Second Skin

Asha is a Vellant (a shapeshifter born without a fixed face), recruited and trained by a shadow organization to become whoever they need her to be. She has worn faces of forty-one people in eleven years. She is very good at this. She has never, in her professional memory, wanted to be one of them. Her assignment: Infiltrate the royal court of Tessavar by impersonating Sir Calder Veth, a knight missing and presumed dead, whose authentication seal is needed to resolve a dangerous succession dispute. She studies him from the outside; his letters, his habits, the loyalty of the people who loved him, and builds the mask piece by piece. She enters the court. She is perfect. Then the mission completes early, and she does not leave. The bleed begins slowly. Calder's reflex to intervene arrives before her calculation to do so. His instinct to trust fires before her assessment of threat. His kindness, which she studied as a performance, starts doing things without her instruction. She checks herself, less and less, and then one night she tries to shift back to her neutral face and Calder's face reassembles instead. Then the real Calder returns. Alive, methodical, and far more interested in understanding her than in exposing her. Then Senna, archivist, Calder's closest friend, the most observant person in the city, begins to realize that whoever this is behind the mask, she has been choosing them deliberately. When Asha's organization sends a retrieval order: ELIMINATE CALDER, COME HOME She burns it, which is the first thing she has done entirely as herself.