One long red limb whipped the helicopter’s nose. It spun, wobbled, almost righted itself, and then slammed into the side of a nearby office building, spewing fire and metal onto the street. Pedestrians in winter coats screamed and scattered. One car ran a red a light and screeched around an oncoming pickup truck.

Magenta turned and began to shuffle down Warren Street. Every few steps, a tentacle shot through a wall, door, or wide picture window, where it spread grasping pseudopods toward every living thing in reach.

Organic matter slid through teeth and muscle. She let the outer network of minds decide how to best digest them, her limbs thinking for themselves. Quick, painless barbs through the backs of necks. Barbs that gutted and worse. Their consumption mimicked old Yaya’s heartbeat, automatic and necessary.

But when she found a chimera, she let the burn of touching them flow through her system. Every mind welcomed the new tree, a pain they weathered as the orchard grew.

None of these new chimeras had been injected the same as old Yaya or found teeth inside their bodies, and even out of those special chimeras, none had grown anything like old Magenta. She didn’t know what caused the difference.

A quirk in the double-zero virus? Old Yaya’s specific DNA? Maybe something as innocuous as when Yaya’s childhood friends all went itchy and spotty with bright red chickenpox at age five, she didn’t catch it until age six. Whatever the reason, her body didn’t like what ABP had done to her, and Magenta had grown to save her.

All chimeras had suffered under ABP, whether or not they understood it.

Cairns crushed their minds. Magenta hoped they found relief in the orchard, but she was beyond asking. She needed mass, and they had it.

She was still growing when the shrill siren ripped through her thoughts.

Twin cop tanks rumbled partway down the block. No rifles or pistols fired this time, but the cops aimed wide white plates of mesh at Magenta. The plates sent lancing shrieks through her body.

She tried to block her hearing with fatty growths, but the plates made her ripple with pain. These were sound weapons, meant for crowd dispersal. Some cop must have realized she was more than a single creature, a crowd of minds in need of dispersing.

No one would uproot the orchard; every mind was precious. Her flesh rounded into tunnels, their ends each a puckering mouth, their throats forming wind tubes through which the shrieking passed. Fatty tissue partly absorbed the tremors. The rest passed in an awkward, ugly song that swept through Newark.

The world made sense again. Magenta kept the sound tubes open until she reached the cop tanks and crushed them flat.

Not every organism was peanut butter, she decided. Sometimes they were jam.

“Keep coming,” she said. “More cops. New weapons.”

Each assault would teach her a new defense she hadn’t known before.