Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
Dead crawler whose face Katia unnervingly resembles for a moment mid-transformation.
Eva is gone, but she surfaces in this chapter as an image. As Katia begins shifting into a mantaur, her body changes faster than her face — she has grown the mullet and is bulking out, but her countenance hasn't yet caught up, and Carl notes with unease that she looks eerily like the late Eva at that moment.
The resemblance lands during the exact scene in which Katia is contemplating giving up the flower and possibly her own future, which gives the flicker of a dead woman's face a weight Carl does not comment on aloud.
Remembered in Katia's half-shifted features: a face Carl recognizes instantly and finds unsettling.
She is a dead crawler whose likeness haunts Katia's transformation.
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