And someone else. The lilt of someone who’d never grown up to leave Kentucky, never lost its trace on her voice.

This world was a nightmare fused with reality. The dead were coming back to life, one by one, and they were coming to speak forgiveness. Pretend forgiveness, Doc was sure. She’d made a mistake following that hum. She should have stayed home and never interrupted the life and death distance

between herself and her resurrected sins.

Somewhere in the walls, the stairwell shuddered. ABP agents were searching. Doc couldn’t say what they carried.

“Hide,” she hissed. “You can’t run. Last time, the Predator Engine—”

“Yaya yowzah.” Magenta’s immense body recoiled at odd angles, at once both snake and squid, some segments coated in flailing human arms, others with writhing tentacles. Steel siding dented beneath her weight. With enough pressure, she would peel metal open and find glass.

Doc had seen this figure nine years ago. “ABP’s too much for you.”

“They don’t think so,” Magenta said. “They were quiet last time, but now they’ve seen me better, and they think they know what I am. Who I am.”

Another smile crossed that Yaya-like face, and the puppet body flopped to the floor. Doc reached out to help, but a tentacle swept her back. The naked body bubbled, and her magenta eyes vanished in a sinking pool, the little Yaya-shaped pseudopod rejoining the whole.

“I want to show them. For real.” Magenta’s voice, but it seemed to echo through the hall, mouths in all directions.

“You’re falling apart,” Doc said. She’d taken another two steps backward, but she wasn’t getting any farther from the edges of Magenta’s pool. The flesh kept spilling closer.

“Mm. Too much peanut butter. Big, big orchard.”

A stalk fifty times the size of Magenta’s old mouth sprang from her center.

Its teeth spread wide and crashed into the steel wall, pulling plates back until gray daylight punched into the Display Hall. Only glass and height separated her from the street now.

“It was the only way to save them,” Magenta said. “Drugs in their heads made them quiet. Knives cut their minds.” Her gargantuan tongue prodded between her teeth. “I have too many thoughts and too few mouths.”

Her stalk wriggled through the opening in the steel wall and the rest of her massive body flowed behind. When the human arms began to clamber, Doc thought she saw heads bobbing in and out, pieces of Magenta that remembered old shapes.

The detained chimeras were part of Magenta now, either merged or absorbed and copied.

This form was temporary. The squid-snake grew longer and coiled against the outer glass, a Kentucky dragon reborn. Camille had offered another brain for Magenta to copy. Gray daylight blinked out and then returned as a helicopter swept past the building.

Doc’s feet quit retreating. They must have guessed she couldn’t get away.

“I know what I am now,” Magenta said. “They need to see the truth. I’m not a real color. I’m adaptation, inspiration, a bad evolutionary trait.”