Free Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

inoffensive tan shift covered by a heated outer robe. She stretched carefully, feeling unaccountably awkward, then let the robe’s warmth soothe her aching muscles. After looking around, she located one of her uniforms and started to put it on. All her limbs seemed to be the wrong length.
    Then she caught sight of her shadow. Froze.
    The shadow wouldn’t have looked like her own even if it weren’t for the eyes. Not only were proportions wrong, there were nine eyes, unblinking and candle-yellow, arranged in three triangles. As she watched, the eyes moved to form a perfect line bisecting the shadow. They might have been growing larger; they might have been coming closer.
    She didn’t feel hazy anymore. Something curdled in her throat. She thought, I am not going to scream. Except the thought wasn’t in her voice. She heard it in an unfamiliar man’s voice all the way inside her skull. She couldn’t make it stop, she couldn’t get it out, she couldn’t get her voice back. Every time she had a thought, she heard it in the stranger’s voice, and under other circumstances she would have found it pleasant, a low drawl, but –
    Kel training reasserted itself. She was ashamed of her panic. It must be a formation, it must be a new formation that her superiors were only now teaching her, and the proper response to a formation was to submit to it. She forced herself to look at the shadow. She saw now that it was a man’s. Had they made her a man? They could do that, it was unremarkable among the Shuos and Andan, and she’d wondered what it was like, but most Kel considered sex changes distasteful so why would her superiors –?
    Then she heard the same male voice, but the words were distinctly someone else’s, as though someone were talking to her. She couldn’t see anyone in the room with her, however. The voice said, “They must not have warned you. My apologies, no one has told me your name –?”
    For all its concern, the voice spoke with authority, and she knew the correct response to authority. “Captain Kel Cheris, sir,” she said, using the politest form.
    Cheris glanced down at her gloves, at every part of her that she could see. No, she had been right the first time. When she spoke, as opposed to merely thinking, her voice was her own, but her body was her own after all, so that made sense.
    There was a pause. “I can’t read your thoughts,” the voice went on. “I can hear you if you speak, which includes subvocals. Do you want me to continue, or would you rather orient yourself on your own?”
    Cheris was confused that he was giving her a choice. “Sir?” she said.
    “You are a Kel, aren’t you? You usually are.” He added, “It’s so easy to forget what colors look like. The style of the uniform hasn’t changed much, though. Don’t – what you’re doing to yourself, this isn’t a formation, that’s not necessary. It will go better if you don’t try to fit yourself into me like I’m a glove. My name is Shuos Jedao, but you needn’t keep calling me ‘sir.’ Under the circumstances I think you’ll agree that it’s a little ridiculous.”
    She looked around, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. If she wasn’t to respond by resorting to formation instinct, what was she supposed to do?
    “You’d better look more closely in the mirror,” Jedao said. She decided that this was an order. She stared into it in fascination, then at her hands, then at it again. Jedao’s reflection looked back at her. She tried to remember what he had looked like in the videos she had seen back in academy, but her memories were hazy. He had straight black hair with bangs almost too long for current Kel regulations, and dark eyes, and a face that might have been handsome if he had only been smiling. Cheris was not tempted to smile. He was leanly muscular, and a wide scar was just visible at his neck above the collar.
    Just to make sure, Cheris examined herself again: her old familiar body. It