Amber light surged halfway up the shaft. Magenta clenched teeth around hot, greasy pipes and tugged hard as she could. To think she could tear it apart faster than the death machine could charge its slaughtering storm would be ridiculous.

But she didn’t need to break the machine. She only needed a gap wide enough for roots.

Formless, near-liquid flesh spilled through fresh openings in the death machine’s side. Magenta skin and bones grew inside its cockpit, where new eyes showed her yellow suits seated in leather chairs, their gas masks gazing at monitors. After eyes, she grew torsos, arms, full chimeras who briefly remembered their old shapes, connected by pink cords.

Every gas mask turned to the naked bodies now filling their space. They were speaking, but hearing them wasn’t a priority. No time—the amber glow neared the shaft’s tip.

Chimeras scratched away gas masks and tore into bare faces. They raked nails over ABP eyes and chewed at fleshy ABP cheeks. Some of them slammed bony fists against keyboards, pulled at levers, smashed monitors. Blood pooled into circuits and shot sparks through the death machine’s cockpit.

Amber light leaked back down the shaft. Some crucial function had been broken by Magenta’s orchard. The sword of light now reached inside its hilt and handle to cut the hand that wielded it.

The agents were still alive and thrashing. They thought they could fix their machine, but that would be like fixing what they had broken inside old Yaya long before today. Some cuts did not heal. The death machine did not know friend from foe—it was only steel. It would never love.

Magenta withdrew her flesh. She didn’t need to grow ears inside when the agents’ shouts and screams rang through the death machine’s severed side, unclogged by the orchard’s roots.

“It’s backfiring!”

“Get the heat sink active!”

“It’s broken.”

“Emergency exit!”

One of the agents ran for a red hatch, but Magenta’s chimera limbs had

broken it. They hadn’t been selective in what they smashed. The death machine wasn’t selective in how it hurt the world either, and she’d learned from it what she needed. The best adaptation for outmatching this monstrosity was mimicry.

One familiar face turned up at her. He couldn’t speak anymore, mouth torn by nails, but his eyes stared dizzily with questions, like he wanted to know why.

She could tell him.

“We’re making our world a better place,” Magenta said. She drew back from the death machine.

Amber light filled its every crack. Heat crept inward, first in steam against the cold air, and then an inferno that sizzled Magenta’s skin as she slid away.

Light lasted longer inside than out, as if every ounce of the machine’s amber death had to run its course, slow-cooking its steel innards.

There was nothing left to eat inside when death ended, nothing left to kill her.