The world held still as the yellow haze drifted into alleys and homes. No one remained inside to breathe the chemical cloud. In the distance, car horns squeaked and honked. Everyone was trying to leave, not just the cops.

Peanut butter jars that ran away? Poor design. They were stealing food out of Magenta’s mouth. She listened for where the car horns called thickest, the

greatest mass of peanut butter she could lick.

A sound of thunder drowned all other noises. Magenta froze her tentacles and cocked her head to listen better. The sound came again, familiar. Enormous tires, choking smokestacks, an abomination of greasy pipes and amber light.

People manned the metal beast, but she didn’t know their names or faces. Like cops. Like jam.

Her voice climbed from deep inside her throat. “Can I hate someone I’ve never met?”

There was no other to ask. She was a mind in the orchard, but she also formed the orchard where other minds thrived. No old Yaya, no old Magenta.

Only the unified whole. She didn’t know the answer to her own question. How could she?

She’d never existed before.

28

The death machine wasn’t quite how Magenta remembered. The sky had been black when she walked Bruen Street, the monstrosity’s shape almost a mystery. She’d been much smaller that night, too. She still couldn’t see it clearly through smoke, haze, and snowfall, but she wasn’t small anymore, and she was smarter than she’d been as old Yaya.

The frontmost gear-like tires emerged halfway down the block, where an intersection split right and ahead. An electric whump filled the snowy air with static, and Newark became an old fuzzy television screen, its signal lost. Amber light ringed the machine’s roof-mounted shaft. The next electric whump grew another ring above it.

ABP’s death crew was readying to tear the world apart.

Magenta wouldn’t cower this time. She had nothing to hide behind. Close enough, she could drive her tentacles under those massive tires and tip the death machine on its side. It would die a sad tortoise death this winter.

Ropes of flesh whipped at building corners and through asphalt, propelling her toward the glowing shaft. Amber light passed its halfway point. That was fine; she wanted it to fire, wanted it to hit her again. Last time she’d been so small that the blast had almost erased her, but now she was bigger than the death machine, bigger than death itself. The machine screamed, as if it knew its doom had come.

A fresh sword of yellow light slashed down Magenta’s side. Shrieking lightning ate through her nerves.

She remembered this pain, but it wasn’t the same—everything had stopped before. She wished it would stop now. Instead, blistering heat erased flesh and charred muscle down her left side. She slammed across the death machine’s front, but its steel was hard, and its frame barely rocked on its tires. Steel hardly noticed the passing of flesh. She was halfway up the next block when she made herself stop, her orchard panicked and burning.