Reactive adaptation. Rapid cellular replacement. Unprecedented regeneration. Doc bit her bottom lip—how could ABP have been so careless?

All that power inside Magenta, and the Board thought their simple machine had killed her, as if a knife could slice a worm and expect it to die.

Ropes of flesh stretched across steel, their weight balancing the Yaya body’s descent. “I don’t have to do what Yaya wanted. I’m not a real color.” Her face floated inches away. “But we can be so many colors together. Let me see you.”

Barbed limbs slipped around Doc’s body and punctured her hazard suit. It tore away in a single piece, its tatters flopping around Doc’s arms. Another tentacle peeled away her gas mask and tossed it, and she looked bare upon the Yaya face.

Distant sirens wailed. The chopping percussion of a helicopter followed.

No windows, no distracting doorway, only that face, drawing nearer, looking so much like Yaya but for another set of eyes that slid beneath her temples and to either side.

“They still think I’m just Yaya,” Magenta said. “They don’t know my us.

Our me.” She leaned closer, and then her lips pressed into Doc’s.

Doc shut her eyes and let the kiss happen. Blackness behind eyelids vibrated with familiar magenta lightning. Muscles slouched. She could fall into a kiss like this, dark as outer space, and never return to Earth. The floating sense came dreamlike, but she wouldn’t let go.

This couldn’t be another fantasy. She’d seen the truth in the lab. Magenta was alive.

Her voice hummed outside the kiss. “When you came for us with scissors, we weren’t a person to you.”

Doc’s eyelids crept open. Yaya’s lips still gripped Doc’s, but another mouth sang from the mountain of flesh, all teeth and sinew.

“You were steel inside,” Magenta said. “We were meat, and you were sharp. You did what they wanted when they watched, and it wasn’t the first time.”

A tremor threatened to pull Doc back. She kept her lips glued to the kiss, afraid to pull away. Magenta knew about Kentucky. She would expect an explanation, and Doc didn’t have one. She couldn’t say she was naïve twice.

She’d failed Magenta and Yaya almost as badly as she’d failed Camille. Better to stay in the kiss and be excused from explanation.

The hum grew stronger. “But I liked you that first night, when neither of us knew the depths of our me.” Magenta’s lips spread, the kiss growing a smile.

“And the other nights. We were flesh, too, and you weren’t steel always. You were only steel for them.”

Doc at last wrenched her head back and sucked in a deep breath. The air burned her throat. Helicopter blades chattered, but they sounded far away.

Magenta’s two mouths spoke in unison. “I forgive you.”

Doc’s heart should have pounded gratitude and relief. She almost smiled, but the voice wasn’t right anymore. Magenta’s, yes, but also Yaya’s.