She hooked into remote sensors so she could see herself, watch her skin being built up, sparkling black substrate being overlaid by her natural off-white. Strange how wrong she looked when she was the same colour all over. Ondo's artistry was undeniable, though. He'd programmed freckles and blemishes into her appearance, including two scars that were an accurate-looking continuation of real scars across her abdomen. She was glad she'd chosen to remove all the hair from her body and head. Permanent artificial skin would have allowed it to grow through, blend in, but the temporary flesh did not. Her new skin also dulled her enhanced senses very slightly, although not enough to impair her significantly. Her best defence was in fitting in, looking like a local.
Ondo took the greatest care on her face. He used the micronozzles to lay down 90% of her artificial maxillo-facial skin, but completed the remaining 10% himself, either by programming in each batch of movements he wanted the devices to make, or even by using gentle brush strokes to build up the layers by hand. She turned off her facial touch sensors so that she wasn't constantly bugged by tickling sensations. Occasionally, he brushed over a seam onto her natural flesh, and each time she had to resist the urge to scratch irritatedly.
His face was centimetres from her own as he worked, his fingers smoothing the flesh of her earlobe or her cheek. The intimacy of it made her uncomfortable, and she had to force herself to sit still while he worked, staring into the distance so as not to catch his eye.
He was studying the contour of her cheekbone, stroking her cheek. He must have seen some reaction in her. “Is this okay? You want me to continue?” It was uncomfortable for him, too. Much of what they'd been through together had to have made him uneasy. She hadn't thought about it from his perspective before.
“You're doing fine. I'm grateful, truly.”
“I'll show you what you need to do so that you can apply the disguise yourself, eventually. I'm sure you have a better idea of how you should look than I do. With practice you could adopt this disguise in only a couple of hours.”
“Thank you. But you're doing fine.”
When he was finished, she studied herself in the mirror. He'd done a good job, the two sides of her face matching seamlessly but slightly asymmetrically. She ran through a series of expressions to test everything out: delight, sadness, horror, anger. It all worked perfectly, although it was strange how wrong the chubby-cheeked fleshiness looked and felt to her. She looked like a person, sure, but she no longer looked like her. Which meant it was a good disguise, although she had to resist the urge to claw off all that fake flesh, expose the real Selene underneath.
She downloaded all the data she could find on Migdalan cultures and languages. The political and social set-up was complicated, with numerous factions and clans competing on most continents – to the point that it was impressive they'd reached the level of social sophistication they had. She'd settled on an equatorial city called Senefore as her target. It was the closest the planet had to a world capital, and it was certainly the city that saw the largest and most raucous processions. She picked out a continent on the other side of the world and decided that would be the backstory home of her character. It would allow her some leeway if she slipped up on a pronunciation or a cultural reference, and its inhabitants tended to have lighter skin tones that were closer to her original flesh. People in and around Senefore, by contrast, were generally a rainbow of darker shades, delicate browns to deep blacks. Anything to help her not stand out – although it wasn't really going to be an issue. Migdalan cities were filled with travellers at carnival time, and there were no signs of tension between nations and populations on Migdala – either because it was a mature society at ease with itself, or because the greater threat of Concordance had united them.
“What mask will you wear?” Ondo asked.
“What do we have?”
“Various ritual masks from other cultures that would pass as grotesque or comic on Migdala.”
She picked out an outlandish red one that covered her face completely. It was some sort of hell-creature, with animal horns and an exaggerated, leering mouth. The eye-holes restricted her vision slightly but hid her features well.
“You're sure I'll blend in wearing this?”
“Some of the masks people wear are considerably more bizarre. You'll be tame in comparison.”
“I guess that's good. You're sure this doesn't represent some dire insult to one of the Migdalan cultures?”
“I'm more or less completely sure.”
“They wear them so they can't be identified by the authorities?”
“It goes back much further than that, into thousand-year-old ritual traditions from one of the mountain tribes. You could do whatever you wanted for this one week, cross any line, commit any sin, so long as you were wearing a mask. By covering your face, it was considered you became a different person, someone not responsible for your actions, allowing you to get away with essentially anything. Murder, rape, incest, mutilation, there are folk tales filled with no end of horrors carried out by people wearing masks, although the stories always have a strong retribution moral, of people ultimately paying the price for their actions, often through supernatural means. Inevitably, the practice has become sanitized for modern public tastes, becoming a way of mocking those in power rather than slaughtering them. Concordance has clamped down hard on the carnivals, but they can still be riotous. You should be careful.”
“Why do they even let them continue? It seems odd.”
“It does. I simply don't know.”
She also picked out clothes to wear from Ondo's extensive collection of costumes and disguises: plain tunics and trousers that were practical for travel and that weren't,
