Inspiration had taken her this far, but the girl behind the glass had been young when ABP took her to the skyscraper, and she’d been mostly dead since then. Given time, the right ideas might gestate to stop toxins, heat rays, napalm, even a nuclear fusion bomb. A thicker carapace? Carbon crystalline structure that might absorb energy? Splitting into a multitude of smaller creatures, tethered by exposed nerve wires like telephone poles? Every trial and error had a bodily cost. The orchard had little mind for these ideas and less time.

Magenta turned another corner, tucked every segment of her too-long body around the next building, and held still.

The death machine rumbled close, its amber hatred ramping again. There seemed no end to its heat and power.

It fired as she sprang around the corner, searing down the side of her torso cleft. She lashed tentacles against steel pipes and armor, and then she scuttled toward two buildings to nurse her pain.

The alley was too tight. She would have to break down to fit. Her limbs pushed at walls and cracked brick and mortar. She couldn’t be trapped here, not now. The death machine was turning her way.

Too late. Its pylon shifted; the crew had seen their chance. They were going to pin her in.

She was going to die again. They wouldn’t make the same mistake as last time.

They would divide her between their buildings across the world. Or worse, they would end her right here, forever. No more consciousness, no more orchard of minds. Every thought would burn in shrieking agony, and when she was a quivering pile of muscle and bone, they’d fire again, and again, and burn the carcass, and only smoke would ever know her.

She squirmed toward the rooftops and doubled back from the alley. Her mouth felt like she was screaming. She hoped she was.

The death machine screamed back, its ramping up now stretched into a screech. Amber light sprouted in a faint ring around the machine’s shaft. It was slower this time. She’d unsettled something at the last blow. Death would come creeping now, its sword driving through her inches at a time rather than in one swift stroke.

She had to get close and stay close. Like she’d tried as old Yaya, all or nothing.

Thunder shouted, the pylon’s old confidence returning. It glowed a third of the way up the shaft.

Magenta piled over the death machine’s steel front. She was too large and too tightly packed into the alley to coil snakelike around it, but she could

clamber on top. The loudspeaker crackled again, but one tentacle flattened it.

Her bulk hugged the shaft, its rising heat burning her skin. Amber light glowed against magenta flesh. This close, that sword would slice her apart.

She couldn’t fight the death machine; it had death on its side. She had to fight the people who filled its steel.

“I am what you made me,” she said. “Now you’re going to regret it.”