.

  When I heard motion, I finished with the patch I was working on, and returned.

  Serru looked at the pile of wood by the fire, looked around the shelter, and looked at me.

  There was no trace of recognition in her face, though. “Oh, hello.”

  “I didn’t keep you waiting that long, did I?” I asked, confused.

  “I’m sorry? I’m waiting for my friend Nathan. He’s a human man.”

  “Yeah, I’m... wait...”

  Four hooves.

  Breasts.

  Everything looking so small and low—even Serru looked oddly tiny, up close.

  I called up old memories, even not-so-old ones of the moments after I’d woken up in this world to begin with.

  Those memories collided with a deep certainty that I was what I had always been and that my proper form was...

  Was...

  Was a female centaur?

  That wasn’t right!

  I had two legs, with feet, in my favourite work boots! And all the usual male bits around where those legs met! And a ft chest!

  What I had now was an upper body with pleasant curves, though less dramatic than Serru’s, and breasts that were probably rger but I was so much taller that in proportion they were smaller, and when I raised a hand to check, I had long hair that was drawn back into a low tail. My skin was a warm deep amber-gold, not really the colour of a tan, but the hair I pulled forward was icy white. The creamy tunic I was wearing—that was all I was wearing!—contrasted rather nicely, I had to admit, and it had hearts embroidered in a rainbow of colours along the edges. The metal arm-band around one bicep had a red base, the kind of bright strong colour that you got at home only with metals anodized and dyed, and a pattern of small hearts, with one rger gold heart in the centre outlined with pearly white; somehow, it stretched and flexed just enough that it didn’t feel tight.

  From the waist down, I was a horse.

  It was hard to judge height objectively, but at the very least, a very solid horse, body a gold even deeper than my skin but much the same hue, tail the same ice-white as my hair, and I had long feathery tufts of white fur draping down to touch enormous hooves at the ends of powerful-looking legs.

  “What the hell did the Quincunx do to me?”

  Serru tilted her head to one side, visibly uncertain. “Nathan?”

  “Yes. You saved me from a moss critter when we met, and decided to help me, and bought me some things including a medical kit, and we’ve been travelling to the Quincunx because maybe it’s a way home, and we ran... I ran into a zombie you didn’t see.” I looked at my own hands, with their neat pale fingernails, in confusion. “What happened in there? I...” I tried to tell her about the puzzle, but the words stuck in my throat. I couldn’t tell her about the passageway underground, either, or about the self-absorbed jackass I’d run into on the way there. “Damn it! I can’t actually say anything about anything that happened after I left you!”

  “Not entirely a surprise,” Serru said. “The Quincunx might well not leave it to individual discretion to keep its secrets. I assume that you believe you succeeded at... whatever it was... but did not expect this to be the result.”

  “I somehow didn’t notice the result. There were... dreams...” I managed to get that much out, at least.

  There’d been something else in those dreams, though, right?

  “Wait.” Forehead furrowed, I reached back into those dreams.

  All I needed was the intention and a twist of one hand and... there.

  Suddenly, I could see golden images in the air, translucent but perfectly clear, like a heads-up dispy.

  To the left was a sort of wheel or dial. It showed two settings, each marked by a small silhouette, one of a human in white, one of a centaur in yellow.

  In the centre was a rger wheel, with icons all around the outer rim, and there was a small window at the top just big enough to frame one icon at a time.

  To the right I saw a twinned pair of vertical bars. Each had bold markings indicating quarters and fainter ones that might be tenths. The outer one was full of glowing blue, the inner one empty.

  Following something that had been in those dreams, I reached out and turned the centre wheel.

  The icon in the window changed, and text appeared above it in a neat box.

  Light: Create a single point of light, in its basic form bright enough to allow for examining a patient even with little or no other illumination. It will st until you tire or dispel it. Scable.

  I turned the wheel at random.

  Quickheal: Accelerates recovery, prioritizing stabilization. Scable.

  And again.

  Vitals: Assesses body temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation. Not scable.

  The inner slider was moving as I turned the central wheel, I noticed, though I had no idea why.

  There were several more, as well, but I stopped, my head spinning. When I let both hands fall, the golden dispy vanished.

  “I think I can do magic.”

  “That would not be entirely a surprise, either,” Serru said, “although I would not have predicted that. What kind of magic? What were the gestures you were just making?”

  “I can see a sort of... interface, I guess, with a wheel of abilities to choose from and a couple of other things I don’t understand yet. It’s a little like the way you can see what’s in a bag just by putting a hand inside but more complicated. And from what I can see, it’s healing magic.”

  “That would be appropriate for you. Magic use simply extends skill and passion.” She looked me over measuringly. “That is... quite a drastic physical transformation, though. Are you all right?”

  “Somehow, yes. I’m not having any trouble with completely different motor controls, my coordination is as good as ever, and nothing feels out of pce. So much so that I literally was not aware that anything had changed at all until just now. But I think maybe...” I thought of that one dial on the far left. I brought the golden dispy back up, and reached for that small wheel, switching it from centaur to human. I couldn’t feel anything there, but it acted as though I made contact.

  The world lurched. My stomach turned, and I thought I might throw up.

  I stumbled, and Serru id a hand on my shoulder to steady me.

  She could reach my shoulder easily: we were almost the same height.

  I looked down at myself. Bck boots and pants, blue shirt and grey jacket, all the familiar anatomy underneath as near as I could tell while all clothing stayed in pce.

  “So you can change back and forth?”

  “I guess so?” I tried calling up the dispy again.

  The central wheel was missing. I could see the left-hand one that had human and centaur on it, and what I thought was the outermost bar on the right, the blue glow of which was now just a bit below maximum. The dispy wasn’t gold, either, just a bnd white.

  “But it looks like I only get to do magic as a centaur.”

  “There is, I suppose, some logic to that. The Quincunx gave you what I suppose you could consider an entirely new role and life that you can make use of when you choose.”

  “I don’t want a new life, I want to get back to my old one!”

  “I know. But possibly it will help with achieving that goal. If you wish to complete the Quincunx, we have only begun, and the next is still several days away.”

  I sighed. “Yeah. You’re probably making sense. We just don’t know enough yet about the whole process or how it works. I guess the option exists of just abandoning the whole idea and settling down somewhere to try to make a living helping people, but I would still rather get home.”

  Serru nodded. “Then we’ll continue to pursue that goal. Since you’ve thoughtfully provided wood for the fire, shall we fetch some water and have breakfast before we move on?”

  “I got water too, out at the fountain.” I pulled out my gourd-fsk and handed it to her. “How long was I gone?”

  She drew out the teapot and poured the water in, while I carefully built up the fire. “Last night was the third night, so you left something over two cycles ago. ”

  “That’s a long time to wait. Thank you.”

  She shrugged and smiled, though she turned a bit pink along her upper cheeks. “I don’t mind. Others stopped here on the second night, a wagoner and his companion taking goods in the other direction. They were friendly enough, and they left in the morning. Otherwise, it was restful, aside from hoping you’d be safe and come back a step closer to home.” She set the metal teapot on the grating.

  “It’s possible I am. I guess I won’t know until I’m done.”