So we were still caged inside the Ada, with the grainy memory of charcoal coating the back of her throat. She was more isolated than ever and we were chafing at still being flesh, so the only thing left to do was hunt. If we were trapped in a body, then we would do bodily things. We painted the Ada’s mouth and lined her eyes with night, and we went out with As?ghara on a long and relaxed leash. It was easy, as it always was. At the bar, there was a man with eyes like anchors and hair like snakes, and although he was shy there, he held the Ada’s hand when she got out of the taxi and walked with him to the brownstone he lived in. What a gentle strange thing, we thought. We felt large and cruel next to him, As?ghara hiding behind the sweet of the Ada’s face, puzzled by his delicacy. In his apartment, we watched as he moved around his shelves and furniture. He was a craftsman and there were fine things everywhere. The Ada said something that amused him and he took her face in his hands, laughing, and kissed her in a pure and glimmering moment.

In the tightness of his bedroom, As?ghara put our palm against the red houndstooth wall and cried out as he moved in the Ada. The flesh was flesh, and for a little while, we could forget all the hurt, all the weight of over two decades of embodiment destroying us. He was so beautiful.

“You don’t have to be gentle,” As?ghara told him. He looked in our eyes, raised his hand, and hit us hard across the Ada’s face. The impact rattled her jaw, but we didn’t look away; we felt the taste of rain fill our mouth. Ah, he was such a gentle, strange thing, to hurt us so perfectly. In the morning, before his reality descended on him again, he turned his head to the Ada.

“I needed this,” he whispered. “I needed you.”

She had forgotten his name, if she ever knew it, and we never heard from him again. Months later, when the summer was starting and Brooklyn was spilling sunshine, the Ada ran into him at a street festival and he lowered his anchor eyes as he passed. We forgave him easily. After you have let the wilderness in you come out and play, after you have spilled your darkness in front of a stranger, it can be difficult to look at them in the sentience of daylight. Besides, he was only a beautiful blip in the crazed timeline of embodiment—he mattered so much, and yet, not at all.

In the months since we’d been in his bed, the Ada had been to Lagos, to Cape Town and Johannesburg, where As?ghara had taken bodies in backseats and hostel beds and living room floors. We had overreacted and scared the humans, forgotten their names and faces, betrayed some friends and left others. Even all of that was nothing compared to the best thing we’d accomplished, when we laid out the Ada’s body on a surgical table and let a masked man take a knife lavishly to the flesh of her chest, mutilating her better and deeper than we ever could, all the way to righteousness. After such carvings, how could one human matter?

The Ada’s surgery happened the spring after As?ghara’s failed attempt, just five months later. Before then, we used to think of the body as belonging truly to the Ada, as something that we were only guests in, something that the beastself could borrow. But now that we had been spurned from the gates, now that we were sentenced to meat, it was time to accept that this body was ours too. And with Saint Vincent, our little grace, taking the front more than he used to, the body, as it was, was becoming unsatisfactory, too feminine, too reproductive. That form had worked for As?ghara—those breasts with the large, dark areolae and nipples she could lift to her mouth—but we were more than her and we were more than the saint. We were a fine balance, bigger than whatever the namings had made, and we wanted to reflect that, to change the Ada into us. Removing her breasts was only the first step.

You must understand, fertility was a pure and clear abomination to us. It would be unthinkable, unbelievably cruel for us to ever swell so unnaturally, to lactate, to mutate our vessel. Could there be anything more human? The ways of our brothersisters, of ?gbanje, were clear. Do not leave a human lineage, for you did not come from a human lineage. If you have no ancestors, you cannot become an ancestor. We were happy to obey these instructions; we had always ferociously protected the Ada from the blasphemy of having another life grow in her. How many times had As?ghara allowed a wash of sperm into the Ada’s body? Yet each time, we hardened against it and nothing took. We were a miracle like that, a mercy to the Ada.

When Ewan left and As?ghara allowed Saint Vincent to take the Ada’s body and start binding her chest—all of these things were in preparation for a shedding, the skin splitting in long seams. The first time the Ada wore the binder, she turned sideways in a mirror and Saint Vincent laughed out loud in relief, in joy, in the rightness of the absence. The Ada was wearing faded purple jeans, and the soft of her belly swelled out from under the cutting bottom edge of the vest. But she could endure that, even the sharpness around her armpits. The flatness was worth it. The Ada pulled a short-sleeved T-shirt over the vest and ran her hands up and down the mild curve. It felt like armor, like we were bulletproof, like Saint Vincent was being built up in layers of determined fiber. The Ada wore the binder every day and washed it by hand in her small bathroom sink. Once, she made the mistake of putting it in the dryer, weakening the elastic. Saint Vincent suffered with each fraction of looseness she had caused, so she was more careful after that.

Before As?ghara put us in the emergency room, we had been searching for doctors to alter the Ada, to carve our body into something that we could truly call a home. Saachi finally realized, in her panic over the Ada’s suicide attempt, exactly how much of her daughter actually belonged to her, which was to say, not much at all. The Ada was slipping from the human mother to us, to a freedom Saachi didn’t trust. After all, how could she keep the girl safe if the girl wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t obey, if the girl was us? We were grateful that Saachi had at one time cared for the Ada, had kept her alive as a baby and been an excellent guardian as far as she could, but what did she know of graces or beastselves or ugly, unwelcome embodiments or the sacrifices a snake must go through to continue its timeline, the necessity of molting, the graves built of skins? We ignored her as gently as we could—this body was ours, not hers; this girl was ours, not hers, she had to understand where her jurisdiction ended and how pushing further was blasphemy.