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“You can ask about it, you know,” says Kranch.
Cannonball tries to smile, but she thinks it comes out brittle. “It feels rude.”
“I’m giving you permission.”
“It just,” she starts, and then has to pause to think how to phrase it. “It looks like it should be uncomfortable.”
Kranch shrugs. Cannonball tries not to wince at the deluge. “It didn’t hurt or anything.”
“I didn’t think it hurt, but Jesus Christ.”
“It didn’t,” he insists. “It was pretty simple. I worked on a maple syrup farm, the trees liked me, and now—”
“But they didn’t turn you into a tree.”
“No,” Kranch says, patiently, like he’s talking to a child. “Then I wouldn’t have been able to farm.”
“Do you still farm?”
“During the offseason.”
Cannonball falls silent, poking tentatively at her waffles. Kranch isn’t eating, which— “Do you still eat?”
“Maple syrup doesn’t need to eat,” Kranch answers. “You need to stop thinking of me as a person. I’m not anymore.”
“Anymore,” she mumbles. “Isn’t that weird?”
“Lots of people became something new.”
“But syrup? That’s really different.”
“It didn’t hurt,” Kranch says, and Cannonball’s about to snap that she gets it, his weird transformative body horror maple syrup whatever didn’t hurt, but then he pauses. “But I miss when sunlight was… good.”
Cannonball sort of remembers Kranch in the Internet Series, the one between the Flowers and the Mechs. He looked both less and more like a person. More dedication to the details, fingers and posture. But less comfortable. He doesn’t have a face as such, but he looks relaxed now, sitting in the booth across from her.
They weren’t teammates for long, maybe half a season. And that was before the alternation, before something recalibrated her brain and she started forgetting faces and people. But the Core has been good for Kranch the same way it was good for her. He built things. A body with help from Bottles. Clothing, for when he felt like wearing it.
“Is it hard?” she asks, more idle curiosity than anything else.
“No,” Kranch says. “I mean, sometimes. I can’t smile. I freeze up in the cold, literally. Seize up, you could say.” He pauses. “One of my teammates was bees, and another one was a Venus flytrap. But it’s okay. The trees loved me. I don’t want to take that for granted.”
Cannonball nods and then pauses. Something’s pulling at her. “Think it’s time for me to go home.”
Kranch looks at her. He doesn’t have a face, but she thinks he’s scared. “How much longer will it be for me?”
“Soon,” she says, with more confidence than she feels. “The flood will bring you back.”
He nods. “Thank you.”
“See you soon,” she says with the gusto of a promise. The immateria wrapped around her foot coils into a tendril, and she sighs. “Neerie,” she calls, “add Kranch’s to my tab.”
She doesn’t hear an answer. The immateria is ushering her out the door, and so she goes.