“The October 12 injection triggered Yolanda Betancourt’s condition.” Doc had to shout each word to be heard over the garage’s clatter. “I don’t know if the other chimeras’ Sibs helps with their cellular breakdown into her body, but we could engineer a reversal.” Glassy gas mask eyes stared at her. “Of the October 12 cocktail.”

Greenwich shrugged. “Wouldn’t we need her living tissue?”

“Didn’t help the last few weeks,” Aziz said, appearing atop the Predator Engine. Had he taken over, or were they making him an honorary crewmember at Greenwich’s request? “Besides, what happened with the other chimeras, isn’t that adaptation?”

Aziz had a point. The lab had been cutting pieces from Magenta since the night they gathered her off Bruen Street. Magenta’s control of her anatomy was unparalleled. She had taught herself to transform and now taught herself to replicate and consume other chimeras’ cells, not just Yaya’s, after failing to consume Connie and Sabin.

“I’m not saying it’s simple,” Doc said. “I’m asking for your help.”

Greenwich’s gas mask bobbed again. “Termination is direct solution.

Board’s orders.”

Doc looked from one gas mask to the other. “You’re saying it’s easier to kill her.”

“Following protocol set prior via the Kentucky Incident,” Greenwich said.

Protocol set by Doc then. It would never end. ABP would keep making monsters of people and then putting them down when they didn’t reap profits.

People with bodies and desires and minds of their own.

Doc turned from the Predator Engine, its fumes strengthening as its engine warmed up, and marched back toward the elevator.

“What’s wrong?” Aziz asked. “Doc, is there something we should know?”

Doc didn’t look back. Upstairs would be in disarray, the skyscraper emptying to

hunt Magenta, Yaya, Camille, and whoever else she’d become. Doc would have the lab to herself and its technicians. Maybe they could synthesize something to break Magenta down into a more human shape. Doc could end things that way.

Maybe she could be better than steel.

27

Magenta’s web carried her down the skyscraper, and the street shuddered beneath her. Car alarms shrieked in a dissonant cacophony, their call spreading over Warren Street. A helicopter’s chop-chop rhythm veered up a parallel avenue. Its pilot didn’t know she was here yet. No one who flew could feel the ground quake.

Red and blue lights blinked nearby, less striking in gray, snow-clogged daylight than that crisp November night on Bruen Street. ABP must have called the cops. Magenta was still forming shapes when their pistols and rifles snapped to life.

She wouldn’t scream. Screaming would encourage them. She had to pretend it didn’t hurt, cutting her every voice box until she found a way to stop feeling bullets.

Three cop tanks blocked the road, ugly steely warthogs with cops jutting from every orifice, all body armor and skull-like masks. Oil pooled between one tank’s tires. There were bystanders, some holding up glowing phones, others fleeing. Skeletal trees and dirty asphalt looked cold, smelled cold, but the guns would burn to touch, same as their bullets.