Untrustworthy passengers or not, I still turned around to look at her rear end until she reached the ladder leading down to the main deck. Those leather coveralls were getting ragged, but they still hugged her ass like a second skin.

Turning back to the wheel, I couldn’t help but wonder about how my life had changed. It had been less than two months since I finally scraped together enough gold to pay for access to the Forrester family Patterns and Shaped my first pair of Hounds, and here I was on a flying Ship and in control of a dozen Shapes, four of which were already rank II.

Despite the short time I’d had her though, standing behind the Ship’s wheel already felt like being home. There was something very soothing about steering the Swift. I felt almost like I was in a trance, somehow knowing which direction the flying island was and feeling the Ship and the Deckhands respond to the wheel and my commands in order to steer her and trim the sails to get the most out of the wind.

Or, at least, the most we could get with insufficient crew members.

I hadn’t even settled into the rhythm of piloting the Swift when a clicking sound on the ladder brought me out of my burgeoning trance. I didn’t think the warped townspeople would actually try anything. None of them was a warrior of any kind, and none of them could actually sail the Swift, so a mutiny would just leave them stranded in the wilds.

I still turned around to see who it was, of course. Warped were known to be more aggressive than baseline beasts and people, and newly warped often had problems controlling that aggression. A pair of azure scaled wings were the first thing to appear, followed closely by the tall and slender form of Doreen Forrester.

She was taller than me, and covered head-to-clawed-toe with silver and blue scales. Large leathery wings rose from her shoulders, adding at least another meter to her height when folded against her back. Ill-fitting clothes covered her body, too wide for her frame yet so short they left her forearms, belly and calves bare. She, like all the other warped townspeople, was naked when we found her, and I could easily remember the sight of her small breasts.

The warping left her completely hairless, with a tall crest rising from her forehead to the back of her neck. a pair of frills surrounded her pointed ears, circling around them from the corners of her eyes and down to her jaw. Despite the changes, her face was still extremely familiar to me, from the piercing green eyes and down to a sharp nose and thin lips, which were once again raised in a very familiar smile. A smile that had been missing since we got her out of the warping tank.

Doreen, or ‘Darren’, as I knew her before, had been my friend ever since I became a scavenger. As a member of a Shaper family, she was the only one who had the connections to buyers for the artefacts I had for sale, and the only one who could get me access to the expensive blast crystals needed as ammunition for my arquebus, and later the one who arranged for me to access the Hound Pattern I used before I Shaped the Swift.

I still wasn’t quite sure what I found more confusing. The fact that ‘Darren’ was a woman, the fact that she wasn’t and had never been a Shaper, or the fact that she was now the most fully warped person I’d ever seen.

Or, and I was somewhat loathe to admit it even to myself, the fact that despite being in a relationship with Marjory, and despite having known her as a man for years, I was very attracted to her.

“Didn’t think I’d see you up here,” I greeted her. “You seemed really eager to get out of sight as soon as we got on board.”

“I did. And I’m still not sure that being out of the cabin is a good idea. But Marjory said that you wouldn’t hear it if an Ogre was trying to sneak up on you while you were sailing, and that you shouldn’t be up here on your own.”

“I’m not nearly as bad as she makes it sound. I mean, I did hear you coming up the ladder.”

I also found it interesting that Marjory would trust Doreen to guard my back. The two had only met for the span of one dinner in a crowded tavern.

“It’s possible she was afraid that I’d scare Mable if she woke up to see me in the cabin. I’m not quite the same as I was the last time she saw me. Besides, I think I owe you an explanation.”

“You don’t, really. I mean, I wouldn’t mind an explanation, but you don’t really owe me one.”

“There’s really not much point in keeping it a secret anymore,” she shrugged, but I could clearly see the pain in her eyes. “There’s not enough left of the Forrester family to hurt.”

I still kept a small crate in front of the wheel, and she dragged it over and sat down next to me.

“It all comes down to Grandfather,” she started. “Like most of the things about my family, I guess. I already mentioned that he was the only real Shaper among us, and the only one with the drive to carve out a town for us. But he was also the single worst businessman in the history of the Forrester family. He just didn’t have the patience for it.

“So when he negotiated with my mother’s family for her marriage to his son, he didn’t pay enough attention to the details. He knew enough to put in a clause that she had to provide Father with a child, but he didn’t notice that the contract never said anything about an heir, or about the child’s gender. Which wouldn’t have mattered if my mother had stayed with the family, but she got disgusted with Father’s lack of ambition and left as soon as I was born.

“The problem was that everyone knew that she left him, and everyone knew why she left him, which made it impossible for him to remarry. And without a male heir, the Forrester family would have been gone within a generation.”

“So he just made you pretend to be a boy for your entire life?”

“Pretend to be? He raised me up as a boy. It wasn’t until the first time I took Mable up to a room at the Boar that I realized I wasn’t one.”

“That’s…”

“Seriously screwed up, yeah.”

“But what about the servants? Anyone who helped raise you would have known about it.”

“He got someone with a binding spell to prevent them from ever talking about it, and sent them away as soon as I was old enough to dress myself.”

“Wow. No wonder you had issues with your dad.”

“Yeah. You know, it’s weird. I’ve just lost my family, my town and my Patterns, but somehow I feel better than I had in years. It’s like everything that had been weighing me down is suddenly gone and I can finally do what I want to.”

“I don’t really think it’s that weird. Then again, I left my family’s expectations behind years ago. So what is it that you want to do now?”

“I don’t really know,” she laughed. “On one hand, I’m free to do whatever I like. On the other, being warped is going to limit me in a lot of ways.”

“Well, you’re welcome to stay on board the Swift until you decide,” I offered.

“I really appreciate that, Jack. There is one thing I really want to try though.”

“What’s that?”

“I need to know if these,” she pointed at her wings, “are working or if they’re just for show.”

And with that, she stood up and in one smooth motion leapt over the railing.