“Calm,” she tried to whisper, but only a whining shriek came out. She needed to heal.

A loudspeaker crackled from the death machine’s side. “We have this under control,” a stern, familiar voice said.

He had stood in Yaya’s apartment once. Which was he? The one who treated old Yaya as inventory, or the one who’d prodded between her legs until old Magenta lashed his neck? Magenta couldn’t tell, the loudspeaker too filled with static after the blast. Inside its steel, banana peels wrapped around peanut

butter. They were people, too, weren’t they? People she’d met.

The loudspeaker hissed. “Let the ABP Predator Engine take care of this for you,” another familiar voice said, this one spritelier. “We’re just another helping hand from America’s most trusted corporation. AlphaBeta Pharmaceutical, making your world a better place!”

Magenta’s limbs pawed asphalt, every part of her desperate to run. She thought she could escape this time, but unlike her orchard, she’d faced this thing before.

Thunder sounded again, another electric whump.

Magenta wriggled farther down the block. Tentacles shot from her sides and into occupied buildings. To gather every living thing meant slowing down, and she could only take so many before turning the corner at the next intersection to eat properly.

Digestion meant stopping. Stopping meant the death machine would catch up.

Far ahead, cop tanks gathered. Yellow and white signs blocked divergent avenues, but that seemed unnecessary. By now, everyone in Newark had to be headed as far from Magenta as possible. Videos of her rampage would circulate every online feed, the internet abuzz about the tentacled dragon of Newark.

Would anyone dig up news of a lost Kentucky town, where the girl behind the glass was once spurned and then found her revenge?

Magenta stormed the barricade, bearing rifle fire and gas until the new cops were dead. This time, she ate them. Desperate times meant they could be peanut butter again.

Thunder roared behind her, the death machine’s shriek reaching its highest pitch.

The sword carved down the street faster than she could move, and by the time she’d ducked down another route, the death machine had seared her right side, too.

That it had chased her around corners meant courtesy toward property, nothing more. If desperate, its amber light would cut through any apartment, office, and corner store to burn Magenta alive. Every red brick and gray slab of cement could crumble.

Her old Yaya brain had thought about getting close where the death machine couldn’t fire and then sneaking past, but her Yaya body had been small.

There was no hiding now unless Magenta unraveled entirely. She wanted to adapt to this thing, but adaptation didn’t always mean overpowering and overcoming. Some animals adapted by camouflage. Hiding was surviving.

Another electric whump hit her ears just as amber light thrust through white walls and dim windows. Buildings crashed in plumes of dust, and Magenta

lumbered off again.