My beautiful sister doesn’t need this ugly mask

One afternoon he set aside his rations--the last sour apple still rough on his tongue--tucked them into his pack, and buried the pack under a snowbank. It would either mold or it wouldn't. He, however, was going to skip supper.

He skipped supper, and breakfast, and lunch, and supper again. He didn't snack on tubers or fruit or his usual selection of mushrooms. His stomach cramped but it was hardly like being cut open. As the days inched on Verso found the hunger remarkably sufferable. It became a meter by which to plan his day, a clock as sure as any built with gears and glass.

The first time a Pelerin of all things near cleaved his arm off, Verso had to admit that maybe this plan could have some downsides. He was a little slower than he should be. As his arms and waist got thinner he wondered if he'd actually be faster and more economical, but it seemed there was a bottom limit to that benefit.

He could have eaten, then. Intellectually, Verso could see the argument for taking up food again. Some energy must be necessary for his muscles to work and his blades to cut.

He knew this, and yet he did not eat. The experiment wasn't finished yet; nothing had been proven. He could go a little longer. Just to see.

After a while, not eating turned into not fighting, and eventually not traveling. He found a little wrecked bus south of Monoco's station set up camp in the lee of its husk. His hands shook when he buttoned his shirt or trousers, and he drank only a few mouthful of water a day. It had been eleven months since he ate the sour apple and spat its seeds into the dirt. It must be a sapling by now. Verso imagined, fancifully, that given enough time he might also become a tree. His sunken stomach could become a hollow for birds to nest in.

Perhaps he would just stop moving altogether some day and his skin would turn gray while his eyes slipped shut. He'd sit like all the rest of the stone bodies, indistinguishable from the expeditioners. Some plucky set of fools would stumble upon his stone corpse and make up a story of his tragic life as a bus passenger. Verso imagined the character he could be to them, and even considered finding materials to fake a journal about it. It would be his little fiction, written down and made real to the legacy of this world. For those who come after, as the new ones liked to say. A fumbling attempt to Paint something of his own.

Verso never finished gathering the material for the journal.

Instead he sat and folded his legs and watched the world slip by him. The first time a Nevrons walked past, unbothered, Verso felt a twist of triumph in his cavern of a belly.

He was invisible, at last.

Hungry, but unseen. Hollow, but unperceived.

His shoulders slumped over the weeks and his head became too heavy to raise on its own. Water was a dream of the past. Verso drank of air and ate of chroma. He sat, and he listed, and finally he fell. He closed his eyes and slipped blissfully, quietly, into nothing.

...

...

...

A gunshot rang out, and the report cut through the fog in his consciousness to sound an equal alarm in his gut. Verso blinked his eyes open and watched, unmoving, as a young woman crawled on her stomach across the prairie grass about ten yards away. She was missing her legs below the knees--poor thing--and the Bruler marching after her would finish the job soon enough.

Verso wondered, idly, if she had anything in her pockets.

Ahh, hunger.

He hadn't felt it in a while, but once he'd woken up it struck back at him like a scorned lover sniffing out an insecurity. He really wanted to eat something.

He closed his eyes.

...

...

...

"Mon ami," crooned a pillowy voice, "You look just like François."

Verso could not open his eyes; too heavy they had become, too crusted over with neglect. His mouth dropped open instead and he rattled a shallow greeting.

"Hello...mon...ami."

I sound like my sister, he thought. The air pushed out of his lungs and up through his teeth, barely making enough force to be heard. She'd find that so funny.

"I think you need a swim swim." Esquie's voice swooped around him, and Verso wanted to protest but he could not find the words.

Not yet, please.

I've almost done it.

"Let's go hoooooooome!" the voice boomed and Verso felt his form swept up, up and away. He cracked one eye at last to see the canvas whooshing beneath him, Esquie's arms wrapped around him like a soft cocoon against all but the wind.

They flew over fields and hilltop, over trees and train tracks. They flew three times around a mountain peak for luck, and finally wafted down into Esquie's nest.

"Here we gooooo!" the giant sang as he dropped his best friend right into the water.

Verso sunk like a stone.

He tried to stay down, he really tried, but his body betrayed him and he gasped for air beneath the surface. His ramshackle bones floated upwards with all the energy of dead leaf, until ballast turned him over and Verso found himself looking up at the soft lights of the cave.

He blinked as water lapped around his ears, his scalp, and his limbs. His clothes were heavy, so he shed them. His throat was dry, so he drank. When a round happy mask leaned over him and dangled a mushroom, Verso winced and turned his face away.

"I think that one's poison," he rasped to his oldest friend.

"Oops," said the gentle demigod. "I'm sorry. Maybe this one instead?"

He held out a small, speckled fungi. It was also poison. Verso knew it from his naturalist course as a young man studying in Lumiere, and he knew it from his wandering as an old man on the continent.

It would make him sick to eat. It looked divine.

His stomach hurt and his heart hurt and water covered his ears and spilled over his cheeks as he floated. Esquie was a round moon in the sky of the cave top.

"If I eat that," said Verso from his sloshing repose, "Then I won't become a tree."

"That is true, mon ami."

"I was going to be a tree," he choked out.

Esquie's large hands curled in a ring around the small man, ready to catch him if he sank again. He hummed and it echoed like bells through the cavern.

"When you become a tree," asked the giant, "Who will be Verso?"

If Verso cried then he couldn't tell, because any tears he shed were washed away in the lapping waters.

Who, indeed?

He gestured with one weak hand, and Esquie dropped the speckled mushroom into Verso's mouth.